The Going Gets Tough

During the past two years, my husband and I squirreled away enough cash to pay the way for the average household in the Tulsa metro for a year. We used most of it to send creditors packing and saved the rest -- we're all hearing this phrase a lot lately - "just in case."

Also, I had a baby last year, and though he's cute and occasionally sweeps my floors with his knees, he hasn't exactly been economical.

Bit by bit, during the course of 24 months and change, we managed to hoard enough money, if we had wanted, to pay cash for a luxury SUV. Implausibly, we did it on an average annual take-home pay less than what most Tulsa households live on, without starving or going naked.

I like to think I know how to pinch a penny or two, but I doubt my family is the only one that has cut expenses to reduce debt and build an emergency fund. As we're pelted daily with darkening headlines on job cuts and pay freezes, I also doubt we're the only family with greater control of our spending than of our income.

Happily, though, the Tulsa metro area seems to have resisted the recession. Thanks to our local energy industry and a relatively diversified economy, Tulsans have enjoyed ample warning of what could lie ahead while others in the U.S. woefully have not. Though the problems haven't hit here to the degree that other locales have suffered, job loss and the absence of affordable credit is happening all around us.

But, enough of the doom and gloom. Life during a recession doesn't have to be fodder for stories to scare the grandkids someday. Actually, it can be kind of fun. If you're a person who will play ping-pong until you hear yourself say, "best 22 out of 43," you could use that competitive edge, that tendency to persist, to make a game out of stockpiling cash to build a nice, soft landing pad, "just in case."

Want an added bonus? When you're out to put the bacon back in your wallet, it's like living green by default. Because the best way to hold on to more of your money is to not buy new stuff, the things already lying around get a second chance at life.

Generally, getting in touch with one's cash flow tends to yield lighter living on the Earth. If that's not green (in more ways than one), I don't know what is.

Most times when I tell someone that, in the span of time it took me to conceive, produce and raise a human being to the age of one year, I hoarded more cash than what most people I know paid for four years' worth of college and expenses, the person corrects me. "You mean you spent that much, right?" I affirm my savings, which is followed by a screeching, "How did you do that?!"

I'm not going to act like we didn't do without, because we did. We didn't buy that flatscreen TV we accidentally drooled on at Sears, and we still drive the used car in which we ran away to get married. I also had to stop ordering juicers and bronze backscratchers from the late-night shopping channel, which was easy because my husband canceled the cable.

I became that person with the calculator and a half-dozen competitor sale ads at the grocery store.

My husband, an infantryman fresh out of the military when we decided to gut our budget, had been trained to sleep on a rock and eat something similar to space food, only worse. With not much interest in clothes or fancy food, and since he has sported the same buzzcut for the past 12 years, he had less adjusting to do than I.

To lay our financial foundation in spite of the then-looming recession, we scoured our place for stuff to sell. After reports of the hauls from our first few garage sales reached our loved ones, our house became a draw for anyone who wanted to make some quick cash. We offered shoppers their choice of not just one houseful of random finds, but sometimes as many as five. With just the money we made from the mega-garage sales, we were able to convert our study into a nursery.

We also made a lot of stuff. Using borrowed tools, my husband built a baby crib that has ruined my childbearing friends for store-bought nursery furniture. Meanwhile, I knitted baby winter gear with yarn I snagged on sale. And, I knitted myself a thing or two, of course.

Surprisingly, we ate really, really well. We rarely had enough room in our meager food budget to hit the drive-thru or to spring for the processed food found in the middle isles of the grocery store. I was relegated to the perimeters of the stores where the freshest, most whole and, coincidentally, the least-costly foods are stocked. I also managed to cut a few deals at local farmers' markets.

The easiest thing to do to a marriage during its first five years is to dissolve it. The next easiest is to shoulder it with tens of thousands of dollars' worth of consumer and student loan debt. About 18 months after our pledge to build a nest egg, though, we saw the light at the end of the tunnel. We started to notice the extra change jingling around in our bank account, and we threw it at all the people who sent us bills every month. After awhile, the bills stopped coming. Now we get to keep more of the money we work so hard to earn.

We've all read articles on how to tighten our belts since the news broke that we are, duh, in a recession. With your help -- yes, you, the one flipping through this paper hunting for $2 beer nights - this column will go beyond tips on how to simply stretch a dollar.

Maybe you're like MacGyver with a buck, somehow able to hang around town on ten dimes for days on end. Or, perhaps you're just getting started with this whole penny pinching thing and wonder how you can cut corners without going back to that dining set made of milk crates that got you through that first year in your own apartment.

Ever been let in on the ground floor of a new venture? Here's your chance. You can help to make this column into a weekly manual on how to get by in Tulsa during hard times by writing me at nball@urbantulsa.com. Wherever you are on the gradient of going green (with cash buildup, baby), I want to hear your story. I want your tips and tricks, your blunders and mistakes, your tough questions and musings on Tulsa life in the low-cash lane. The more I hear from you, the easier I can scout out the best ways to live it up in this town, R-word style.