My husband was hired by a startup in Tel Aviv a year ago. A month after he was hired, a number of people were let go and they closed down one of the two floors they had rented in a large building.

A couple of weeks ago, thirty percent of his coworkers were let go. My husband went in for the special meeting held with the remaining employees to explain what is happening.

The chief financial officer of my husband’s company was one of the first in the Israeli tech space to be interviewed and talk publicly about the assumption there will be an economic recession over a year ago. He now explained that investment money used to go to start ups that were spending money hand over fist. No one wanted a company on a budget; they wanted to see growth.

Now the investment money is looking for companies that are lean, in order to get through the financial dip that is expected. He explained that they are making these cuts in advance, to prepare for what is coming with the hope that the company can make it through. They also have shut down their large spacious offices and are moving into a smaller space. He said that most companies still don’t see what’s on the horizon, they aren’t changing their spending or projections and a lot of them aren’t going to make it.

I was paying attention to what he said a year ago, and I’m paying attention now. Sometimes you don’t want to hear something negative like this, because it makes you feel anxious and worried about what your own future holds. But I try to move beyond my tendency to be avoidant of what I don’t want to hear, and learn from it.

If the chief financial officer is taking steps to buffer the company for an economic downturn by turning to frugal strategies, it seems prudent for us to take steps to buffer our families by doing the same.

Obviously I’d prefer to think we’ll be minimally affected by the economic bumps that are anticipated. Don’t we all?

As uncomfortable as it was to consider, my husband and I had a discussion about what would happen if we were to experience job loss. We decided that it would be prudent to scale our expenses down now. The intention is twofold: to create more savings, and to know that we could live on less if we needed to. It’s much easier and less stressful to do this as a response to a proactive and thoughtful decision than to suddenly and reactively need to cut expenses from a place of deprivation.

Though my husband has been managing the finances for many years, a few months ago we agreed that it’s time for me as the frugality ninja to step up to the helm since I enjoy rather than tolerate the minutiae of money management, and taking the above steps means looking closely at all outgoing money.

It’s taken a lot of time but I’ve been enjoying this purposeful and focused work, and have been gratified by the progress we’re making. Some of my efforts have been on cutting expenses, while sometimes it means spending more money now, so we won’t have to spend it later (eg replacing our old energy guzzler freezer with an energy efficient chest model).

We don’t have any debt other than our mortgage, as I’ve consistently stuck to my hard and fast rule of not spending money that I don’t have. This includes making five weddings in five years. If I did have debt, I would be focusing on getting it paid off.

Here are some steps we’ve taken:

• cut expenses in different spending categories
• looked for ways to increase income
• increased our savings rate
• paid down a chunk of our mortgage
• refinanced our mortgage to a set rate
• took care of non-urgent repairs on our vehicles rather than delay to when they become necessary
• withdrew pension funds (a recession would affect the stock market) and reinvested the money
• been generous with charitable giving while we have the ability to do so

Rather than being negative or alarming to think about, considering less cheerful possibilities has helped us make choices that have led us to feel more empowered and relaxed.

Expenses (energy, food, gas) are expected to continue to rise in the coming year – some financial experts say that they’re going to rise significantly. Increased job loss is also being predicted.

I don’t know if that’s what will happen. But I do know that if it does, the combination of rising costs and decreased income isn’t a good match for a relaxed home. I’m sharing some of what we’re doing to proactively buffer our family with you in the hope it will inspire you to take actions that will likewise empower your family.

If you’re already taking actions of this sort, I and other readers would love to hear about it! Please share in the comments. 🙂

Avivah

Back in June, I noticed a jump in our mortgage payment, which had previously been stable for years.

My husband and I wondered what was going on, so he called the bank to find out. They told him that a portion of our mortgage loan is linked to the prime rate, which means it’s linked to the Bank of Israel interest rate increases.

(Quick explanation of Israeli mortgages so all of this will make sense: the standard mortgage consists of three different loans, each with different terms. One portion is fixed, one portion is linked to inflation, and the third portion is linked to interest rates. A completely fixed mortgage isn’t a typical offering here, no doubt because the high prices of real estate necessitate loans to be rigged like this to make them affordable to the average buyer.)

Concerned about the possibility of inflation, we made the decision over a year ago to pay off the portion of our mortgage that was linked to inflation. We talked about this for a long time, and breathed a sigh of relief when it was done, relieved that our mortgage payment wouldn’t be affected by market fluctuations. (At that point we were still unaware that the prime loan was linked to interest rates.)

