Table of Contents

-Beauty doesn’t have to be a beast
-For the love of God, get off the couch
-Sorry Kermit: It IS easy being green
-Bon Appétit! 
-Make some extra money, honey
-Get creative
-Events, activities, and other cash guzzlers
-Cleaning = soap + water + elbow grease
-Around the house
-Giving doesn’t have to break the bank
-In a pinch

Excerpt from 101 Tip$ From My Depression-Era Parents

When I was five and my sister was eleven, our parents worked in a factory. That summer they were both on lay- off. These days I often hear people say they've been “laid off” when in fact the correct word is "fired." I guess it’s a change in our vernacular, but a “lay-off,” at least when I was a kid, meant something else. When the company a person worked for completed a specific contract, it was common for the factory employees to be "laid off" until a new contract was negotiated. With a new contract, employees went back to work. Lay-off was sort of a mini-vacation, except that you collected unemployment insurance, something my parents were never happy about. They wanted to work. 

At any rate, that summer in 1961 my parents were laid off. They didn’t work at the same factory and it was unusual for both of them to be on lay-off at the same time. But they were. Of course my sister and I never knew the family was having financial problems. Our lifestyle was more than adequate, and we were unaware that at night mom and dad were tearing at their hair trying to figure out how support us, my widowed maternal grandmother, and half a dozen aunts, uncles, and cousins who periodically landed on our doorstep. But the folks did okay and managed to take care of business without letting on that there was money trouble.

My father, John, had an odd sense of humor. He was first generation American, his parents having come over on the boat from Lithuania. He spent his first few years in Brooklyn before the family moved to upstate New York, where he and my aunt Mary were raised and where he eventually met and married my mother. A smart man, he had to drop out of school in eighth grade to help support his family. His father, my grandfather, fled the wife and returned to Lithuania, never to be seen again. Paternal Grandma was a tough one: loud, angry, and dead in her fifties. All this to say that dad had a difficult childhood, fought the good fight in WWII, and knew how to dig in and survive.  

So the summer my parents were on lay-off, dad was in the kitchen one day making cat food. An explanation may be necessary here: pets back then weren’t pampered like they are today. They didn't sleep on store-bought beds and eat special food specific to their urinary tract and aging teeth. Cats were cats. They lived outside, chased mice, and were fed in big tin bowls left on the back step. For reasons that remain unexplained to me, John would take vegetable peelings and leftover meat scraps and cook them all up in a big pot on the stove for the cats. For my part, going to the store for a can of pet food seems more sensible, but then I speak from a non-Depression era mentality. For him, boiling up God knows what on the stove and feeding it to the cats was a rational project. 

Helen and Alec, friends of my parents who were not in the same difficult financial situation at the time, stopped in one day to say hello (my mother wasn’t at home, was probably at the grocery store not buying cat food). They appeared in the kitchen and saw my father stirring gray muck in a big pot on the stove. Helen asked what he was doing. Straight-faced, my dad said: “Well Helen, we have to feed the girls something.” 

Helen, not surprisingly, was horrified.

After a short visit, Helen and Alec left and my mother returned home. An hour later the couple reappeared with five bags of groceries. John had not shared his little joke with my mother, and she was bewildered to see friends arriving with food. When Helen explained she couldn't bear the idea that my sister and I were eating potato peelings for supper, my father burst out laughing. My mother, however, was touched. Those were the days when it wasn't so hard to believe that parents might have to feed their kids vegetable scraps; days when friends did such things unasked, brought groceries to people who they thought needed help.

My mom and dad and their friends were people of the Great Depression. They understood hardship, and the importance of saving money because you never really know what tomorrow will bring.

It's difficult to imagine that we today, in the age of the iPad and the drive-through, might ever have to endure such burdens. Stores are bursting with food and merchandise as our children spin about racking up cell phone bills. But recent events in the U.S. economy might well bring us all back to a time when life is not the easy place it's been for so many decades. Retirement accounts are dwindling. Gas prices fluctuate between astonishing and eye-popping. Food costs are rising. The global market is faltering. When my mother passed away in 1992, I found 24 outdated cans of stewed tomatoes in her pantry, dozens of disposable salt and pepper shakers, and a baggie full of used bread wrapper twist ties. They were there just in case. I didn't get this "just in case" mentality then. Just in case of what? I wondered as I filled the garbage can. The woman was lovely, but a bit paranoid.

Now, reading the financial news, I find myself musing paranoid? Maybe not.

Recently, an optimistic friend remarked that the current economic trials may not be a bad thing, that such financial tribulations get thinkers to thinking and solutions flowing. I hope he's right. In the event he's not, however, I've come up with a few money-saving tips in these times when cash is king, Depression-Era ways my family elders might, if they were alive today, maneuver their way around the economic crisis we're all facing. Some of the tips are interestingly practical. Some are a little nutty. And some are downright frightening that we might ever need to employ them. Let's hope we never do. But it's not a bad idea to hunker down and live lean and mean, save a few dollars here and there, and have a plan.

Just in case.