Inside Vancouver
The Year of Living Frugally
By Jim Sutherland published Mar 1, 2009
True, everybody’s cutting back nowadays. But Mary Ann King is taking the idea to extremes. Last August, she decided to stop spending money unless absolutely necessary. Here’s how—for better and worse—her life has changed
Mary Ann King hasn't let the neighbours in on what's happening inside the walls of the pretty cream-coloured house in Point Grey. Her colleagues, even many of her friends, don't know it, but last August she stopped buying things.
Oh sure, you're economizing these days, too. Everyone is. But you're probably cutting back on lattes and putting off the purchase of a new car, not sitting in a tidy, chilly living room talking about how to mend a garden hose, what to use as a watering can, how to preserve food when you refuse to shell out for containers, which friend you'll ask to cut your hair, how to maximize your vegetable production, how to do without muffin-tin liners. You're a late-to-the-party dabbler. She's the one who took a vow of austerity, determined to live for 12 months while buying almost nothing except for whatever food she couldn't grow herself.
The few exceptions she allows herself are telling. The vintage Corolla (which the Prince Edward Island native liltingly calls a "Ty-ota") still sits out front because her grown children use it as a kind of co-op vehicle, but it is restricted to one tank of gas a month. The BCAA membership was retained because the car is old. Magazine subscriptions have been stopped, but she still gets the Saturday paper. The books that provide her favourite leisure activity come from the library, but if she and her three grown children hadn't agreed to make it a spend-nothing Christmas, she would have shelled out for a few volumes because she knows that her experiment, if widely adopted, could become a hardship for others and she wants to support the publishing industry.
