Co-operative buying
picture by NatalieMaynor
Our family have been co-operatively buying organic fruit, veg and groceries for six years now. People often ask me why we buy co-operatively.
Well, first of all, because it offers us more choice. Supermarkets control the supply of specified varieties of fruits and vegetables. It might seem like there is plenty of choice, but really, only a limited selection of what is available ends up in the supermarket fruit and veg section. If you prefer to buy organic fruit and vegetables the selection can be even more limited and produce may be of inferior quality. So buying directly from the distributor, or the fresh food market, or the farmer, gives us access to a greater variety of fresher, produce in season.
Second of all, co-operative buying offers less choice. The impulse to buy a packet of chocolate biscuits or a tub of Maggie Beer ice-cream is eliminated when you shop from a spreadsheet. Less choice keeps it short and simple. I can shop for my staples in the space of five minutes and be done with it until I collect my box a few days later.
We buy co-operatively with a network of like-minded friends. Not all friends participate in the same co-ops. Our most formal co-operative is structured as a not-for-profit association and supplies us with the majority of our fresh food, bread, dairy and packaged grocery items. We have a bank account and we use a roster system to manage the running of the co-op. Our co-op buys fortnightly and we take turns to gather and box up each others’ individual orders.
In the off week I buy our other groceries in bulk; things like toilet paper, cleaning products and the packaged breakfast cereals we’ve become addicted to.
On a quarterly basis, we open the co-op to a wider network to buy fresh organic flours, grains and spices, seeds for sprouting and assorted baking staples.
Through yet another network of friends, our family buys bulk organic meat, direct from the farmer.
It sounds complicated, and for those who love their conveniences, maybe it is. But to have a superior organic product for a cheaper price is worth it. There are other benefits too.
Our distributor complimented us saying that we’re one of the longest lasting co-operatives he’s known. Many co-operatives come and go. It can be hard for a group of people to come to consensus on decisions, and get along as well. How is that we’ve managed to exist for these past six years?
Keeping a co-operative together requires some strict rules, and quite a few bendy ones. It demands good communication of every member, and sometimes that can be hard to facilitate. It requires a sense of ownership and accountability. And it helps to be punctual and keep commitments. Goodness, why would anyone want to buy co-operatively if it requires so much personal investment?
Good question.
I find co-operative buying such a life-enriching way to shop. We’re not dependent on the major supermarket chains for our dietary choices, and we feel like we’re part of a community of people who care about where their food comes from. We’ve become familiar with each others’ families, watched each others’ children grow and shared some really good, and frustrating, times. In equal measure.
Maybe I secretly yearn for the village green, and a way of life that is more connected to the immediate environment. I don’t believe life is to be lived in isolation from my neighbours. Maybe this social way of buying fills a personal need that modern supermarkets, and their anonymous shoppers, can’t fulfil. And maybe it gives me that modicum of additional control over who gets my shopper dollar, and maybe I like having that power.
June 27th, 2010 - Posted in consumerism, community, sustainability, ritual, wisdom, friendship, money | | 0 Comments
Conspicuous consumption
picture by permanently scatterbrained
Cars slow down on our street to check out the progress on our front yard landscaping. It’s a big job, including a swimming pool and a kabana-type shelter. I know what they’re thinking. They’re wondering how much it is costing to build this monster and where we got the money from in this economic climate. They’re probably figuring out whether we’ve met before, at the neighbourhood Christmas party maybe, or perhaps our kids go to the same school. Even worse, we probably have, they probably do, and I don’t remember their names. And they don’t like us anymore.
These things are so simple for my husband. He works hard, we both agree, so he should be able to spend the money however he sees fit, knowing it will enhance our family time, provide a place to engage with our community, be an asset for our lifestyle. “Imagine us years into the future,” he assures me, “having our family around us.”
Of course, I come at it from a different angle, worried that we’re wasting our season ticket to the local community pool, that we won’t have the pleasure of bumping into (or making) friends there anymore, that the kids will get ’soft’ and be unable to swim in the local creeks with their friends where the rocks are slimy and scary-but-harmless creatures lurk below the surface. I worry that people will make assumptions about our family and our lifestyle and I’m worried that those assumptions might turn out to be correct. What happened to our goal to live simply, frugally, and maintain a small footprint? Shouldn’t we be chopping wood for our combustion stove so we can bake the bread before tending the composting toilet?