It was a very unpleasant surprise when we learned that we still had a portion of our mortgage with a variable rate. My husband was told by the bank representative that they’re legally allowed to raise the rates eight times in a year – though when he called someone who works in mortgages to verify this information, he assured us that they wouldn’t do that because it would destroy the economy. (Good we’re not in Australia, where I was told they had interest rate increases for eight months straight! I suppose they aren’t worried about destroying their economy?)

After seeing the mortgage go up in June, I considered converting our prime loan to a fixed rate, but assumed it would be fixed at a much higher interest rate. That obviously would mean a much higher payment, and I mentally debated if it was worth it. While I was mentally waffling, my monthly mortgage steadily moved higher, and is now up 20% in the last six months.

Two weeks ago I finally called to get the details on converting our variable loan to a fixed rate, rather than continuing building up in my mind how costly it would be.

Our mortgage broker told me that interest rates will be going up again in January, but suggested I wait to convert my mortgage until next year when he hopes rates will go down. Though generally people convert a mortgage to take advantage of lower rates, I explained that I want the stability of a predictable, fixed monthly payment.

I was very pleasantly surprised to learn I could get a fixed rate for less than one percent more than what I’m currently paying. I was sure that it would be at least 3 – 4 percent higher. To think that for months I debated converting to what I thought would be a much higher rate, when the fixed rate for a prime loan is just marginally higher than the prime rate itself!

I am very much hoping we will have our loan converted before the interest rate increase in January. The paperwork is in process so we’ll see. It’s been reassuring to have taken this step, even if it’s not finished yet.

Avivah

A year ago, my husband got a new job along with a raise in salary. Nice, right? And yet, here we are a year later with hardly any increase in our savings rate.

How did that happen? When we talked about our numbers, we both felt we were being pretty careful financially – we’re not big spenders. We sat down together a few times for financial meetings to go over the numbers, and seemingly the only answer was that our expenses had gone up. It wasn’t until this week that I could finally answer that question more definitively.

Why this week? The first year we were married, my husband was responsible for the finances. I took over the next seventeen years. And then for the next twelve years, my husband has been at the helm. This week I took responsibility for the finances once again, something my husband really doesn’t like but I actually enjoy a lot. (As to why he did it for so long if he didn’t like it, that’s another question, but it was a purposeful decision on both of our parts and we’ve agreed our goal was reached.)

Taking over again is a bit overwhelming because I’m looking at a different system than my own, and I have to wade through a lot of numbers to figure out what’s going on, what money we have coming in and what’s going out, in order to get clarity in my own mind.

Here’s what’s become clear so far: we’ve allowed lifestyle creep to sneak in. For years we were really, really frugal and careful about all of our expenses. We had to be, as our income was on the lower side (my husband’s friends who had similar incomes as well as a spouse’s second income were all in debt) and it was only by very careful and conscious management that we had any possibility to accrue some savings.

As our financial situation improved, we got a little more relaxed, and then a little more relaxed….we stopped paying attention to all the little expenses because the bills were getting paid without it.

And we began to spend a little more money here, a little more money there – nothing major or budget busting that we could point to as to where all the potentially savable money was going.

Now I’m back in the hot seat. The first couple of nights I sat for hours, going through details of months of expenses, trying to get a clear sense of where our money goes. I felt like giving up because it was so frustrating to me. But I stuck with it, and after a couple more nights looking at printouts, am excited and energized to be our financial money manager again. I’m looking forward to seeing how much money we can save and funnel into savings.

That’s going to mean becoming more conscious again about expenses, assessing the value of where we spend money rather than just spending it when it seems necessary. I’m going to be carefully tracking all of our spending – neither of us has been tracking our cash expenditures at all, and all the itemized expenses have to be gone through regularly – and plugging the many small leaks that our budget has sprung. There’s no one big item to point to – yes, prices have gone up, but even more than that, what I’m seeing is a general increase in expenses due to lack of attention.

I’m recognizing lifestyle creep and taking steps to counter it. This is a very hopeful and empowered place to be, and I’ll be sharing about different things I’m doing and how it’s working out for us.

Avivah

There’s a pithy phrase that was popularized in the WW2 era: ‘Waste not, want not’. There are so many resources available to us and when we look at them with a creative set of eyes, you’ll often find more life left in that item than you previously assumed. Do you need it, can you extend it, or can you upcycle it to use it differently?

Here are some examples:

———————————-

Food – Do you need to use the expensive ingredients listed in the recipe, or can less costly similar ingredients be substituted? Can you prepare less of the dish rather than be left with leftovers that end up being thrown away? Can you cut down on the frequency of meat meals, and integrate meatless meals during the week?

