The New Age of Frugality
Americans’ charge-it culture is getting each overdue reality check. But resoluteness the new discipline stick?
by dint of. Steve Hamm
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On a shady lane in New Hope, Pa., a silent change in American cultivation may be taking shape. Here, a family of four lives in a unblemished, colonial-style house in a manner that once would have been considered All-American but more recently has been seen as happy direct wild: They’re frugal.
Meet Leah Ingram, Bill Behre, and daughters Jane, 13, and Annie, 11. They walk most and everywhere; from pole to pole, they rarely eat out, they sometimes buy clothing at amount shipped shops, and they turn the lights distant from when they leave a room.
Theirs is no hard-luck-in-a-recession novel. 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 have not one credit card debt.
That’s now. A little more than a year past, 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 loan on a anterior house and wearied lavishly attached a lifestyle upgrade—going in continuance three cruises in two years and taking the kids on annual pilgrimages to Disney World (DIS). “After 9/11 it became patriotic to shop, and we became as patriotic as anybody,” laments Behre, sitting in the dining room after a meal of chicken stir-fry—washed down by tap water.
Ingram and Behre are harbingers of a dawning Age of Frugality. People who overconsumed during the past decade are at this time rejecting unreasonable lifestyles. They’re spending less, and more wisely. Some are getting their affairs in order. Others are showing the white feather of losing their jobs, shocked by means of investment losses, or hunkering down amid the general uncertainty.
The penny-pinching is already showing up in the numbers; this quarter could mark the first fall in personal consumption in 17 years. And with credit tight and Americans loaded down through $2.6 trillion in personal debt, consumer borrowing dropped in August, the first such diminution since 1991. Menzie D. Chinn, who teaches science of wealth at the University of Wisconsin, figures consumers won’t be in a position to spend freely for five years.
Which brings us to the sort of John Maynard Keynes called the paradox of thrift. What’s good on this account that the sake of the individual, argued the famous economist, be able 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 dweller of hard-hit Avoca, Mich., who with 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 on could—rewire Americans as savers rather than spenders. And that would help push to action the frugality on a sounder footing over the long lug.
Thrift has gone in and out of style since the founding of the representative government. In the McGuffey Reader of the 19th centenary, Benjamin Franklin was held up as a paragon of virtue during the term of his frugal ways. Later, people who lived through the Great Depression were in some cases distinguished 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 progenitor’s grocery lay up failed and his dad couldn’t find another job for several years. To this day, even though Handel became very wealthy, he shops for food with coupons, drives a Honda, and takes the subway rather than taxis. “I lawful don’t believe in throwing money away,” he says.
