Yesterday when I got our Feb. 29 issue of The New Yorker, I flipped through the articles and turned first to Nick Paumgarten's, "The Scold: Mr Money Mustache's retirement (sort of) plan."
I realized right away that this was one we had to share together, so I handed it to John and how we did laugh. We have our own funny stories of thrift that didn't turn out right, and we go along with the blogger's philosophy, though we certainly are not as religious as he is.
Like Paumgarten, author of the article, we are fans of duct tape. Our vehicle and my most comfortable hiking boots are proof.
Paumgarten writes this:
"On his blog, Peter Adeney presents thrift as liberation rather than as deprivation."
The article is as funny as it is serious, Paumgarten admitting that he also has "some tightwad cred. I’m a thermostat despot, with holes in my sweaters and duct-tape patches on my winter gear. I reuse paper towels and aluminum foil. But I also have a mortgage, a cable-TV subscription. . . ."
[Blogger Adeney's] goals, he says, are: 1. “To make you rich so you can retire early”; 2. “To make you happy so you can properly enjoy your early retirement”; and 3. “To save the whole Human Race from destroying itself through overconsumption of its habitat.” The blog, which he started five years ago, is really an attack on consumerism and waste—a theology of conservation—
disguised as a personal-finance advice column.
Not everything has gone well for Adeney. "There was a thirty-dollar mistake, back in 2010: [He] built a rig for a storage box attached to the rear of his Scion hatchback, but the heat of the muffler melted a hole in the box. He modified the design, then wrote about it on his blog. The post, called “Turning a Little Car Into a Big One,” was an ode to the ingenuity of his storage box and to the underlying good sense behind owning a cheap, small, fuel-efficient automobile. He left out the bit about the muffler."
