Christmas in a Depressed Economy

As we move into 2008’s extended holiday period, more than a few families are wondering if there will be a Christmas this year. Sure, some retailers are going all out to stay open long enough to see if anybody’s buying this year, but with consumer credit at a virtual standstill, international trade languishing on the docks and jobs being lost by the thousands every week, it’s a no-brainer that this Christmas isn’t going to be ‘the usual’ consumer spending orgy of Christmases past.

Presuming that your family still has a home, can heat it, and enough income to put food on the table, there are ways to have a festive, meaningful Christmas without going further into debt and without ending up with cheap Chinese junk that nobody really wants or needs.

The best thing you can do for your family is Make Your Own, and involve the kids! We save old Christmas cards in a box in the closet, pull them out around Thanksgiving and use them, plus various saved papers, made papers, trims, sequins, glitter, buttons, studs, etc. to make brand new Christmas cards for the people in our lives. Scissors and glue, a paper cutter, maybe some cutsey hole punches and lots of odds and ends, these cards inevitably get saved by every Mom, Grandma or other friend/relative who gets them! And kids are especially creative in this area. Sure you’ll have to clean up the mess, but a great time was had by all.

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Recycled Fashionables

The Beauty and Style site List Maven has posted a linky article entitled…

35 Accessories Made From Recycled Materials

It’s truly imaginative. I particularly like the crocheted plastic grocery bag necklace, though I use my plastic grocery bags as trash basket liners if I forget to take my many forever re-usable canvas bags to the store with me. And I’ll definitely have to make my grandson those computer key cuff links for the prom, since he’s determined to win the Duck brand Scholarship for best Duct Tape tuxedo…

ATG Debunks 7 Thrifting Myths

Selena at Apron Thrift Girl ventured into video this past November, and it turned out so well that I hope it won’t be her last video venture! Here she debunks 7 common myths about thrifting, which may help those who are new to living on a shoestring budget get past their preconceived prejudices and ingrained shopping habits. It also reinforces the things that us seasoned thrifters already know!

If you enjoy Selena’s video, don’t forget to check out her blog! There’s plenty more knowledge where that came from…

Previous Posts About Thrifting:

Thrifting: It’s An Art Form!
Credit Crunch: How to Survive the Recession
Living on Less: The Alternative Economies
The Payoff: Thrifting and Re-Selling
Free Yourself from Debtor’s Prison
Tips for Avoiding Pressure to Shop
Craig’s List: Great Resource or Scary Place?

Craig’s List: Great Resource or Scary Place?

A good friend read my post It’s Better than Cheap… It’s Free! and mentioned Craigslist as another very useful resource for the sale and exchange of items, along the lines of the Freecycle Network. I had never made use of Craigslist and wasn’t very familiar with how it works, so in this post let’s look at what it actually has to offer those of us trying to live well on limited budgets.

Craigslist is a lot broader in scope than the Freecycle Network, which maintains local sites devoted exclusively to the exchange of ’stuff’ for free - you advertise what you have to give away or want someone to give to you, and responses are routed through the administrators (sans personal information) to facilitate the exchange. In contrast, Craigslist advertises community news, businesses and services, housing, personals, for sale items and job openings (or wanteds), just like your local newspaper’s want ads - but much, much moreso!

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Tips for Avoiding Pressure to Shop

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been much of a good consumer as that designation has come to signify in and out of recessions in this capitalist-based economy. I don’t “shop ’til I drop,” I don’t buy much of anything new, and whenever friends or sisters try to talk me into tagging along for a bout of binge buying at the mall I come up with every excuse in the book to beg out of it.

And now that I live on a mountain rather far from town (and any sort of mall), I’ve managed to keep from making friends who believe that frivolous spending of vast amounts of money is a competitive sport. I like that about the people here in the southern Appalachians - they’re not nearly so concerned conspicuous consumption as they are concerned about the quality of their natural habitats. Perhaps that’s true of rural areas all over the country, where people are simply not accustomed to spending money as an ingrained habit or mere way to pass the time of one’s life. When we lived in a city of a million-plus people in Florida, there seemed to be at least one strip mall for every household, and they were all making a living!

