Frugal Fatigue

Does my family have symptoms of Frugal Fatigue?
I've been mulling this over after coming across the term on the Colbert Report this week. Actually, Frugal Fatigue entered the popular lingo a while ago. Back in the run-up to Christmas shopping season, there was much excited talk among retailers hoping against hope that the average shopper was fed up with cutting back and ready to go crazy with the credit card again.
Did it happen? Well, there were a few reports of improvement in the Christmas sales figures. But MSN Money reported today that Wal-Mart is a little freaked out that it's same store sales are a bit down this quarter. Apparently, ever lower prices have not been enough to boost the buying power of the average customer.
So is Frugal Fatigue real, or is it just wishful thinking by retailers? Everyone knows the job and wage outlook hasn't improved. So are people like us just going to snap and spend into debt as a backlash against all that bean soup we've been eating?
Early stories made it sound like a sort of neurosis brought on by the steady drumbeat of layoffs, downsizings and pay cuts. This story describes it as an emotional response, a throwing up of the hands, maybe even a psychological disorder.
But if you've lived it, as our family has, you'll understand that the slight uptick in spending--against all wage and unemployment figures--is not emotional at all. Nor is it just more evidence that our generation is selfish and unable to control its impulses to overspend.
For most of us, the recession didn't start when the stock market fell in 2008. That crash was just the thing that made powers that be take it seriously. Here are a few other things driving small spending upticks that have nothing to do with hysterical self indulgence:

Things break, don't they... Our family, like many others, has been cutting back steadily for most of the 2000s. Pay may have gone up a little, but it's been offset by the fact that we're paying more out of our own pockets for benefits like health insurance and for sending our kids to college.
For us, that means driving our cars until the cost of fixing them exceeds the cost of a new one. When one car was towed off to the Salvation Army, we just didn't replace it. As appliances and furniture aged and wore out, we made Band-Aid type repairs that cost the least. When glassware broke, as it inevitably does, we replaced it at the church garage sale.
But you can't go on like this indefinitely. Sooner or later, it will just be stupid to call the repairman again for that major appliance with the ominous smoke coming out of it. You could do all the dishes by hand, sure, or take your clothes to the laundromat. But you need that time to be finding paying work.

Frugality is not the same as scrimping...although the two terms are often interchangeable in news stories. Frugality is a choice to live within your means. Scrimping, on the other hand, is something you're forced to do to get by. Not even my grandparents, who lived through the Great Depression, expected they'd always have to make clothes out of flour sacks. They were scrimping until times got better. Once that happened, they spent with a vengeance, disdaining things like canned tuna and macaroni.
In either case, though, you expect a reward of some kind, otherwise what's the point? You get by on a little less so one day, you can afford that sparkling new toaster oven, or the new DVD player. It's that little reward that, oftentimes, keeps you going.

Your not getting any younger, and neither are your kids...When you've been cutting back as long as we have, you wake up one day and realize your kids are only going to be at home for a little while longer. Maybe you believed a sport or music lessons would help your kids do better in life. You can't tell them to wait until the economy turns around in 10 more years. They need the sports camp or the upgraded instrument now. Unless you want to be remembered as the parents who made empty promises.
Or, let's say you're in your 50s, worked hard and lived without the things everyone else enjoyed because you didn't want the debt. Then you suddenly find yourself with a 50 percent pay cut or even unemployed. With ageism as rampant as it is, can you hope to ever make up what you've lost in the time you have left on earth? You could continue to scrimp, I suppose. But if you dip into your savings once for a little fun, does that make you a selfish Boomer brat? I don't think so.

So Frugal Fatigue? Well, we're fatigued, definitely. And we're frugal.
But that doesn't make us silly.