By Dolores Kong
Originally published by The Boston Globe, May 7, 2000
Penny Yunuba gave up a $70,000-a-year job in computer sales a decade ago and now chooses to live on less than $10,000 a year, shopping at thrift stores when her clothes get too frayed, buying groceries in bulk, and furnishing her Jamaica Plain home with hand-me-downs.
Nancy Stockford and her family downsized from a house to a condo in Dorchester and slashed other expenses, too, so that they get by with spending under $30,000 a year. Her husband just quit his part-time job, yet they’ve been able to save more than ever toward a college fund for their 9-year-old daughter.
And Stephen TenBarge socks away 60 percent of his income as an accountant at a Boston venture capital firm after having once led a typical young urban professional lifestyle, spending “all the money that I earned and then some.”
All three of these Boston residents are practitioners of a lifestyle trend called “voluntary simplicity.” They’re choosing to spend less money in order to be financially independent, so that they won’t need to work just for a paycheck and can spend more time doing things they truly love.
They’re not being frugal for frugality’s sake, just to amass a million dollars one day. The concept runs deeper than that: They’re living substantially below their means so they can do meaningful work, even if it’s volunteer or low-paying; save for a college education; or leave the rat race early. Along the way, many practitioners of voluntary simplicity also have an increasing interest in protecting the environment or addressing social injustice.
While it seems almost un-American in these booming economic times not to spend, spend, spend or strive to make loads of money, people who follow voluntary simplicity point to Benjamin Franklin’s saying “a penny saved is a penny earned,” Thoreau’s “Walden,” and the notion of Yankee frugality as evidence of how American it is to live simply.
The phrase “voluntary simplicity,” first coined in a philosophical journal in 1936, was popularized in 1981 by Duane Elgin’s book Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life that Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich
Then Your Money or Your Life
In fact, voluntary simplicity became so popular, especially after the stock market crash of 1987, that the Trends Research Institute identified it “as becoming a national movement,” said Gerald Celente, director of the Rhinebeck, N.Y., group that analyzes trends for corporations. “By about 2010, upward of 25 percent of the population will be practicing it in one form or another,” he predicted.
“We’re looking at the evolution of a philosophical shift that’s about to take place in society,” said Celente, who includes the voluntary simplicity movement in his bestselling book “Trends 2000.” “People are getting more philosophical. `What’s my purpose in life?’ It’s bigger than money.”
Indeed, various national and international surveys have found a growing unease among people, even if they make good money and have all their material desires met. In 1995, a Merck Family Fund report titled “Yearning for Balance” estimated that millions of Americans had voluntarily scaled back their salaries and lifestyles to achieve a more balanced, less stressful life.
In a survey of more than 200 voluntary simplifiers from 40 states and nine countries, author Linda Breen Pierce found that about a quarter of the respondents scaled back out of worry about money or stress, and that people who have done so range across all income groups, from making less than $10,000 to more than $100,000. The results are in her book “Choosing Simplicity.”
It’s easy to start. You don’t have to take a vow of poverty to simplify; basic steps such as bringing lunch to work or not buying that daily cup of coffee can mean big savings over the long term.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the millennium. In the mid- to late ’90s, the stock market went into the stratosphere. Everybody has been spending like there’s no tomorrow and thinking mostly about the money.
Author Eisenson, a voluntary simplicity proponent for about 15 years, said: “When times are tough – which they aren’t right now – more people seem to think what I say makes sense. Now they look at me like I have three heads and say, `Why do you want to live like that?”‘
While trend watcher Celente said the booming stock market has slowed the voluntary simplicity movement, he’s still predicting that a quarter of the population will practice voluntary simplicity in some form by 2010.
“We won’t see a resurgence of voluntary simplicity until there’s a severe stock market correction or a recession,” he said. “Voluntary simplicity right now is stalled. It’s not dead.”
Keeping the movement alive in the meantime are Yunuba, Stockford, TenBarge, and more than 100 other locals who have participated in “Your Money or Your Life” study groups since they began meeting in Massachusetts a couple of years ago. The groups meet for eight weeks and examine the nine-step program outlined in the book, learning to budget, watch their expenses, and figure out what they truly care about.
The groups also have regular potluck dinners, open to everyone, to talk about such issues as “enoughness” and otherwise seek out like-minded, voluntary simplifiers. Recently, people in their 20s with tens of thousands of dollars in higher education loans have been coming to the dinners, according to Yunuba, who has hosted some of the gatherings.
As Yunuba, 59, sat in the living room of the Jamaica Plain two-family house she bought two decades ago, wearing a thrift-store outfit of frayed sweatshirt and corduroy pants, she cheerfully pointed to all the furniture she’s received as hand-me-downs – a Bentwood rocker, a side table, and an uncomfortable but intriguing-looking “dragon chair” carved out of dark wood and padded with a home-made red cushion.
Yunuba gave up her $70,000-a-year job a decade ago after her youngest child left home, and chooses to live on less than $10,000 a year. She has nearly $200,000 in long-term money invested in US Treasury securities, socially responsible mutual funds, bonds, and certificates of deposit.
She now volunteers as state coordinator for “Your Money or Your Life” study groups, works about 20 hours a month for a nonprofit in exchange for health insurance, and gets income from rental property.
Nancy Stockford, 39, of Dorchester, and her family don’t go as far as Yunuba. Stockford continues to work as an administrator at a nonprofit grant-making foundation because she enjoys her job, although her husband, Mark Houston, 43, just quit his part-time job. Their daughter Eva is “a pretty discriminating 9-year-old,” Stockford said, and doesn’t want the latest toys or clothing being advertised.
While they weren’t struggling financially in the early 1990s, when they were living in a big house and Stockford first read “Your Money or Your Life,” “we had a fair amount of debt and no savings whatsoever,” she said. Today, after selling the house and squeezing into a 1,000-square-foot condo and making other changes, “we really do save money,” about a third of their income.
“It’s definitely possible with a child. We definitely don’t suffer. If we go out to eat, we eat in very cheap places. We take maybe one trip in a plane a year, to visit my sister in Florida,” Stockford said.
TenBarge, 37, the accountant who now saves 60 percent of his income, said in the past, like most people, “I always felt like I just wasn’t making enough, no matter what it was.” But when he read “Your Money or Your Life,” “it was sort of like an epiphany. There is a way to set yourself up so you can retire early.” Among the steps he’s taken: Instead of eating out twice a week like he used to, he now goes out only twice a month.
While he likes his job and works for a good firm, “there are things that I want to do with my life that I just can’t do with a full-time job,” TenBarge said. He wants to address issues of economic inequality, and get involved in the community. He volunteers once a week at a soup kitchen sponsored by Neighborhood Action Inc. at St. John the Evangelist Church on Beacon Hill, but eventually he’d like to do that kind of work full time.
Voluntary simplicity is “the best thing I could have done with my life,” he said. “I’m very excited about the future. I’m very excited about the journey that I’m on to attain my goals.”
Dr. Gregg Raymond, also 37, was able to walk away from a $100,000-a-year job as an internist in Boston, after having “lived like a student when I started making good money as a physician” and saving enough to lead the kind of life he wants. He just bought a house in Maine, paying with cash, and he plans to grow vegetables and walk and bicycle wherever he can. He’s passionate about environmental issues and plans to spend some of his time on that.
While he may continue to practice medicine part time, he said he would do it out of love and not for the money. He has saved enough so that he can live off the income of his socially responsible investments.
“This is giving me the freedom to just do what my heart is calling me to do.”