KEY POINTS:
"That", says my brother Adam, "is the most middle-class thing I've ever heard". We are sitting in an Italian cafe eating expensive peasant food, and I've just told Adam about my plan to go for a month without spending money. He rolls his eyes and bites into his pizza.
On the wall across from our table, behind the group of executives knocking back glasses of chianti, is a mural of photographs showing greasy manhole covers and road markings. It's appropriately postmodern, or ironic, or something dreadfully bourgeois, anyway. Adam leans an elbow on the table and regards me with amused disdain. "So you're basically going to be a stingy rich person for a month?"
And essentially, the answer is yes. When I say "without spending", I mean I am allowed to buy basic groceries and fill up the car with petrol, but nothing else. No takeaway food, no barista coffee, no taxis, no visits to restaurants, bars or cafes, no tickets for movies or the theatre, and no buying books, clothes, shoes, magazines or cosmetics. No buying presents for anyone. No haircuts or massages or facials. No fancy booze in bars, no tobacco, no non-essential drugs (pharmaceutical or otherwise). The supermarket is it, but that doesn't mean all supermarket items are OK - there'll be no DVDs or home-laminating machines in my trolley.
The concept of becoming a stingy rich person - or taking a break from consumption - is spreading the world, thanks in part to The Compact, a group of San Francisco friends who were appalled at America's rampant consumerism and decided in 2006 to go beyond recycling to simplify their lives, reduce clutter and aid the environment. The Compacters whose blogged adventures have inspired similar movements from Iceland to Hong Kong resolve to buy all food locally and resist buying any new items (although second-hand purchases and bartering are allowed for essentials like, say, a new S-bend if the toilet packs up).
I know, it sounds ghastly. But if you've ever been horrified by a credit-card bill or stood in front of the wardrobe staring at clothes you've worn only once, you might understand the motivation. The point of renouncing something (like, say, doing a week's detox diet or giving up tequila for Lent) is to make oneself more mindful, to stand back and take an honest look at habits. How much do I really spend? How much junk do I have in the house? Do I need anything else? As a nation, we could do with some mindfulness; we coughed up $79.9 billion in private expenditure in 2006 compared with $56.6 billion in 1996 a 41 per cent rise (and yes, those figures are adjusted for inflation).
I've never been able to seriously save like some people can. Sure, I've always kept up with bills and paid my debts on time and avoided the Small Claims Tribunal, but I've found it excruciatingly hard to hatch anything resembling a nest egg. Thank God superannuation savings are compulsory in Australia, my home country, which has enabled me to at least stash away something for my dotage. I don't even hoard things; I'm a ruthless purger - I love clearing my wardrobe of everything I haven't worn for a year but somehow I always find new things to replace the old. What is that about? Retail bulimia? A short attention span? More likely, I think, it's the unending and slightly amnesiac quest for consumer perfection ... every pair of jeans I've owned ended up dissatisfying me, so I moved on, eternally hopeful.
And it's a feminine thing. Although men might be more inclined than women to buy a $50,000 car or a turbo-powered barbecue, for women the problem is that regular, often unnoticed dribbling of money from purse to pavement. Shopping itself has become a kind of hobby. What to do on a wet weekend? Check out the shops. Wandering through town at lunchtime? Ooh, new books, the latest Time. I have a professional duty to stay in touch, after all. Dropping into the pharmacy for a prescription? I do need another hairbrush, some mascara ... It's easy to drop $20 or $30 in an afternoon on things I could have either done without or borrowed from the library. And that's not even counting clothes - there are plenty of women who can't walk past a fancy boutique without getting the DTs.
The problem is we go through our 20s learning how to spend. For most of us there's no baby, no mortgage, and we've just emerged from the miserable poverty of university to earn a salary that seems phenomenal (in my case, it was something like $22,000). And modern cities are ordered so perfectly to relieve citizens of cash; the cool, echoing arcades in our office-towers; the supermarkets deliberately placed inside gleaming malls; the ubiquitous ads: Newer! Shinier!
That's capitalism, of course, and no matter what Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard says, the economy depends firmly upon our spending our cash rather than stuffing it under the mattress but I wanted to know: how hard would it be to opt out for a month?
