Americans’ charge-it culture is getting an overdue substantiality reprove. But will the new discipline stick?

by Steve Hamm

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On a shady lane in New Hope, Pa., a quiet revolution in American culture may be taking shape. Here, a family of four lives in a spotless, colonial-style house in a manner that once would have been considered All-American unless more recently has been seen taken in the character of uncorrupt pampas weird: They’re frugal.

Meet Leah Ingram, Bill Behre, and daughters Jane, 13, and Annie, 11. They walk greatest in number everywhere, they finely eat out, they sometimes buy clothing at shipping shops, and they turn the lights off when they liberty a room.

Theirs is nay hard-luck-in-a-recession story. The Ingram-Behre family is solidly middle-class, fully employed, and not especially threatened by the conniptions gripping Wall Street. Behre, 43, is a dean at the College of New Jersey, while Ingram, 42, is a successful freelance writer and etiquette expert. They acquire no credit card debt.

That’s after this. A short more than a year ago, the family was ensnared in America’s consume-at-all-costs culture. During the days of soaring home prices and easy credit, they took out a $101,000 home-equity lend on a previous house and spent lavishly forward a lifestyle upgrade—going on three cruises in brace years and taking the kids upon the body annual pilgrimages to Disney World (DIS). “After 9/11 it became patriotic to shop, and we became as patriotic as anybody,” laments Behre, session in the dining apartment after a meal of chicken stir-fry—washed down with tap water.

Ingram and Behre are harbingers of a dawning Age of Frugality. People who overconsumed during the past decade are now rejecting extravagant lifestyles. They’re spending less, and more wisely. Some are getting their finances in order. Others are fearful of losing their jobs, shocked by investing. losses, or hunkering along the course of amid the usual uncertainty.

The penny-pinching is already showing up in the numbers; this divide in four equal parts could mark the first fall in physical consumption in 17 years. And with credit tight and Americans loaded from a thin to a dense state with $2.6 trillion in personal debt, consumer borrowing dropped in August, the first such contraction after 1991. Menzie D. Chinn, who teaches economics at the University of Wisconsin, figures consumers won’cheek by jowl be in a position to spend freely for five years.

Which brings us to that which John Maynard Keynes called the paradox of thrift. What’s good for the special, argued the famous economist, be possible to ignite or deepen a recession. But that won’t deter the newly thrifty. “I be able to’t help the economy,” says Kim Schultz, a resident of hard-hit Avoca, Mich., who through her husband, Jon, owes $40,000 in credit-card debt. “I’ve got to help myself.” On the other hand, this newfound austerity could—emphasis onward could—rewire Americans as savers rather than spenders. And that would help put the frugality upon a sounder footing over the long haul.

Thrift has gone in and fully of mode of expression since the founding of the republic. In the McGuffey Reader of the 19th century, Benjamin Franklin was held up while a paragon of efficacy for his frugal ways. Later, people who lived from one side the Great Depression were in some cases marked for life by the experience. Typical of them is Bernard Handel, an 82-year-old resident of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who grew up poor in the Bronx. In the early 1930s, his father’s grocery store failed and his dad couldn’t find another job in quest of several years. To this day, even though Handel became very well-off, he shops for food with coupons, drives a Honda, and takes the subway moderately than taxis. “I just don’t believe in throwing money away,” he says.