 We arrived from France at the beginning of 2001 with a clear mission: to prepare for my husband’s retirement. With a 3-year contract in the pocket, our goal was simple: save, save and save. Having been promoted to the role of “finance manager”, I set out to implement our plan. Checking and saving accounts were openned, a budget was made out, expenses were tightly controlled and carefully tracked on Excel. Our sense of achievement mounted with each dollar saved, and my husband started dreaming about the lie-ins he would indulge in and the vegetables he would grow when he retired. I, for my part, had a job to go back to and was enjoying my 3-year break before getting back to the grind. |
| We constantly commented, smugly, on the appallingly high level of consumerism we could observe around us. Everyone seems to be affected by a spending virus, no doubt brought on by the constant advertising dispensed over the TV, radio, magazines, even the Internet. We were, of course, smarter than most: with a reasonable rent for a reasonable-size townhouse, a single pre-owned car that we bought cash, no credit card and our teenager in public school, we had managed to keep overheads very low and savings very high. I made sure we bought our clothes on sale and our food wholesale. Our single indulgence was to enroll our daughter in private day care two days a week, so that she could learn English. |
| I don’t really know how it happened but slowly, the spending virus wormed its way into our life too. |
| I started to meet people and enrolled in various activities. I was out a lot. Of course my husband wanted to keep track of my whereabouts, so there came the cell phone. |
| Ben walked to the metro everyday but I didn’t. I felt the urge to exercise. So I joined a gym. |
| Our life was made difficult because we lacked a credit history. So we got a credit card. |
| Then came 9/11. In order for us to keep in touch in case of another such emergency – I had tried to get hold of my husband for hours that day without success – the cell phone counts in our family jumped from one to three. |
| Of course, the new, and bigger, house we moved into at the end of 2001 did not have good TV reception, so we connected to the cable. |
| Four years later, we are still in the US. My husband’s retirement dreams have been postponed for another five or six years. We now have three cars, three cell phones, three TVs, two computers, two cameras, a camcorder, a house we bought, a new bathroom, new wood floors, new windows and our daughter attends a private school. |
| And yes, it’s all necessary. My husband does not take the metro anymore but drives to work in his new car. After all, he deserves a treat, doesn’t he? He works 50 hours a week, why should he stand in the freezing cold or driving rain waiting for his bus everyday? We have all joined the gym – the three adults in the family – so that we could “do things together”. It tripled the monthly fee, no need to say. Remodeling the house was a no-brainer: everybody knows we’ll recoup the money when we sell. The TVs came because with two kids, my husband and I never had access to the remote controls. We now have a TV safely tucked away in our bedroom. A computer is a necessity in our technology driven society, everybody knows this (did I mention High-speed Internet?). The laptop was a gift from my husband who wanted me to be able to write anywhere and anytime. And so the list goes on. |
| Until a few weeks ago. |
| When, on a split-second decision, we bought a brand new car while we had decided only a few days before that we would wait for another year. |
| When it took us 30 minutes to get approval for a loan that would eat away nearly $600 of our savings every month for the next three years. |
| As I looked at our shiny seven-seat SUV– did I mention there were just three of us now in our family?—I thought: “This is just too much.” |
| I have always believed ourselves to be detached from material possessions, not greedy at all, but now I have my doubts. Questions roll in my mind. |
| Do we really need all this? Are we not putting an unnecessary financial burden on ourselves? What are we teaching our kids? What example are we giving them? What about our big saving plans? |
| I think of Ben’s family barely scratching a living from parched fields in Zimbabwe and I feel embarrassed by all we have. |
| “But we help them too,” I remind myself, in hope of relieving the guilt. |
| “Yes,” I continue, “but couldn’t we do far more if we had a simpler life?” |
| In one of my many soul searching moments, I wonder how we got sucked into this consumer world we so dislike. |
| Did we succumb to the power of advertising? Is it peer pressure? Or is it just the society we live in? Everybody just has things. There’s nothing outrageous in having three cell phones, or joining the gym or having three cars. Most people do. It may have felt outrageous to us when we first arrived but not anymore. We’ve blended in, subconsciously accepting as normal all the gadgets, technological gimmicks and luxuries that have no other merit than to make our life easier, our bank account slimmer and local businesses richer. |
| So I am left with my quandary. To accept our new lifestyle, and give up some of our goals and to some extent, some of our dreams, or go back to a more Spartan life, and swim against the tide. |
| In my dream, I see an old stone house, surrounded by mountains but facing a valley. I see red tiles and red shutters, a lazy cat by the front door. Downstairs, just one large room with a fireplace in the center. It is our kitchen, dining room, sitting room and office all in one. Upstairs, two bedrooms. There is a yard at the back where Ben grows tomatoes, zucchini and green beans and also keeps chickens. I stay home, write a lot, cook a little, may be tutor a kid or two. We take turns to drive our daughter to school, are always available to help her with her homework. No rushing around, fighting the crowds in the metro or the traffic on the beltway. Friends and family come to visit at the week-ends. We savor long meals on the sunny terrace. We have a modest income from our savings and investments, but it’s enough. Our life is simple, we are content. |
| A dream against a stack of bills. What would you do? |
| I think I’ll start by selling the car… |
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