Surviving the New Depression, or "Brother, can you spare a dime?"

My mother was an Okie, the daughter of a country preacher from Oklahoma who lost the family farm in the Dust Bowl and became a migrant farm worker. Her parents lived through the Depression and survived the migration West to Bakersfield.

I remember her stories about getting by on very little: when she had an earache, her mother would pee into a spoon and pour it into her ear: they could not afford to see a doctor, and this was how you cured an earache on your own back then. (As a side note, a later study indicated this remedy did actually work, due to some compound contained in women's urine.)

As a mother in Marin County in the 70's, she still held onto traces of this Depression-era, Dust Bowl frugality. If she got a run in a leg of her pantyhose, she would cut it off at the line at the top of the thigh, and keep it. She often left the house wearing beneath her pantsuit two pairs of one-legged pantyhose, her abdomen double-armored by control-top nylon. She kept a jar of buttons, even though I only ever saw her replace a missing button once in my entire childhood.

I did not know until I was 17 that chili was something thick and rich, like a stew. My mother used to open the family-sized can of Dennison's chili, spoon it into a pot, fill the empty can to the brim with water, and add that to the pot, stirring to make what I would now call "chili soup." Back then, though, as far as I knew, this was how chili was intended to be made and eaten. My first taste of unadulterated chili was shocking: too rich, too solid, and far too greasy.

My mother was simply trying to stretch the food as far as it would go, even though we were not in any danger of being poor. I looked down on these tendencies of my mother, in all my teenaged self-obsession and arrogance. Now, I am revisiting my memories, calling my mother for tips, and finding my own ways of stretching a dollar.

Things are tight, and by all accounts, they are going to get significantly worse before they get better. We're all going to have to change how we live our lives in ways that even just last year would have seemed unimaginable.

I am going to write a series of blog posts on this topic, to share what I am doing to save money and make it through what some are calling the New Depression. I've already posted a short piece about the economics of making soymilk at home. I will be transforming my front yard into a victory garden, and planting my back yard with as many edibles as I can possibly fit back there, and will write about those efforts as they happen.

This piece is on the first major, money-saving step I decided to take: Cancelling cable.

Decision: Getting rid of cable. Savings: $75 a month.

Many of you will probably react to this idea in the following way: No. No! Getting rid of cable? An impossibility! What will my kids do? I may have to give up many things, but they will have to pry my TV remote from my cold, dead, starved hands! This was certainly my reaction for a long time. Then I did the math, and looked at the way technology works now. $75 a month for basic cable + the HBO package is $900 a year. Nine hundred dollars. That is a fairly significant expense. $900 could go a long way towards offsetting the increase in food prices, paying the heating bills this winter, or just to go into savings for real emergencies.

I learned that I can watch full episodes of current seasons of a lot of my favorite shows online-- for free. YouTube has all the Project Runways. Hulu has House. ABC online shows the new Boston Legal episodes.

We also have the "DVD library" phenonomenon that so many of us and our families have adopted in recent years. We collect hundreds of movies, just to have them. I owned maybe 80 movies on tape and DVD, collected over time. My sister has hundreds of them, shelves full of them, some still in the original shrink wrap, and few of them watched more than once...AND she has cable.

OK, I said. I'll get rid of my cable service, but just for a short period of time, as an experiment. If I want to watch a movie, I will put on one of the movies I've already spent money to buy. All those "Special Edition" DVDs with the audio commentaries and additional features that I spent extra money on? I'll actually watch the extra features and see the movie again with the commentary running.

When I run out of those, I'll borrow movies from my sister's extensive collection; better yet, I'll go over there and watch them with her, to throw a little "family bonding" into the mix. If I have to watch a show "live," I'll go watch it at her house. For those few shows I cannot live without, I'll just buy them used from Amazon Marketplace for around $20 a season, and still come out ahead.

I cut the cable cord at the beginning of July. Six months later, I have saved an astonishing (t0 me) $450, and have not missed having all those TV shows and movies on tap. My fiancé and I still watch our movies and TV shows, and don't feel media-deprived in the slightest. Better yet, sometimes we leave the TV off and accomplish things with that time instead. Catch up on all those magazine subscriptions. Work on a motorcycle repair project in the garage. Listen to music. We sometimes even...read.

Even without the coming economic storm, surely we don't ALL need to have full cable packages in our individual homes and apartments. Can't we go see a friend or family member who has cable, and watch a show with them? Would it be so bad to bring a movie you own over to your mother's house and spend the afternoon with her? There is still time to rent free movies from the library (while we still have libraries). We can watch full, new episodes of your favorite shows online for free. Then there are our long-neglected books. Beautiful, stirring, and entertaining literature, just waiting for us to remember it exists.

With all these resources, and saving close to a thousand dollars a year, is it really that much of a deprivation to cancel your cable, if only for a couple of years until things start to look up?

Try it. You'll thank me.

_{Tips gratefully accepted, for those so moved}.