My Published Articles for ViewsHound: Lessons on Frugality and Extravagance

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Lessons on Frugality and Extravagance

One of the lessons my mother, Paz Balleza Barrido Katague, taught me was frugality. During her life-time she and my father saved at least 10% of the family's income every month. By the time they were in their late forties, they have enough savings to purchase a commercial lot and building in Iloilo City-they called the Katague Building. The purchase was backed up with my father's back pay since he served as the Dental Officer of the American-Guerilla forces in Panay and Romblon Islands during the Japanese-American War in the Philippines. Both my father and Mother were able to send me and my six other siblings to college. When my father received his back pay, he wanted to buy a car- a luxury item at that time. My mother convinced him to save it. This help in the purchase of the commercial lot in Iloilo City in the late 1940's.

My Frugal Mother and Me, 1984. My Father however was not frugal at all, but money decisions at that time was under the control of my Mom.

My mother also taught me not to waste food. Your plate must be cleaned. If she saw you not cleaning your plates she would lecture you that millions of other children in the world are starving. This will make you feel guilty and finished your food even though you are no longer hungry. The trait of frugality I think I have passed to all of my four children. However, one of my children, I sometime wonder if the word frugality is carried to an extreme, to the point of him and his family not enjoying the current joy in living. Thus to be frugal is good but if carried to the extreme that you lose the enjoyment of life and daily living is not good. This reminded me of saying of Johnson, that without Frugality, there will be no rich people, but if you are miserable it is not worth it.

One of the many frugal things I did when I was still employed was to bring my own lunch( Macrine's left-over cooking) 4 times every week. On Fridays I treat myself and members of my team by eating in the local restaurants near our office. I calculated that the saving I made by doing it for 22 years was enough to build our beach house Chateau Du Mer in Boac, Marinduque, Philippines. Another item that gave me savings was on my utility bills-by turning off lights when no one is in the house and turning down the thermostat in our house when we are out of the house. I calculated I saved about 5% on my electric bill monthly.

Chateau Du Mer-Painting by Rene Nieva

Today, our practicing frugality during our younger years are bearing fruits and now being harvested. We are living in comfort even after our retirement even though our social security benefits are not enough. I can afford to pay an extra $60 per day for Macrine's rehabilitation -an upgrade to a single room- which is not covered by Medicare and my BCBS medical insurances. We can afford to hire cleaning ladies twice a month, have a monthly one hour whole body massage, order gourmet meals, go the Casino once a month and eat in a restaurant whenever we feel like doing.

Macrine's terno is similar to this photo but made with pineapple cloth

Although Macrine and I were frugal in our younger years, we did splurge on a few extravagances. We have visited 14 countries outside the US and stayed in 4 to 5 Stars resorts. We have visited 40 places in the US both small and big metropolitan areas, eat in 5 Star restaurants, drank a $100 bottle of wine and went to Las Vegas five times enjoying the night life( shows) and the Slot machines. One other extravagance that Macrine had enjoyed was her purchased from a famous couturier in Manila of a fully beaded/embroidered Terno that cost us $1000 about 15 years ago. At that time $1000 dollars( not pesos) was a lot of money for just an evening dress.

Another luxurious item that Macrine had enjoyed was a mink jacket in Chicago during my graduate school years at the University of Illinois. Macrine won this mink jacket( First Prize worth $500 at that time) at a lottery sponsored by our local Catholic church. After wearing it for a month, she decided to sell it for a washer and dryer- more practical items and much needed with our two kids still using diapers ( disposable diapers was still not available in the early 1960's).

One last extravagance of Macrine was our purchase of her Red Toyota Celica Convertible in the mid 1990's. This convertible was used in the Parade during the Filipino-American Centennial Celebration in Washington, DC. when Macrine was over all Chairperson of this Annual Event sponsored by Fil-Am residents of the tristate area of metropolitan Washington, DC, Maryland and Northern Virginia.

Macrine's Toyota Celica Red Convertible

We have certainly enjoyed a few extravagances in our younger years. If you are in the mature stage of life and have some money, do not be afraid to spend it. When you die all the money you saved will just be a source of problems/envy to all your children or to your living relatives. Spend it while you can and enjoy your aging years.

The reason why I am writing this blog is to remind everyone ( friends and relatives), to save and live a frugal life, but not to the extent of depriving yourself and family the enjoyment of daily activities. Again be frugal and be rich, but not too frugal to live a miserable life.

What is frugality? Wikipedia defines frugality as the quality of being frugal, sparing, thrifty, prudent or economical in the consumption of consumable resources such as food, time or money, and avoiding waste, lavishness or extravagance. For more article on frugality read the following:

https://wallethacks.com/daily-extravagance-habits-frugal-people-dont-do/

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Lessons on Frugality and Extravagance

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