When people hear thrifty they think it’s a euphemism for tight wad or cheapskate. I think I thought that before I was married, but now I know there is a difference. My wife’s thriftiness had lead to us being able to enjoy a higher standard of living, experiencing great vacations and living in our own home. Well, it’ll be our own after another 20 years of payments.
Being a young couple and just married, we made almost every wrong financial move you could make. Looking back, it’s amazing we didn’t make more mistakes, though I scratch my head trying to think of ones we didn’t make. Myself, I was a mail order junkie. If you promised me ten easy payments on the front of the catalog I’d buy from you. It didn’t matter if we needed it or not or if it was useful. The fact someone wanted to lend me money to buy something was good enough to get me to move on it.
The wife, she didn’t like it.
As our marriage went on I started to notice how my wife was thrifty. She and I were ardent garage salers, but where I thought it was just cool to go through someone else’s stuff, she would haaggle with someone over the price. It didn’t matter that the orange juice decanter was 50 cents, she’d offer 25. When it came time to buy a car I went out and signed the first piece of paper laid in front of me. Yes, I bought a Yugo new from a slicked backed salesman. When she bought our first car it was for $100 and was from our neighbor. I still have that receipt.
Thriftiness is a way of life for her and by extension us. Still, there are times where it borders on silly. My favorite thing is when we’re grocery shopping at night. Late at night. She’ll be upset that I want to buy a box of cereal for 50 cents more than we could get it from another store. Never mind I’m dead tired and the other store is a couple of miles away and we have no plans to go to it.
Even with the occasional silliness, her thriftiness constantly enriches our marriage. The best example of this is when she saved us a few thousand dollars in interest from a loan shop. It all started with an offer from one of those storefront loan companies. I was amazed that just for my signature they would give me $5,000. Did I read the paperwork? Nada. Did I consult the wife? Hell no. I knew she wouldn’t approve. I eagerly signed my name and picked up the check. Later did I find out it was a loan with something like a 20% interest rate. The wife was not happy.
A couple of years after this loan she declared we saved enough money to pay it off. Me and my wisdom thought it would be best to use the money for something else, but she explained to me the best, the thriftiest move was to pay it off. It as like something from The Simpsons. I as Homer sat watching with attention her presenting charts, graphs and numbers.
While this is an example of her prodigous thift, she does it in simpler ways each day. She advocates reusing bags, shopping on the days when there is a $10 coupon and returning unused items. She also looks for ways to craft things for use around our house.
The best example of this is when she learned how to sew from her father. Her father, a great man himself, taught himself how to sew and then he worked with the wife to teach her. Pretty soon she moved from pot holders to ties to clothes. She made shirts, shorts and dresses. She made stuff for me, herself, but more impacting, my daughter. I imagine we saved close to a thousand dollars on clothes my wife made.
I’ve recently lost a significant amount of weight. In the course of looking through some old boxes of clothes, we came across shorts she made for me. They were simple, basic and did the job. I loved those shorts and it was then I realized it was another thing. I tried the shorts on and they fit. In an instant I was filled with the joy and happiness or our early marriage, transported to a time when my wife’s thriftiness was new, weird and, well, quaint. We’ve come a long way since then and it made me realize our marriage has grown to what it is thanks in part to her thriftiness.
Today’s Gift: She’s been saying we’re going to have a garage sale since we moved into the house. That was nine years ago. I’ve puffed my chest and tried to get her to do it, but this time I am simply going to tell her I’ll make myself available to her to help her organize and move the stuff for sale.