—————————————

Repurposing clothing – My son ripped the elbow of a high quality shirt that was in excellent condition. Patching that wouldn’t be doable or aesthetic, so I headed to YouTube to watch a video on how to turn a long-sleeved shirt into a short-sleeved shirt. It was the first time doing this for me and my first attempt wasn’t perfect, but it looks pretty good. Next my husband asked if I could do the same to a cufflink shirt of his; he now has two ‘new’ work shirts.

Another example: my boys are hard on pants, and I periodically recycle their ‘good’ pants to ‘work’ pants. That is almost always because they’ve ripped the knees. I patch them from behind using material from a pair of pants that I keep for this purpose, then reinforce the patch at the knees and the areas around it repeatedly so they’re very strong. I do it all with the same color thread as the pants, and this extends the life of them for a long time as work pants. They do a lot of hiking/biking, outdoor work and home repair work, so these pants get a lot of use.

————————————-

Spatula, a valuable frugal tool – Ds10 and ds5 and I made banana muffins yesterday. Ds10 wanted to taste the batter and I told him he could lick out the bowl when we finished. He was dismayed when I took out a spatula and ran it along the bowl, scraping out enough for two or three more muffins. He still got to lick the bowl but it didn’t have the generous amount leftover that he was hoping for! A spatula is a simple thing but it’s amazing how much you can get out of that can or container or bowl by scraping it with the spatula.

————————————-

Repurposing containers – At the same time that there’s a huge industry selling us storage containers to organize items in our homes, there are many free containers that come into the home that can be productively reused, reducing or eliminating the need to buy the ‘storage solutions’. Here in Israel when we buy screws and nails, they are sold from bulk bins and you bag the amount you want. So you don’t come home with a box for them. My husband recently was organizing the hardware and found that the peanut butter jars with screw on lids were perfect for keeping nails and screws organized well.

And then there’s the glass jars and bottles that store bought food comes in. I didn’t use to reuse them because I didn’t see the value of the recycled containers or cleaning them out seemed like too much work, but now have recognized how useful they can be! So now I reuse most of the glass jars that come into our home. If the jars have metal pop-top lids, I use them for canning. If not, I use them for storage.

Lately I’ve been saving glass grape juice bottles rather than recycle them – until now I’ve been storing our goat milk in recycled plastic water bottles, and while plastic has its advantages, glass is a healthier option for storing food.

—————————————————

Saving electricity – Electricity costs have gone up world-wide, and that’s motivated me to be more conscious of all the quiet leakage going on in our home. Though we hardly use air conditioning, we regularly have way more lights and ceiling fans on than we need. Someone leaves a room without turning off the light, then goes into the next room and turns on the light – and so it goes. I’ve begun asking our boys to be more conscious of this, and while I don’t go around all day long being the electricity police, I do turn off lights and fans that aren’t in use. I’ve explained to them there’s no use spending money on something that brings us no benefit; it’s just throwing money in the garbage.

Building supplies and natural resources – My son dug up a lot of dirt in the backyard when preparing to build a shed. He piled it to the side of the yard and left it while he was building the shed. Once the shed was done, it was time to find a place for this dirt. The easiest thing would have been to dump it. However, I wanted to build a raised garden bed, and it made no sense to dump it and then at a later time to dig up more dirt to fill the raised bed. We also had pallet wood in the spot that the shed was built that we needed to find a new home for, so I asked him to use the wood to build a garden bed. He built the raised bed using the pallet wood scraps, filled the bottom of the raised bed with more wood scraps hugelkultur style, and then dumped all the dirt on top. (Though the dirt is low quality fill dirt that will have to be actively enriched to be a decent growing medium, it was still worthwhile to do this.)

I’ve been looking for a rack to hang in the kitchen to organize brooms, dustpans and sponja sticks for ages. I know they exist but haven’t found one. Finally, I asked my husband if he could make something for me. Using a scrap of white painted wood (a castoff from another project), he attached hooks along the length of it. Then he screwed a wire ring into the end of the sponja stick so it could be hung; the brooms already had holes in the handles. Free, using what we already had in the house, and now my kitchen is better organized.

These are just some ideas to get you thinking creatively, not a complete list of things we’ve done. I could give you so many more examples – we do this regularly because it’s an extension of the way we think: to look for ways to use our resources wisely and responsibly. It’s particularly satisfying to create something useful from something that seemed destined for the garbage/recycling. And I also appreciate when we are able to put in the effort to maintain an item rather than replace it.

I do want to clarify that I don’t like clutter, so this doesn’t mean keeping a huge amount of stuff piled around. If it’s something I’m not likely to reuse, I rehome it as quickly as I can so it doesn’t take up space in my home.

Waste not, want not – there is abundance in using what you have wisely and well.

Do you have things you’ve done to recycle, upcycle or otherwise extend your resources? Please share your ideas in the comments for others to learn from!

Avivah