When you're poor but you didn't used to be, part 2: Rockin' it

My last blog post was about stuff I spent money on, with no regrets, when I had money to spare. Which I don't right now, for the most part. But that's okay, because thriving is cheap if you learn the right things & are surrounded by good places and people -- and before I had money, I learned to live poor, so really the past few months have been part refresher course and part personal growth. Again, I know I'm speaking from a position of relative privilege, because I'm not starving in the streets or having to work 3 part-time jobs to survive. But for my fellow lower-middle-class folks, here are some of the adjustments I've made to maintain a fairly fabulous lifestyle -- and they're all pretty much common sense.

Make stuff. Everybody knows how to make something -- jewelry, guacamole, something. Learn to do more. Make stuff that you use around the house. Make stuff you can sell or trade. I've been making my own toothpaste and deodorant for a while now and nobody's complained about any stank. (And I've saved money and prevented a bunch of packaging from ending up in a landfill -- everybody wins!) For $20 I bought some kefir grains because yogurt and kefir can be super expensive at the store, but I've made at least a dozen quarts of kefir at home -- probably $60-$70 worth, for the $20 initial investment & then the cost of a few gallons of milk. And, thanks to becoming very nearly broke, I have a tiiiiny herbal medicine business that I actually *made a profit on* between January and June. It's not much, but it's something. And when I can't pay my dance teacher for lessons, I give her a jar of salve that would cost the same as an hour of class. Which brings me to another tip ...

Know good people, be good people. Since money is the agreed-upon currency in this society, it's always nice to have. What's nicer to have are friends and acquaintances who are willing to barter with you or who understand that you have no money but are willing to work something out because they know you're not a jerk and they'd like to help you.

Scrimp and save what you can. There's a whole newfangled high-tech version of the putting-your-change-in-a-piggy-bank method of savings. There's a program called Digit that hooks up to your bank account, analyzes your spending and stashes away little bits of money that you don't really need -- $3.50 here, $9.75 there -- and puts it in an account for you. You can keep track of the amount of these withdrawals via texts on your smartphone, pause automatic savings, have the program deposit the savings back into your bank account ... all sorts of things. I signed up through a friend's link, and if you sign up through mine I'll get $5 (woo!) so check it out if this sounds like something you'd want to do. It does help you save more money than you think you'd be able to - I've got more than $250 sitting and waiting for an emergency and/or something fun. Details about how Digit works are at the website.

LIBRARY! You know how in my last post I mentioned that books were one of the things I spent money on when I had it, and I totally don't regret it? This is true. I love books. I love reading them, I love being surrounded by them, I love having old favorite and new unexplored worlds sitting right across the room from me. But there's also another place like this: the public library. And it's free. Earlier this summer I actually culled the herd in my personal library, sorting out a bunch of books that I could easily find at the public library if I need them and taking them to Half-Price Books to sell for a little money (which I then used part of to buy some ginger root for one of the medicines I make ... economy!). Because even though I love all the books, I don't actually need to own all the books. They have a home across town where I can go visit them and take them out for a little while and then return them. It's like dating. But with books.

Grow your own food. I know this isn't always a practical suggestion. If you live in a tiny apartment, or if you have a brown thumb like I do, gardening is a very limited activity. But if there's anything you can grow, do it. You can even regrow some foods from scraps -- buy some green onions, use them except for the roots, the white part and the very bottom of the green part, and put that end of the onions in a jar of water. Bam! More green onions. I've got to dig up some purple potatoes that I planted from the eyes of a few potatoes I bought at the store this spring.

Know your seasonings. It sounds silly, but honestly, the right seasonings and spices can turn very simple, cheap food into something kinda beautiful. Buy a box of mac & cheese, add some curry powder to the cheese sauce when you're mixing it all together. If you order pizza, save the red pepper flakes and use them and some lime juice to flavor a Pad Thai boxed meal. Those green onions and potatoes I mentioned that I've regrown from scraps? Those make a righteous side dish when I cook the potatoes, crush them with a fork, sprinkle in the bits of green onion I chopped off, and season the whole thing with apple cider vinegar and rosemary. (And you can find rosemary bushes growing all over the place.) Scrambled eggs are good; scrambled eggs with fresh-ground Italian herbs are great. You get the idea -- dress up your Bachelor Chow!

Wash all your clothes on the delicate cycle and hang dry as much as you can. This not only saves you money on your electric bill (or at the launderette), it also helps your clothes last longer. I've got a couple of shirts I've had for nigh on a decade that I've preserved just by keeping them from going through the rough-and-tumble life of a regular wash cycle and a spin through the dryer. I mean, dryer lint is made of your clothes (and probably pet hair). Slow the disintegration, man.