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Free Yourself from Debtor’s Prison

I was in my late twenties when I finally grasped a tiny bit of the Mystery of Mammon - the magic of money. It occurred to me while awaiting a payment for services rendered that the person who owed me money was waiting on someone who owed him money too. I realized that among the full-time residents of that small New Mexico town there was never more than about $5,000 in circulation on any day of any month. That money made its rounds every month starting at the top and ending right back there when the month was over. The only new money anybody ever saw came in by way of tourists from Texas, but that got immediately swallowed up by big bank accounts in somebody else’s town.

Many regular people have a certain psychological aversion to money, or to the idea of allowing money to rule their lives. The capital class depends upon this deep psychological aversion to empower the “money myth” they depend upon to amass ever more of it in their own coffers. Terms like “filthy lucre” and traditional religious prohibitions of usury speak to this deep uncomfortableness with artificial value, yet it is the general public’s uncomfortableness with artificial value that allows the capitalist system to operate.

People who are not comfortable with artificial value don’t tend to amass much money and are prone to use the artificially valued paper to purchase things that for them have actual value. A home. A reliable means of transportation. Nice clothes, big televisions, enough food to make themselves obese, computers, entertainment, toys… it’s what makes our consumerist lifestyles hum and it’s every bit as unsustainable - both personally and economically on the national level - as chemical-intensive force-farming. These days a college graduate begins his or her working career deeply in debt and remains deeply in debt for most or all of his or her life. And it never seems to matter how deeply in debt you are, there are at least 10 new credit offers in the mailbox every week to dig you deeper.

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The Payoff: Thrifting and Re-Selling

I’ve written a bit about The Art of Thrifting, purchasing clothes, appliances, knick-knacks and gift items at secondhand outlets, garage sales and through auction outlets. I’ve also written about Alternative Economies and how systems like barter and straight trade can keep your family going without the exchange of cash or credit.

This post combines both of these approaches to make a talent at thrifting into an actual income. Over at Apron Thrift Girl blog there is a wonderful post describing one adventure in estate sale thrifting entitled Seeing What Has Always Been There that I recommend to readers so as to get a feel for how to make money by picking out bargains and re-selling them at a hefty profit.

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Living on Less: The Alternative Economies

Some people get into the economics of living on less because they don’t have much of a choice. Others get into alternatives because they believe our living-beyond-our-means lifestyles are harmful both to ourselves and to the environment. Either way, it’s good to know that there are alternatives, and plenty of room for people to invent their own levels of participation.

The ‘Money Economy’ is the one most people live in here in the modern world. It causes us to trade our lives - our time, our talents, our energy - for a certain valuation calculated in cash, and in that economy different people have different value placed on their lives. Women are still worth less than men, even in the same jobs with the same responsibilities. Women also tend to have to work more hours than men do, despite also being saddled with most of the housekeeping, child-rearing and food preparation jobs.

Minority workers are also valued poorly, as are teen workers and entry-level jobs in all sectors are notorious for paying less than it takes to live, eat, and repay student loans for that semi-worthless college degree.

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Credit Crunch: How to Survive the Recession

The news is bad. The “housing bubble” has burst, job growth has become job loss, and the cost of credit is going nowhere but through the roof. It looks like the ’shoestring’ some of us have been living on for awhile now just got a little more frayed.

While there is lots of moaning and groaning about how bad things are getting out in the real world of trying to make do, there’s not a whole lot of good advice about how the middle class can hope to survive the crunch. I’ve surfed around a bit and found a few pages offering real help and analysis, and have linked those at the bottom of this entry.

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Thrifting: It’s An Art Form!

Thrifting - shopping at secondhand stores and estate/garage sales for bargains - can do more to stretch a tight budget than shopping at Wal-Mart ever could. Even better, many secondhand outlets are charity sponsored, so the money you do spend goes to worthy causes. I am particularly fond of the smaller Catholic Charities and a couple of Kiwanis/Lions outlets in my town, but for basics and a large selection you can’t beat Goodwill and the Salvation Army.

Once you get into the spirit of thrifting it can become addictive, so do be careful to keep yourself to a set budget, only occasionally allowing yourself to make that ‘extra’ purchase because you might never find that item again if you don’t get it right now. When they say “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” they mean women, mostly. I have bought so many bargains at secondhand stores in my life that my motto is “she who dies with the most junk wins.”

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