Drastic measures

One of my life’s passions is travel. Many years ago, I was watching a PBS fundraiser whose host was a travel writer I admire. Someone on the show asked him how a person on a tight income could afford to travel. If you don’t have much money but travel is truly a priority in your life, he said, living a frugal lifestyle could free up enough savings for a trip once in a while. When pressed for specifics, he said he knew a couple for whom travel was so important that they owned only one car—a used one—and decided to forever live in rental property rather than buy a house. The money they didn’t spend on a second car and a house (and the upkeep) became their travel budget, he said.

At the time, I thought these suggestions sounded pretty drastic. Owning only one, used car would be preferable, but not owning a home? Just so you could travel? I figured that if that was the type of sacrifice I’d have to make, I’d never be going anywhere. But as our children have grown and gone, my husband and I have had to reprioritize, and guess what? At our age, since we don’t have the money to do it all, we’ve decided we’d rather travel than own a home. (We’ll also gladly get rid of one of the cars.)

To many people, frugality means deprivation. That’s what not owning a home sounded like to me when I first heard that notion, probably because I was in the midst of raising a family, and owning a home was a necessity, in my mind. I had sacrificed a lot for that. But owning a home is no longer necessary, and now I consider renting as an opportunity to get something I’ve wanted my entire life: my travel “bucket list.”

Living frugally is not deprivation if it gets you something you want. Cutting corners on things you don’t care so much about in order to have more money for stuff you do care about is one definition of living frugally. Another is to go for quality rather than quantity: Buy the best you can afford, but buy only the minimum number, and take care of it so it lasts.

I have a clipping from a recent New York Times article on retirement goals pasted into my journal that never fails to help me prioritize. The article suggests asking yourself the following three questions to determine what is truly important to you. I will paraphrase:

1. You have all the money you need. How would you live your life today?
2. You have only five years to live. What will you do with that time?
3. You have only 24 hours left on earth. What did you miss? What did you not get to do? Whom did you not get to be?

I would add:
4. You don’t have all the money you need. How do you find the funds and what do you give up to accomplish these goals?

What drastic measures have you taken? We’d love to hear them.—Carol Wiley Lorente