I start at Easter. Free of temptation, I figure, except the first thing to fall out of my newspaper is a giant Easter shopping guide. I flick through, and suddenly the vinyl shoes and golf clubs look strangely appealing, simply because I can't have them. When I leave the office one day for a lunchtime walk, taking my tea in my new vacuum mug (for which, with a sense of bemused disgruntlement, I paid $23.95 a week earlier in preparation for this experiment) I walk past a jewellery shop emblazoned with a finance company's advertisement: "Want it? Need it? Have it!" Yeah, and then spend the rest of your life paying compound interest for it to the usurers who wrote that sign, I mutter to myself. God, where did that come from? I can already see the big danger of this month: that I turn into a smug anti-consumer, all moral superiority and no sense of humour, like Sting sipping a mung-bean smoothie at Keith Richard's birthday party.
Girlfriends either think the idea is terrifying or laughable. "You could ask my husband for some tips", says Aroha - "He hasn't bought anything since 1983". My boyfriend says with what I feel is a touch too much enthusiasm: "That's great!" I get the same feeling one gets when someone says "Gosh, you've lost weight" - torn between pleasure at the compliment and defensiveness. I suppress the temptation to ask if my boyfriend thinks my credit card was fat before. Three days into the experiment, as I say mournfully "I can't" in response to his suggestion we go to a bar for a drink, he notes aloud that surely a week of frugality would be ample. My sister-in-law Amanda says: "Why didn't you just have a baby? Same concept."
One night, stopping at a supermarket to buy sausages to take to a friend's barbecue (groceries are allowed, remember), I fling into the trolley a few items for my week's lunches and some basics, like mouthwash and toilet paper. Somehow, the bill comes to $120. I feel distinctly peeved. Shouldn't this caper be saving me money?
Let's work it out. I can buy lunch in the city for about $10. If I bring lunch from home, it'll probably cost $5 to make. So that's a saving of $25 a week or roughly $1200 a year. Not bad.
But my big saving this month is going to be in reducing my incidental spending. For example, not buying takeaway coffee or the little incidental snacks that sit in jars on shop counters, whispering to me seductively. "Biscotti", they murmur. Or "muffin". I used to respond, often two or three times a day, adding another $5 or $10 to my daily bill. That was $20 a day, going straight into my mouth. It's a lot of money, and it's entirely discretionary. Do I even enjoy takeaway coffee? It's so routine, I'm not really sure any more. So if I shrink the daily bill of $20 down to roughly $8 (including a couple of snacks from home and some plunger coffee), the annual saving clocks in at $60 a week or $2880 a year. Phew.
Disturbingly, that still leaves me spending nearly $2000 a year on daytime food. I hate to think how much money I chew up and swallow in a year if we add dinner and breakfast to the calculation. Pity I don't have the discipline or inclination to just stop eating altogether.
So I guess I'll be saving about $180 a week, which would typically cover lunches, coffee, cafe brunches on the weekend, a few evenings out and incidentals like magazines, books and the odd new frill or bauble.
Already, there's a dilemma. I have a small skin infection and need some antibiotics but do I really need them? Aren't antibiotics the quintessential modern consumer article, an easy solution we've come to over-rely on? I decide to try a natural cure instead - I've heard regular teaspoonsful of turmeric (the bright orange spice that makes Indian food stain your white T-shirt so badly) might work. So I pay $3.97 for a tiny jar, mix it with water and swill it, thrice a day. It tastes a bit like curry without the meat, salt, vegetables or warmth. And it works; the infection's gone in a few short, but unpleasant-tasting, days.
The shops seem to be taunting me. I'm sure the window displays weren't this tempting last month. I hear about a Workshop three-day sale and wonder if I could put things on layby ... but fear getting busted. You see, I've deliberately told as many people as possible about my project. It's like Neighbourhood Watch for the soul; I'm relying on the vigilance of others to keep me honest.
Weekends are hard. I can't visit my regular cafe, where the staff are good friends. Instead, I trundle off to Foodtown for golden syrup, so I can make some Anzac biscuits to take to a friend's house later on. I somehow end up spending $50 on groceries.
"Are you allowed to eat leftovers?" my boyfriend Simon says hopefully when I arrive to collect him from the cafe, pushing the plate towards me. It's a perfectly intact side-salad: glistening roast capsicum and little crispy squares of bacon rest atop the leaves. I agonise for a moment then decide the food will only be thrown out if I don't eat it, so I'd be morally bankrupt if I left it on the plate.
But as I'm nibbling the remains, I feel appalling - not only undignified, but even more of a miser than I did before. Am I not cheating the cafe staff of earnings?
