I Stand on the Shoulder of A Giant

I had meant to write this post as my very first one, but when I go out walking the dogs my mind wanders and comes up with other ideas. It has a mind of its own. I’m making a list of topics so that I can stick to what I want to write on a daily basis, or at least have some sort of semi-structured plan.

I can’t, of course, speak for anyone else who is interested in the frugal life-style and is enthusiastic enough about what it has helped them to achieve to take their “stories” public (in whatever form). But I feel that I personally would be remiss in getting too far into this blogging experiment without paying homage to the matriarch of modern frugality, Mrs. Amy Dacyczyn and her masterpiece The Complete Tightwad Gazette.

With my marriage in 1995 I had begun slowly and tentatively trying to find my frugal way. It was lonely. The economy was just starting to perk up again after the latest recession, and people just didn’t seem interested in thriftiness. Actually, I don’t even really think that I thought of myself as interested. All I knew was that I really, really wanted to buy a house and I just couldn’t see how I would ever, ever be able to save a down payment, let alone make the monthly payments, not to mention property taxes and insurance. I lived in California back then, and believe it or not houses were dirt cheap at that time. But still, they seemed impossibly out of reach for me and my husband.

My husband and I used to drive around on our days off and look at houses. One time we looked at some beautiful Craftsman-style model homes in La Verne, California. Wow! Their shiny newness captured our hearts in 10 seconds flat. At around 1500 square feet they seemed palatial, especially compared to our 600 square foot apartment. Three bedrooms, 2 baths, and an indoor laundry - jiminy christmas, they were a dream incarnate.

Whoa! Reality slapped us in the face when we found out the price. $160,000! I was pretty sure right then my dream of being a homeowner would never come true. My brain made up its mind that it would never happen, and my conscious-self reluctantly accepted that. But still, deep deep inside I didn’t want to give up my dream. I didn’t really know that I still felt that way, but you know what they say: the heart wants what it wants, and I guess that was true for me. So I kept looking here and there for a way, sorta semi-consciously.

What I didn’t know was that there was someone all the way on the other side of the country who knew exactly how I felt. She wanted what she wanted, too, and found a way to get it. And she was nice enough to share how she did it with strugglers like me. I stumbled upon her first book, and I was hooked. Looking back I can now see that it wasn’t so much specific hints and suggestions that got me where I wanted to be (though they were certainly helpful), but the idea that I could reach my goals. And maybe an even more revolutionary idea, that my goals were worthwhile and worthy of sustained effort to achieve, even in the face of skepticism of others (which I seemed to encounter a lot of!)

So, to paraphrase, I JUST DID IT! By 1997, my husband and I were able to come up with a small down payment on a home in Glendora, CA. We paid $145,000 for that house, and let me tell you I was scared! That was a huge sum of money to us and 30 years was a long, long time to be paying for it. Also, the real estate market in California at that time was still not great. On the one hand, prices were very low, but on the other hand, older and “wiser” people were warning us that we were making a very serious financial error. Our interest rate was 7.5% and we felt lucky to get that.

Of course, we had an impound account (monthly payments to cover annual property taxes and insurance) because we didn’t make a 20% down payment. Altogether, our monthly payment was $1,100.00. That was a lot for us then, $400.00 more then our monthly rent, and added to the scariness. Many, many nights I would lie in bed in my new home and wonder if my husband and I had done a dumb thing. But, there, again, in my deepest heart I was truly at peace and content with our decision, even if the financing of it wasn’t 100% ideal.

I give a lot of credit to The Tightwad Gazette for helping us achieve our dream. We no longer own that home, but we will own forever what it represents - the confidence that we can always find a way to achieve our goals, using the resources at our disposal. Hopefully, with this blog I can do my little part to spread that revolutionary message. Thank you, Tightwad Gazette.

Here is my copy of The Complete Tightwad Gazette. It is practically falling apart (I recently repaired it with scotch tape and a hot glue gun) but it still works great. Wish I could say the same about many much more expensive purchases!