Find free fun. A friend once said that even though you can't earn a lot of money working in San Marcos, it's easy to be poor here. This is true. There's so much free stuff to do -- go down to the river, catch a free concert, get some coffee & sit outside the old courthouse & people-watch, go to one of the art festivals ... we are blessed to live in a town where there's so much going on that costs nothing or very little.

There are other steps to take to keep living awesomely even if your income is shot to hell -- walk or ride a bike (except it's Texas in July/August and I really don't advise that until the weather turns humane again), go in on a Costco or Sam's Club membership with a couple of buddies, cool off in the river instead of trying to keep your house at 70 degrees, all sorts of things that can make life not just bearable, but beautiful. Life is an art, and it's good to get creative with it.

When you're poor but you didn't used to be

For the past 6 months I've been thrust into relative poverty. I say "relative" because I have a roof over my head, food in my fridge, clothes on my back, a functional car and a bed to sleep in, and I don't have to work 60 hours a week (though sometimes I do), and I don't need to apply for food stamps or Section 8 housing. For all that I have, I am grateful. And I'm grateful for the job I have now, despite the radical pay cut, because I'm working for and with people I genuinely like, and I'm doing something I enjoy so much that most of the time it doesn't feel like work -- it's just what I do. If I only had one year to live but I had to have a job, this would be the job I would choose. You can't put a price on that.

But yeah, I miss money. Or not really the money, but the experiences that having expendable income let me have. And in thinking about the difference between reasonably well-off and relatively poor, I started thinking about what on earth I blew all my money on when I had it. Most of it, I don't regret -- I did buy a lot of wankery and do some dumb things, but here's what I spent most of it on. These are things I am glad I did, so you can take this as a list of suggestions on what to do with money if you've got it:

Travel. God, I miss traveling. I never even scraped together enough to leave the country, but I got to visit Florida a couple of times, New York City a handful of times, L.A., Colorado ... my bestie and I made a pilgrimage to Memphis and Clarksdale for my birthday one year, and I visited New Orleans once and fell in love with it so hard I've been back probably a dozen times.
On one of my trips to Florida, to visit family near Fort Lauderdale, I drove down to Miami Beach to hang out with a cousin overnight & had a blast there. And on one of my trips to New York City, I took an Amtrak down to D.C. to meet up with a friend for a whirlwind tour of the city. It was glorious.
I got to see so much, do so much and learn so much ... the people-watching alone when you're in a different city is fascinating. So go travel, even if it's just to a place a few hours away. You'll never look at your home town the same way.

"Aegis" by Lisa McPike Smith

Art. This is something I was overjoyed to be able to spend money on, because not only does art beautify my home, but buying it was a way for me to support local artists. Admiration doesn't pay the bills -- believe me, I know -- and it felt so good to be able to give tangible support to some of the artists in San Marcos. And their work gives me immeasurable joy. I think the last piece I bought was "Aegis" by Lisa McPike Smith and it's still hanging on a wall not far from my bedroom door, and every morning when I walk past it, I smile.
I'm also elated that I got Furly to do a portrait of my two cats, Tom and Prissy, before Tom passed away. He's immortalized forever on the living room wall.
Invest in some art -- it's good for your soul and good for the artist's soul as well.

Food. Eating healthy can be expensive. Eating decadently can be expensive. I like to do both. I'm glad I was able to spend as much money as I did at our local farmers' market and at Gourmage, the cheese/bread/wine/dessert/all-good-things shop in New Braunfels where the owner and chef still know me by name and where I still go when I have a little extra dosh to pick up some goat cheese and a baguette. So go on, treat yo'self sometimes.

Books. Do I even need to say why it's great to have books around the house? If I have to explain it to you, I don't know if I should be talking to you. The last major book binge I went on was about $300 at the Maple Street Book Shops in New Orleans last winter, after word got out that they were going to have to close. I panicked. Apparently a bunch of other people made panicked purchases, too, because last I heard, they're still open. Go buy books! Support bookstores and feed your mind!

Charity. I don't really like to talk about the causes I donate to, but it's wonderful to be able to support people who need help and ideas you believe in strongly. And if you pay attention to politics at all, you know money talks louder than most people. Find good charities and support them.

Experiences. This is a broad category, I know, but as examples, I went up in a two-seater airplane over Guadalupe and Comal counties and took photos; I learned some kickboxing techniques; I learned to belly dance and I learned more belly dance and I learned even more belly dance; I went to a comic-con and met Nathan Fillion, Alice Cooper and other groovy people; I spent 48 hours in Castroville, "the little Alsace of Texas," thereby learning that there's a town called "the little Alsace of Texas"; I spent a long weekend at a spa on Lake Travis getting comfortable with myself again, doing yoga, getting scrubbed and rubbed and detoxed, and spending quiet time out in nature. Go do stuff. The world is full of people and places and things and there's no reason for any of us to ever be bored.