My friends Chris and Jocelyn want to go to a cafe and sit in the autumn sunshine. "I'll just have a glass of water", I say, feebly. Chris has a better idea - he'll buy me a coffee in exchange for some of the Anzacs I've made. It's bartering - a concept I vaguely remember from high school geography (something to do with indigenous Peruvians trading coca leaves for baby formula). The coffee tastes divine. I make it last as long as possible.
The following day, another dilemma. I want to buy the newspapers (an essential, surely) but that will cost me about $6. Wouldn't it be cheaper to go to a cafe, read their newspapers and order a coffee for $3.50? After 10 minutes of ethical dithering, I skulk into a cafe, pick up the papers and sit down. I suddenly feel horrendously guilty. Only a week into the experiment and I'm cheating already. But wait - fate saves me from hypocrisy. None of the staff approach to take my order. After 40 minutes of uninterrupted reading, I scuttle out of the cafe, apparently unnoticed by anyone. I've kept my $3.50, but it feels like a very compromised victory - have I sunk this low? As well as being a professional miser, I'm now a thief using up their space and breathing their air. I only need a bottle of methylated spirits in a brown paper bag and I'd be a bum (in which case they might give me some free food). I make a mental vow to come back here when the month is over and spend up big. As punishment I decide newspapers are out for the month. I can read them at work or online.
Confession time. Not me, others. By week two, friends begin regaling me with their own fiscal failings. I go to a birthday party clutching not a gift, but a basket of homemade cheese scones, feeling like the love-child of Ebenezer Scrooge and Martha Stewart. "I spent $70 at the chemist today and I have practically nothing to show for it", says Sasha morosely, munching a scone. Matthew tells me how the previous weekend he hosted brunch at his house. "I went out for the eggs and bacon and ended up spending $100. It was lovely to have people around to my place, but I honestly thought, God, why didn't I just take everyone to a cafe and offer to pay?"
The new Vanity Fair comes out. I want. Friends rave about the sensational story on the corporate water conglomerates sucking China dry. I interrogate them for the details, even flick furtively through a copy in a bookshop. It's not quite the same.
I had thought evenings might be hardest, when I have to trudge home past bars clinking with good cheer and I do have some fairly lonely nights in. Jamie Oliver on Friday night becomes a big kick. But really, the day is tougher than the night; especially lunchtime, when I just want to avoid the shops. Instead, I discover a few waterfront spots where I can eat home-made food in the sunshine. I discover a new community - the lunchbox set, deliberately avoiding the cashcard-carrying crowds and instead reading books or just sitting absorbing the sun, heads tilted back. They-re profoundly uninteresting to commerce - in fact they're an outright affront to it. The buildings around here are full of PRs, ad agents, retail execs - I wonder if they're ever tempted to march down and give the brown-baggers a lecture: You're letting everyone down. Go and spend! Mammon needs you.
As I make lunch in the tearoom one day, Michele asks: "Are allowed to buy Italian parmesan? A ha!" she crows at my guilty face, "That's outrageous!" Imported cheese is not really a basic grocery item, but it was on sale for less than the domestic stuff and ... oh, all right. Mark asks how I can reconcile no-spending with unlimited grocery purchasing. "Why don't you live on the dole for a month, and really find out what it's like to be poor?" he says. "That way you'd be free to have a coffee or buy a magazine if you compensated by eating cereal for dinner."
But the point of this exercise is not to save money, not really. The point is to get out of the habit of constantly thinking about buying, spending, having. If I were trying to live on the dole ($178.49 a week for a childless beneficiary, since you asked), I'd be constantly wondering, "What can I afford to get today?" This way, I just have to accept I can't afford to get anything. Money is no object, as Hugh Hefner might say. The difference is he gets to put his arm around a very expensive rabbit while he says it.
For the first time, I understand what it must be like to be significantly poorer than your friends. Being poor (or frugal) is fine if everyone in your social circle is doing the same, but how tedious it must be if your friends accelerate to ludicrous new levels of lucre. Oh, I'd love to come out to dinner, but I might just have the garlic bread ... sorry, I can't get away to come skiing that weekend.
