01-11-2007

Living Thriftily for a Year, a Month, or Even a Day

Now that the holidays are over and the new year has begun, it’s a good time to rethink personal spending. A Time Magazine article entitled The Year of Living Thriftily, details a trend that started recently of people making a commitment to scale back their consumerism.

A little over a year ago, 10 friends got together in San Francisco over a potluck dinner. There were a few teachers, a technology marketer, an engineer, a dog handler. What would it be like, they wondered amid the Christmas shopfest, if they all pledged not to buy anything new except food, medicine and essential toiletries for a year? Thus was born a movement that they named, in a light-hearted way, after the 1621 Mayflower Compact. “We are a group of individuals committed to a 12-month flight from the consumer grid,” they wrote in a chat-room manifesto that lists their aims as going “beyond recycling,” reducing clutter in their homes and simplifying their lives: “Borrow, barter or buy used.”

Serendipitously, Amanda and I are part-way through our own scaled down — one month — version of the same idea. Just a couple weeks has definitely helped us refocus on simplifying our lives. Before running across the article above, we had already talked about limiting our non-essential buying to one weekend per month, once this month is up. Maybe we’ll take the plunge and try for an entire year of not buying anything new.

In the past, I’ve taken a year-long hiatus from eating meat, drinking sodas, and watching television. My eating, drinking, and watching habits have all been lessened significantly after each year-long fast.

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