Saturday, March 7, 2009

I need to vent. This is ridiculous. What is the world coming to?

We are facing financial turmoil that has never been seen before in our generation. As a couple with young kids, we see things that just cause our guts to churn.

Many of you probably know us and wonder why we spend any effort being frugal at all. After all, we actually don't need to be.


What I want to tell you is that we are frugal because we know that the lifestyle that this world has become accustomed to is unsustainable, and we want our children to develop those habits. These habits could ultimately save them from the financial destruction that a lot of people are facing today.

Here are some questions for society.

Why overextend yourself on credit? Who are you trying to impress? Who are you trying to keep up to?

Can you sleep at night, knowing that you are a paycheque away from financial disaster? Why don't you save? Why did you just lease that vehicle, when in fact, you should not have gotten one in the first place? When you see interest rates go down, do you go out and load up on more debt? Do you shop for relaxation?

How simple is your life? How much more could you simplify it?

What fallbacks do you have in case of emergency?

Those questions are just the beginning. As a generation, we have not seen economic difficulty and we therefore live in an era of entitlement. I deserve this, I deserve that. I'm sure we are all culpable of that.

We need to get rid of that mentality and return to being satisfied with what WE have, rather than what we think we should have. As a society, we've gotten away from our roots and have left sustainability behind.

We poison the water and the earth with our trash - all this, just to consume more and more.

I'm sick of it, and I'm tired of hearing people complain about the economy when they are unwilling to admit that their consumption habits are part of the problem.

The economic downturn will help to reset that consumptive habit. It's unfortunate that it had to come to that.

We might seem frugal to people, but that is actually the way things were when our parents were our age. They had to work for things, credit was tough to obtain, and they had to save because they knew that nobody else would bail them out. Our generation has forgotten those values and it's going to learn the hard way. Society has lulled us to thinking that so much consumption is normal, but it's not.

Good luck.

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