As New Yorker Judith Levine writes in her 2006 memoir Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, the hardest part of miserdom is convincing your mates it's possible to have fun without money. This month, I've had to knock back dozens of generous offers from friends to shout me coffee or lunch or dinner. The problem is I don't want to be a freeloader - accepting constant favours would be just too humiliating, and besides it wouldn't reduce my consumption, which is the whole point. So when I'm invited out for coffee, I suggest instead we sit on a park-bench and chat. Instead of going out with friends, I invite them round for dinner.
I catch an episode of the excellent TV One series Why We Buy exploring the all-pervasive pressure to shop. How can we possibly resist the ubiquity of consumer goods when our most ancient instincts tell us to hoard, hoard, hoard? What a cop-out. Nobody drags women into shoe-shops, just like fat teenagers haven't been tied down and force-fed Snickers bars. It's just that were so absorbed we don't really notice it happening.
In week three, we fly down to Wellington on frequent flyer points. The tickets were booked before I took on this story, and we're staying with friends Te Rau and Fiona, so we're not paying for a hotel, but I've been worrying all week about it - should I stay in while everyone else goes out? Should I buy groceries in Auckland and fly them down? It seems too absurd (think of the carbon miles). When Te Rau texts me during the week to ask if we'll come to Fiona's work party at a restaurant on Friday night, I panic. I can't go to the party and not eat - I'd never be invited anywhere again. So I relax the rules for two days; I'm allowed to buy restaurant food, but nothing else. I'm newly conscious of how pricey everything is.
My book group is reading Madame Bovary, but every copy in the Auckland library system seems to be out. What's going on - a sudden rush of Flaubert fetishism? I ask around my friends but no one has a copy, and I'm not allowed to rent the DVD. I flick through the TV guide to see if, by some miracle of coincidence, it's on any time soon. But luck! The full text is online. My initial delight wanes a little when I start to wonder how I'm actually going to read the damn thing - printing it out would use an entire rainforest of paper. I read it on-screen, scrolling down until my vision goes blurry.
As week four begins, I drive down to Rotorua for the marathon. Not running, just supporting from the sideline. I've arrived in town with a chiller-bag full of groceries. My friend Vicky, whose husband is running, generously insists on taking me out for coffee while we wait. It's pouring with rain. I accept. The coffee is delightful.
At the finish line, a sodden and exhausted Simon says all he wants is a strong cup of tea. But the only free tea-making facilities in sight are, frustratingly, inside the first-aid enclosure. I can see wan-faced runners sipping steaming cups laden with sugar, trying to recover their energy. I contemplate staggering into the tent, pretending to be in agony, but I'm too cowardly. I go to the nearby coffee cart and buy Simon a cup of tea for $2.50, looking around me guiltily.
Time for my own confession: I've cheated six times during this month by buying that cup of tea, two packets of chewing gum when I was desperate, accepting two cafe freebies, and getting my winter coat drycleaned. The coat was musty and had grubby marks all over the cuffs - real, dedicated misers probably don't buy cream-coloured garments for this very reason.
When it's over, I practically knock over chairs in my rush to get into a cafe. But I can't think of any solid consumer item I really want to buy. In fact, I'd quite like to keep up the frugality for a while if I can - the bank balance is looking satisfyingly healthy. I've saved about $600. Not bad.
So what have I learnt from this? That I like spending money on things that matter but I'd like to be a little more miserly on a permanent basis. From now on, bought coffee should be a treat, not a thrice-daily habit. I've learnt that bringing my lunch from home really is cheaper, and that saving a few dollars really can make a difference. I've also discovered cooking at home can be really cheap but only if cuisine is heavy on the starch and light on the luxuries. Rice and toast might be cheap, but if you enjoy chicken breasts and fresh pomegranates, it's hard to budget under $10 per head, which really isn't any cheaper than takeaway.
But most importantly, this month has reminded me to be a little more mindful of money; saving my cents for the important stuff. I don't just mean mortgages and superannuation - I mean the experiences and items that make everyday life a little sparkly. I don't care how frivolous it sounds, but for me, the joy of life is at least partly in visiting cafes with friends, flying across the Tasman to see my family, seeing movies, going to galleries, buying the occasional gorgeous dress - these are the reasons I work for a living.
I like being part of a society where delightful food and beautiful locally designed clothes are available on every corner, and I'm happy to pay for that privilege. If we all stopped spending to start Compacting, this would be a much less interesting place to be. It's just a matter of finding the point where "I need" meets "I want". As long as the general flavour of life is more Italian parmesan than wet turmeric, I'll be happy.
