Tired Of The ‘90s Rat Race? Be A Happily Strapped Jock

Washington state is home to one of the richest men in the world, Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

It is also home to people who’ve chosen a different kind of wealth - wealth based on lifestyles of low consumption. I’m speaking about the Voluntary Simplicity movement.

This past year I took a long look at the role I’ve let money play in my life. I realized I’d been running on someone else’s treadmill, driven by ad slogans and misconceived ideas about keeping up with the Joneses. But haven’t we been hearing that the Joneses are carrying $3,000 in credit card debt?

It was time to take the reins. I had been living paycheck to paycheck so long it didn’t occur to me that perhaps there was a better way. So I read “Your Money or Your Life” by Seattle authors Vickie Robin and Joe Dominguez.

I read through it in one night. Its premise is that the money a person earns represents life energy. In those terms, you don’t want to waste it on frivolity. Instead you should make sure your money and how you handle it reflect your values.

I could barely sleep with the anticipation of getting up the next morning and not spending any money!

The immediate plan was to start taking the steps the book outlined. My wife and I figured out how much we were making after subtracting the expense of working - transportation, lunches at work and those extra hours that revolve around work, such as unpaid overtime, travel time, etc.

Next we tracked our expenses to see how much it was costing us to live each month. From that point on, it was easier to see where we could reduce our expenses.

We bought food in bulk quantities, looked for baby clothes at garage sales and secondhand stores, and cut back on expensive forms of entertainment. We made educated decisions and learned to let the heat of spontaneous spending cool off.

Suddenly, even though we were a single-income family supporting a child, we had a healthy savings account and did not feel deprived of anything.

I joined a small VS study group here in Spokane. During the meetings, my wife and I got to open up with others who came from different backgrounds. We all desired to slow down and stop using up our resources - Earth’s resources - at the present rate of insanity. We also wanted to redefine wealth and not let our money slip through our fingers as it had in the past. More is not better than enough.

What’s the appeal? Sanity - basic sanity.

One member mentioned something to me about Benjamin Franklin. Ol’ Ben practiced some principles that certainly align with modern notions of frugality.

In a section of “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” Poor Richard looks on while a group waiting for a market to open get a stern lecture from an old man whose opinion they’d sought about a recent tax increase. The old man tells them taxes are one thing, but they are likely to lose four times as much to their own folly.

Henry David Thoreau advocated “voluntary poverty” as the way to realize exactly how much is enough for you to live happily and enjoy life.

After World War II, American households typically saved at least 10 percent of their incomes. The current average is well below that.

In our search to be happy we’ve turned shopping into a pastime. Let me rephrase that: We’ve turned spending money into a pastime. We’ve been subtly groomed to think that if we just had some new thingamabob we’d be happy.

Such folly is unwise in an era when words like “downsizing” are commonplace.

Critics call VSers nothing but yuppies who decided to become slackers after they’d collected all the neat toys. They say this chosen simplicity is a sham compared with the enforced poverty of the working poor. Not all of us are yuppies, however. I certainly am not. But yuppies who choose to consume less, and thereby protect our environment, are some damn fine yuppies, in my book.

I had the opportunity to visit a VS group in Seattle this year. Some of its members have been featured on Oprah Winfrey’s show and in other national and international media for their financial independence and frugal lifestyles. They are a great bunch. They garden, ride bikes, recycle. If they need to spend money they buy used items when they can. Plus, they are active volunteers.

When I told them I was following the steps in the Robin and Dominguez book, they all smiled and said, “Great! When will you retire?”

I knew I was in the right place.

MEMO: Street Level is a regular feature of the Roundtable page. Darryl Caldwell is a member of The Spokesman-Review’s Board of Contributors.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Darryl Caldwell Contributing writer