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.