You probably won’t believe me, but I’ve had some of the best times of my life when I was poor. Sure, they’re tough times, but if you use them correctly they can make you more creative and help you build character besides. And believe me, I know all about that (well, not the character building – more the creativity). I’m a writer, after all, and it is part of a writer’s fate to by poor at least some of the time.
Heck, it can even be a bonding experience when you go through this experience together with other people. I’ve found that I got very close to other people who were trying to find ways save money. Quite a few of them I still talk to today. So don’t see poverty as a problem, see it instead as an opportunity to try out new things and establish a new balance.
So what did I do to make ends meet?
We got creative with food and drink
You don’t have to pay for all of your food, you know. Nature offers a whole host of foods that are delicious if you know where to look and what to get. For example, this wonderful elderberry champagne is ridiculously easy to make and all you need besides the elderberry, is a bit of sugar and water from the tap! Similarly, you can brew your own beer quite easily, if you need to indulge but don’t have the money for it.
Also, there are a lot of plants that you can grab in the forests. For example, when its blackberry season you can walk away with literally buckets of the things, ready to eat or turn into marmalade. I got the recipe down so well that I even managed to sell a few jars. And this was before the times when everything had to be ‘all natural’, so imagine what you could ask for them now? Some other foods include dandelions (yes, the yellow things), mulberries and even pine needles (Which make quite a nice tea). Want to take it a step further? Grow an organic garden! You can even sell the produce.
We got creative with where I went
You don’t have to go to bars, clubs, pubs or cafes. There are plenty of other events to attend that are free. Most cities have guides about free opportunities. We would just pack some food and bring a thermostat of strong tea and make a day of it. If the event was no good, we’d just sit outside and talk about the people we saw.
I also made it a habit of knowing about all the gallery openings. You just had to make sure your clothes were suitably artsy looking and you could go right in and have a glass of wine while trying to figure out if they’d hung the paintings upside down or if they were supposed to look that way.
And now there are websites as well. Meetup.com lets you find or launch events that people in your neighborhood are attending. That way you can enjoy hanging out with other people without running up the expenses of having to go somewhere.
We got creative with our time
You know what day I loved when I was poor? Big garbage day! That was when everybody put all their big items outside that they didn’t want anymore. I’d go around and find things that could possibly still be repaired and then took them home with me to try and repair them. The trick is: Just don’t be afraid to fail. After all, if I failed then what did it matter? People were going to throw that stuff out anyway. While if I succeeded I’d just got a piece of furniture for free! Even better, I’d built it. And in some ways my connection with those items was therefore stronger than with the stuff I’d bought.
Also, we played board games – ones we’d made with our own hands. I made a chess set. Yes, the pieces kept falling over, but it looks cool, the way all the pieces were wonky and strange. We also made a monopoly board. We just found a copy of the cards and wrote them with felt tip on a deck of playing cards. For money we used index cards and then spend the entire game creating cool designs around the numbers and coloring them in while we were waiting for the other people to play.
We got smart
If you see it as a challenge rather than an obstacle, nothing quite focuses the mind or brings out your creativity as being broke. How far can I make this dollar stretch? What could we do to save money here? It became a game to us, to see who could come up with the most creative ways to live a bit cheaper and in that we found common cause and we turn poverty from a grind into a character building adventure.