John Rubino is a former Wall Street financial analyst and author or co-author of five books, including The Money Bubble: What to Do Before It Pops and Clean Money: Picking Winners in the Green-Tech Boom. He founded the popular financial website DollarCollapse.com in 2004, sold it in 2022, and now publishes John Rubino’s Substack newsletter.
Obviously, one of the best ways to prepare for hard times is to avoid unnecessary spending in good times. So being able to do that across an entire lifestyle might be considered a core prepping skill.
Charles Hugh Smith just posted an essay on this concept. Here’s an excerpt:
I ended last week’s essay with these two lines: A hard rain is going to fall, and we serve our best interests by preparing for the coming storm. The core skill going forward–frugality–is largely a forgotten skillset.
So let’s examine frugality.
Conspicuous waste is part and parcel of conspicuous consumption, which is a signifier of wealth and status. The more one wastes, the higher the status, as waste implies “I’m so rich, I can waste as much as I want.”
This reach for status by consuming (and wasting) more is the engine of the waste is growth Landfill Economy.
In good times, when jobs, stock market/real estate gains and credit are all plentiful, even those with average income earn enough to waste money. Even though we complain about the high cost of food now, there is little evidence that we’re no longer wasting up to 40% of the food we buy / order out.
In a deep, prolonged recession, jobs, gains and credit become scarce, and so we have less to spend, and so frugality–eliminating waste–is either incentivized or imposed by necessity: forced frugality.
(So you wanna be a writer/artist/musician? First take a vow of extreme poverty / frugality.)
Frugality has another source: the desire to save income to invest in long-term goals via careful planning and shopping. It’s well established that the difference between “rich” and “poor” in middle income brackets is deferred gratification, the ability to defer consumption today (instant gratification) to serve long-range goals, such as buying a house or saving for a child’s education.
There is a third source of frugality: genetics. Some of us are naturally frugal by nature, others naturally profligate, others in between. What others consider normal–throwing out the leftover rice because eating leftovers is for poor people–is absolute anathema to us.
Others mock those of us who save plastic bags and rubber bands, while for us it’s second nature: why throw something away that can be re-used? We save random screws in a jar (a real treasure for handy people), smoothed out wrapping paper and scraps of wood. Composting kitchen waste is second nature. And so on. (You want to see my collections of stubby pencils, bent nails and plastic bags?)
The frugal take great pride in our frugality–the more extreme, the worthier it is of admiration. Here are few recent examples of my “fix it rather than buy a new one” repairs:
Low-quality toaster handle broke off, replaced with a drywall screw and duct tape.
Low-quality cutting board fell apart, repaired with a bit of glue and a throwaway bamboo chopstick (of course I save those… look how handy they are.)
For most people, the main cause of waste is simple ignorance. We don’t know how to fix a toaster, so we toss it and buy a new one.
This brings us back to the concept of “skill stacking.” The more skills we acquire, the more things we can fix, and the more frugal we become. The money thus saved frees up time to acquire more skills, and so on. See Skill Stacking, Part 1: Handymen Will Inherit the Earth.
For an idea of where this positive feedback loop leads, spend a little time with a farmer. I know a few and am always shocked by the difference between them and typical “symbol manipulator” professionals. Farmers know how all their machines work and view replacement as a distant last resort. A 50-year-old tractor is a status symbol because it’s proof of the owner’s competence, while new equipment is, at least in part, an admission of the owner’s failure to maintain the old gear.
Few of us ever reach that level of competence/frugality, but we should all be heading that way at our own speed.
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