Waste Not Want Not - So True Now!

I learned my values from my beloved grandparents. Despite the total dysfunction of my family, that gave me a very good grounding. They'd lived through the Great Depression, were from farming families. Grandma's first husband died when their children were 4 & 6, & she did what she had to in order to provide. I have no idea whether she sent money for the kids or not. First she tried working as a country midwife. Then she returned to the city & took a job, took in boarders to keep the house. One of her kids went to live with her mother & father, the other with her childless twin & her husband. That's what families did for each other back then. From my grandparents I learned to be frugal, & that almost everything has a use.

As a young adult, I worked in the branch of a bank that specialized in teaching women to manage their finances. I learned about the value of automatic deposits, balancing your checkbook each month, how banking works, & the importance of establishing good credit. I was taught to obtain credit cards that didn't have annual fees & charge something regularly that I'd normally pay cash for. Then, to pay it off when the bill came. With all that I learned to manage my money. When I got together with my first husband, I had credit & a good job & he did not. I had low to no balances on my credit cards. That changed when I married a guy who had no profession & tried sales when he was a fish out of water. So that was the beginning for me of many years of financial struggle. He came from plenty & I came from a background where I was told we had to make due (although the adults always had money for gambling, alcohol, cigarettes, bowling, & entertainments). I served just enough pork chops to meet the needs, & insisted he chew the meat off the bone instead of throw it away & get another. Then I simply quit serving them. I'm sure my Grandma taught me there are ways around everything. When I divorced him, it was up to me to provide. I didn't quite make enough & child support wasn't enough. I tried to never make the kids feel like we were poor & we weren't, but we couldn't waste money either. They wore top quality hand-me-downs from good friends & clothes without the designer labels. They didn't like it but I explained that money isn't limitless & that you have to make choices about what you do with it. If you spend it all on designer jeans there's not money for shoes or a shirt. I provided all the essentials & more, including county sports participation & sporting equipment, instrument rentals, pets, & activities. Within the limits of my time as a working mother, I provided them an opportunity to explore all their interests that I could. I hope I taught them at least some of the values & appreciation of the use of money that I learned growing up.

All of us need these lessons & more now & into the future. I'm not sure when all the changes took place. I look back to the end of the last century, when I was a professional woman with a great job, fully participating in the financial & working world. I know there was a huge economic change in 2008, so I'll reference that. Nothing has been the same since & there's no going back. The way things were at the end of the century & beginning of this one are gone forever. Now it's time to start learning to effectively manage all your resources, as my grandparents taught me. The more you learn the better off you will be - about natural medicine & alternative healing, gardening, canning, preserving, making things, & networking. No one can be entirely self-sufficient, which is where networking becomes important. We each need to know who best supplies what we need - best meaning the quality we need & at a reasonable cost. I said cost instead of price because price implies money & cost is more broad. Cost can include what you can barter (time or resources) for goods & services. I am passionate about the old ways & crafts & that equips me for the evolution taking place. One of the nice things is that I'm also a teacher, so I can teach you too! I can teach anything & everything I know, including resource management & being frugal without creating a feeling of need or want, & how to make the things you desire. So add me to your network!