Victor van Wetering: The art of living frugally

Eric can magic a wonderful meal from humble ingredients, he has developed our section with beehives, vegetables and more than 20 fruit-bearing trees. Fortunately, I can make jam and jelly".

Victor van Wetering on the beauty of living simply.

I'm sure our house and garden must be a riddle for people walking past. Being snuggled up beside a former show home makes our house seem very humble. That and our private back garden seem almost like an act of protest as, all around the neighbourhood, houses on sites like ours disappear as developers become evangelists of Auckland's unitary plan.

I bought the house where Eric and I now live the day it was listed. The lawyer meant to consider the offer was in hospital. His bad luck was good for me, because friends of the owner, with power of attorney, simply accepted my offer.

The post-war stucco house has little ornamentation - other than Bakelite door handles - but it has the simple quality of houses of that era, along with the "golden rectangle" rooms. The house was built on basalt rock, evidence of which can be found everywhere on the section, including whenever we dig a hole to plant another tree in our orchard.

I like to think one of the original lemon trees on the site grew from lemons catapulted on to the section. While Wim, my father, was courting Anne, my mother, at her family home in Taylors Rd, just around the corner and up the hill from where we live now, he and Anne's dad would tie an inner tube to a post and fire lemons on to the vacant site down below.

Anne told me another story when they first visited me at the house. During World War II, before the house was built, the section was an assembly point for evacuation drills for students at the nearby Marist schools. This means that Anne and her sister, Mary, set foot on my section about 60 years before I did.

A short time after buying the house, I remember thinking," What next?" Next was meeting Eric. Even before moving in, Eric started redesigning the garden, adding more fruit trees here, bringing in bees there, changing this and improving that.

Almost everything I had planted for ornamentation was replaced with something bearing edible fruit - with magnolia trees pretty much the sole survivors. But the first instalment in his grand design was a fish pond, excavated out of that basalt rock. It's typical of Eric to create something so beautiful so that I can look out on it every day from my study window.

Before I married Eric, I was your typical single white male, feeding a mortgage, eating vegetable chilli several nights a week and not taking holidays.

Checking balances and guessing power and water bills were routine pursuits. I thought an annual spend of less than $20k, excluding the mortgage, was high, given what some households have to survive on. But it was low by many other people's measures.

Since Eric and I started living together, we spend about $26k a year – excluding a mortgage. That's about the same as I spent on my own, if you take account the rent Eric was paying. So two can live almost as cheaply as one.

Our joint skillset and being brought up with a saving ethic helps.

Eric can magic a wonderful meal from humble ingredients, he has developed our section with beehives, vegetables and more than 20 fruit-bearing trees. Fortunately, I can make jam and jelly.

We share the same financial philosophy that it is easy to spend but hard to make money. For most of his life, Eric had to financially support his family.

Much of that is reflected in how I deal with utility providers, make investment decisions, or use found or salvaged items.

Some of our best scores include repurposing a demolished garage and pallets into fencing and getting several truckloads of topsoil off a section in Mt Albert. All it cost us was the price of a few dozen beers to thank the driver and site foreman.

One of our shrewdest investments was a second-hand ute, which has brought home loads of free firewood, outdoor and indoor furniture salvaged from the roadside and has proven an ideal holiday vehicle. Some holidays are spent visiting friends, which we reciprocate by hosting them, providing a koha and, woofer-style, cooking or gardening for them.

It is quite amazing what people discard on their berm. We seldom venture out for a walk without bags, just in case, we end up carrying something home. We endeavour to reciprocate – whether that's by leaving jam, gifting honey or replacing the books taken from community libraries.

We have learned that charity shops and demolition yards provide vastly better value than retail box stores but also not to advertise the fact too much with certain people.

Our retail frugality and self-sufficiency is not complete: I still find retail-free days a bit of a challenge. To spend may bring buyer's remorse but it still has appeal. And life is to be lived, right, so it's important to enjoy the occasional extravagance, whether that's a restaurant meal, a weekend away, concert tickets or splashing out on a gift.

Over time, I think our aspiration has become for contentment not consumption.

Many who write about saving money and human contentment traverse familiar themes of delayed gratification, that when you have a need a solution ultimately presents itself, that necessity is the mother of invention, that gifting time is more important than things.

These ideas are intergenerational and they align with the values of many indigenous peoples.

But we live in a materialistic era when consumption and economic growth are equated with political credibility. All this while the world heats, its resources shrink and the population grows.

Boasting about saving money is really still culturally a bit "off", like those silent generations who lived through depression and wartime. Making do is something you don't complain or boast about.

Whatever we save we accumulate, adding to our sense of financial security. We are lucky to be in that position we are in. That way of living provides a level of contentment without complacency.