Canwest News Service
Convenience a casualty of tighter home budgets
As money gets scarcer, people stop paying others to do their household chores
By Joanne Sasvari, For Canwest News Service
Talk about an inconvenient truth.
A decade or so ago, when she was a consumer columnist in Vancouver, New York-based businesswoman Marlaina Gayle had a saying: "The most expensive thing you'll ever pay for is convenience."
If only we had listened to her then, we might not be in the mess we're in now, drowning in debt -- money squandered on things that made life oh-so-convenient.
We've been maxing out our credit cards on disposable fashion, restaurant meals and dry cleaning. We've been paying someone to wash the dog, clean the house and mind the kids. And we've been paying even more to store all the stuff we bought when we were on our spending spree.
If you haven't noticed the floodwaters of debt rising around your ankles, the person offering a cold splash of reality is Gail Vaz-Oxlade, host of the Slice television network's Til Debt Do Us Part.
"My philosophy is: You can have it all, you just can't have it all at the same time," the personal-finance expert says. "And what we have been doing in the past is having it all at the same time."
Money is a limited resource, Vaz-Oxlade notes. "You can run out of it. And if you have debt, you'll run out of it faster. If you have any consumer debt at all, your No. 1 priority has to be to pay off the debt."
Vaz-Oxlade has three basic rules: You cannot spend more than you make; you must save something; and you have to get the debt paid off -- and by "paid off" she means within three years, no matter what it takes to do it.
It's also time to start doing things for ourselves. Not so long ago, we didn't throw our socks out when they developed holes; we darned them. We didn't buy new shoes when our old ones looked shabby, we polished them and had a cobbler resole them. We didn't go for $5 lattes at breakfast and takeout sushi at lunch, we brought a Thermos and packed a sandwich. And we didn't drop our clothes off at the dry cleaners when they got wrinkled, we whipped out the iron and pressed them ourselves.
Photo: Gail Vaz-Oxlade is the host of Slice TV's Til Debt Do Us Part.
Now just the fact that she irons at all has turned Ontario home economist Mary Dobson into something of a celebrity.
"With the current economic climate, my focus lately has been back to basics," says Dobson, who appears on Citytv's CityLine. And she means really basic: how to make a bed, how to vacuum a house, how to wash your clothes and how to iron a shirt. "You'd think people would know, but they never learned."
Dobson is sensing a growing interest in practical homemaking skills.
"The more the economy starts to tighten up on us, the less people can be that free with their money," she says.
"You can pay people to do things for you, but when it comes down to it, it's five to seven minutes out of your day (to iron an outfit). It's a question of looking after what you have and making it last a bit longer."
There are good reasons we pay someone else to do what we used to do ourselves.
"Once upon a time there was a bread- winner in the family and the other person stayed home. There was a body on the ground managing life," Vaz-Oxlade says. "Then the dynamic changed because we wanted to buy more stuff, so we needed more money, so we sacrificed the guy on the ground managing life. Now we have to outsource everything that person used to do."
A change in attitude can be seen everywhere. Shoe sales may be down, but cobblers are reporting increased business, according to the Wall Street Journal. So are craft and fabric stores.
Families are taking up the old-school traditions of preserving produce, making bread, sausage and cheese, and planting herbs and vegetables -- because its fun, it's a great reason to get together and it pays off.
"I credit my '50s housewife style of cooking three meals a day from scratch with maintaining our lifestyle in New York," says Marlaina Gayle, who co-owns and manages a successful photography business in the Big Apple. "It's damn expensive to eat out. We like to do other things besides eat, like travel."
Dobson points out that taking care of your things can also be a pleasure all on its own.
"I'm quite passionate about it," she says. "I love fabric. I love what the whole process of ironing can do. In 30 years, I've never gotten tired of how nice a Ralph Lauren shirt can look before and after ironing."