From Lori

[Warph]

I went green (as in greenbacks) last month. I put away the credit cards, operated on a cash-only basis and hung out with the guys – Washington, Lincoln and Jackson.

With the current economic turmoil, it seemed like a good time to estimate how much I spend running the house and see how far off I was.

Sure, you can track what you spend with a credit card, but it's not real time. By the time you're going over your charges a month after you made them, you have no idea why a sane person would go to Wal-Mart 9 times in one billing period.

Besides, plastic isn't real money.

Just like the politicians working with numbers on paper aren't spending real money. If they carted those billions in bundled bills by wheelbarrows from D.C. to every corporation getting a bailout, we wouldn't have a president asking Congress to cut the equivalent of a latte from next year's budget.

We wouldn't have a Congress. They would have been run out of town several hundred billion dollars ago.

I loosely estimated what I spend on groceries, clothes and assorted household items in a month and made a cash withdrawal at the bank.

I was out of funds by the 10th.

Being that I had already proven myself right – that I underestimate what I spend on a daily basis with credit cards – I rewarded myself with a another trip to the bank for more cash. When that was gone, it was no money – no shop-ey.

Here are the differences between paying with plastic and paying with cash:

First and foremost -- it hurts.

Secondly, you develop hostile feelings toward mundane purchases like glass cleaner, baking soda and grass seed.

When you spend cash, you're more inclined to dig around for something you thought you saw in the garage five years ago than to rush out and buy a new one.

Lingering desires to continue swiping credit cards is so intense you are tempted to swipe your driver's license at the grocery store checkout for old time's sake.

When you see cash literally slipping through your hands, you take better care of what you already have.

You realize that a $3 greeting card is a total waste of money and hit the 99-cent display.

When you shop with a credit card, you ask yourself, "When is that screen going to pop up so I can scribble my name?" When you shop with cash, you ask yourself, "Is this really necessary?"

When you spend cash, you plan meals more carefully and treat your leftovers with respect. The words "let's eat out" do not roll off your tongue.

Impulse buying plummets to almost zero.

When you near the end of your allotted dollars, you spend slowly and thoughtfully and promise yourself not to take it out on the husband, small children and furry animals.

When you spend cash, the best part of the month isn't when you load your wallet -- it's when you open the credit card bill.

[Warph]

People can be sticklers about what time they have Thanksgiving dinner. There are the high-noon purists and the mid- to late-afternoon debonair.

I spring from high-noon stock. As a child, I heard of people who had Thanksgiving dinner later in the day, around 2 or 3, and frankly, I wondered if they were all right.

Whatever did those families do until midafternoon? Play cards and let their babies run wild? It was rumored that those who didn't eat at the naturally ordained hour of noon were putting on airs and acting cosmopolitan. 

Sometimes I fancied myself as cosmopolitan. Holding my stiff Chinette paper plate, I would go to the end of the line behind all the aunts and uncles and hundreds of cousins, hoping that by being the last in line, I would have my turkey, mashed potatoes and dressing at a decadent 12:20 or maybe even a scandalous 12:35.

That was as far as my flirtations ever went. There was no transgressing into the 1 o'clock hour. An aunt or uncle who found a kid staring at a plate of food that long would have sounded the alarm for a medical emergency.

Not all of our Thanksgivings were spent with the tangled mass of cousins. Some of them were spent with three great-aunts who had helped raise my father when he was a little boy.

One was widowed early in life, the other two never married and all three lived together in a tidy white house. They embodied the essence of prim and proper and held fast to the high noon tradition.

The aunts bustled about the kitchen roasting the turkey, singing in three-part harmony, boiling potatoes and steaming the windows. They darted in and out of the dining room, setting china, silverware and beautiful crystal goblets they had bought for their own mother years ago.

At precisely noon, they would take off their aprons; we would sit down to pray and commence to feast.

As the years passed, their singing began to warble and the mashed potatoes occasionally had a lump. Thanksgiving dinner slid slightly off schedule -- by 15 minutes one year, half an hour the next. The aunts were flustered that the meal was off schedule, but Mom and Dad assured them everything was fine.

