Starting over

My mother is the most frugal woman on the planet. I'm not talking about coupon-clipping, order-only-water-at-restaurants frugal. I'm talking drop-her-in-the-city-of-your-choice-with-$20-and-she'll-survive-for-a-month frugal. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of her making deposits at the bank for what seemed like hours, my brothers and I begging her for 5 cents to get a cup of water from the doughnut shop opposite the bank (they charged not for the water but for the paper cup), and her refusing us and telling us to wait til we get home. Rumor has it that she went into labor with my younger brother while checking out at the grocery store and drove home before heading to the hospital so the ice cream she'd just bought wouldn't melt and be ruined.

I was brought up this way, and I used to be good at it. I remember my first year of university, living in a 2-bedroom apartment with four of us and somehow getting by on $400 for 2 months. I remember priding myself on an entire outfit costing less than $15. 

But somewhere I've lost the ability to function this way, and I've been hemorrhaging money for the last five years, spending it as soon as I earn it. Part of that must have been living life on the road, part of it must have been certain lifestyle niceties encouraged by Big American TV Show I worked on, and the cycle of deprivation-overabundance-deprivation-overabundance. But what it comes down to is this: I need to make a change here and rediscover that lost art of living cheap. It's good timing, because I've just spent a lot of money moving to a new country, and am trying to settle myself in LA. There seems no time like the present to figure out how to do this...

Enter this blog, in which I intend to document my adventures in living thrifty in LA. I plan to cook most of my meals, find ways to exercise cheaply without joining a gym (or use Groupons I guess), teach myself to fix things that break, figure out ways to make a little extra cash on the side and generally find ways to have fun for free. I want to feel better about my finances by the end of this year than I do now, Christmas and all!

So we shall see how we go...