More time passed and the aunts' steps began to slow. There was a small wrinkle in the linen tablecloth and, in a mortifying faux pas, they forgot to set the butter knife.

Thanksgiving dinners were now off schedule by a full hour.

Eventually, the aunts began having difficulty sleeping at night. They acquired the usual aches and pains that accompany age, but they still relished having the family for Thanksgiving dinner.

At the last Thanksgiving we shared in their home, sunlight streamed in through the tall narrow windows in the dining room, casting a halo of light on the marvelous feast before us. The aunts had not lost their touch in the kitchen, although the meal was now one-and-a-half hours off schedule.

The aunts looked at the clock on the wall and sighed in unison. Mom and Dad laughed, dismissed the hour and said the only thing that mattered was that we were all together enjoying Thanksgiving. 

It was 10:30 a.m. We were a new kind of cosmopolitan.

[srkruzich]

Warph, I have been green for a very very long time.  Everything you said is true.   Though now i manage to have a few bucks left at the end of the month sometimes.  You should see me grocery shopping.  I'll pick up this and that on my list and stuff not on the list and by the time i get to the check out, i will have gone through the items before getting there and weeding out what i really did not need.  Then at the checkout, i handle each item while adding in my head the amounts, and when i get to items i really wanted but then weighed the decision by whether or not i wanted that item or did i want the money it cost in my pocket.  The item gets chucked every time.

I am a master at scrounging.  I take old stuff and make it new again.  My whole woodshop is filled with tools probably 30 -40 years old and i keep them in good working order every year.  All motors get disassembled and lubed up and cleaned out, repaired if needed, new bearings ect and reassembled and tested. 

I don't pass up free anything that i can use.  Free tin, free lumber.   Shoot a piece of 6" pvc pipe can be made into so many kool things.  Cheese press, or a goat mineral feeder.  LOL

Friend of mine says i'm one of the most tightwad people they know.

[Warph]

The stimulus plan isn't going well. I've had two cups of caffeine already and still nothing.

The recovery isn't much better. Used to be I could go out to a late movie and be fully alert the next day, but not now.

When I read the government had spent $9.5 million to update the website tracking the economic recovery, I decided to visit. I hoped recovery and stimulus were going better for them than it was for me.

The recovery map showed more than 20 pink, blue and green dots that were awarded stimulus money in our zip code.

Most of the recipients were given monies in the neighborhood of a half million dollars. It seems like a lot of money until you remember that you used to be able to get a candy bar for a dime. (I don't know what that has to do with anything; I'm just trying to make you feel better about a $787 billion package, which is a lot of candy bars at any price.)

My favorite dot on the map was a neighborhood Subway that snagged $591,000 in stimulus money – putting America back to work one 6-inch turkey on whole wheat at a time.

"We missed it," I told the husband.

"Missed what?"

"Our chance at recovery. I told you we should have jumped on the bandwagon."

"And I told you it was illegal."

When the first round of bailouts started, there was an on-line application form. All you had to do was declare your status as a legitimate financial institution. I suggested we file as the His & Hers No Trust Company.

"We are not a financial institution," the husband deadpanned.

"Well I wish you would have told that to the three colleges we just bankrolled on behalf of three kids."

I maintained we could compete with the best of the worst in the financial world. We had drained our assets, our financial records were in shambles and I was willing to accept an obscene bonus and travel to a California spa to reflect on the error of my ways.

"No deal," the husband droned.

"I'm not asking to play a game show," I said, "I want to play with taxpayers' money."

Though the husband nixed my dreams of bailout money long ago, hope springs eternal. I'm thinking there still might be some loose change for the taking in the stimulus package.

Furthermore, I qualify. I am a small business run by a woman (two points) and work in an energy inefficient space (our house).

With a sweeping expansion, new energy efficient windows, curlicue light bulbs, updated French doors, a new paint job and ergonomically friendly office furniture, I could be in complete compliance with the EPA.

"You do not qualify," the husband repeats.

Some people just don't hear opportunity when it knocks.

Know this: When they talk about slow recovery, they will be talking about me.