But it hasn’t turned out that way. It seems like, in order to live frugally, we need to spend money upgrading this or that appliance to a higher energy rating, getting more solar panels, even a back-up battery system for power outages (because the power does go out regularly here). I get terribly confused about what is reasonable consumption for a human being in a single life-time and whether we are setting our family up to feel entitled to consume. Or is the infrastructure we’re creating (swimming pool and all) a way for the next generation to not consume as we once did, because everything we need to live well is already here? I dunno. It just doesn’t come in black and white.
Eilleen from Consumption Rebellion doesn’t seem to have these dilemmas. She lives a beautiful life with so much less. When she was deliberating about needing/wanting a new digital camera and a new mobile phone, I was like, “Honey, you can do both.” But that’s not the point. The point is to consume conscientiously - and a big part of that word ‘conscientiously’ is ‘conscience’; that part of me from which my crisis originates.
If ‘frugal’ is a lifestyle I’ll admit, this isn’t it.
May 22nd, 2010 - Posted in partnership, consumerism, play, beliefs, wisdom, money, self-care | | 8 Comments
External validation
picture by hapticflapjack
I didn’t think I needed it, but it’s so very nice to have. It answers all my questions about whether I’m being indulgent with my writing hobby, going back to uni and all, or whether I have a talent I can somehow develop. Never before, in my tertiary learning, have I achieved a high distinction in my assessment. Not ever. But now I have. Not just once, but twice! Yes, I do feel validated.
During high school I managed, now and then, to get a high mark in my subjects but overall, I’ve always been a pass-grade kinda girl. On my report cards, teachers would often comment that the potential was there, but unfulfilled. Now at least I know I have excellence in me. And now at least I know that I’m not throwing good money at a fantasy. If I’d got pass marks this semester, I might have doubted my decision to turn things around and go back to school. I mean, really. What was I thinking?
So now that I’ve achieved that elusive high distinction, the expectations I hold for myself have inevitably been jacked a notch or two higher than they were before. Where I might have been satisfied with a passing grade, I now won’t be satisfied with anything less than my very best work. I think that’s a good thing and I’m feeling very grateful right now. And very motivated to keep writing and raising that bar.
November 12th, 2009 - Posted in personal growth, gratitude, happiness, money | | 2 Comments
Debt-free (very nearly)
picture by f2b1610
Quality of life and personal growth go hand in hand with financial stability. We can’t live on a negative or subsistence income, with no emergency fund, compounding more and more debt, and also compounding the stress and in-authenticity that goes along with that lifestyle.
Add to that the fact that women tend to be less financially literate than men. Well, we do tend to make the daily spending decisions for our families, but we also earn less compared to men and have interrupted careers due to having and raising babies. We also tend to work in more casual and part-time jobs that see us ignoring or under-paying superannuation, yet having to make those meagre savings stretch because we live longer! Famed Aussie financial advisor and Chairman of the Financial Literacy Foundation Advisory Board, Paul Clitheroe, wrote in his 2008 report Financial Literacy - Women Understanding Money that while women tend to be good at budgeting and saving, they lack confidence in their ability to manage money long term and plan for their retirement. I count myself in that category too. When my husband wants to talk financial planning my eyes glaze over and I hear blah, blah, blah. It is only through his persistence that I dare to blog about it now.
Yep, money is a biggie, and I’ve blogged about it before. I’ve come a long way and we now live very nearly debt-free and there is real peace of mind in knowing that no matter how bad the economy gets, we have a roof over our head and a means of sustaining our family that, excluding natural disaster, cannot easily be disrupted.
For us, it all began at the age of twenty-one, with a one-week money diary that helped us identify just how much we were spending on takeaway food, alcohol and entertainment! Once we identified the imbalances and discerned luxury from necessity, it became possible to pare back, reallocate our money and define some goals.
We knew what we wanted. We were about to get married and even though my dad was old fashioned enough to want to pay for the wedding, we had to finance our own honeymoon and start saving for a place of our own. In 1992, with a combined 38K income, a 150K mortgage for a dilapidated fixer-upper in inner-city Brisbane was well beyond our means - yet doing the sums now, if we’d found a way to stretch, we’d have made a very tidy profit indeed! But we were risk-averse, and so was the Department of Housing, our first lender at a whopping 13% interest!
We settled on a run-down 110K flat on the wrong side of the tracks that wasn’t stretching our purse too much. That price looks quite ridiculous now that the area has boomed into a yuppie cafe district, but the 100K flat still isn’t worth much more than we paid for it. It has been a fabulous renter though, and a financial stepping stone, since any asset, in the eyes of the bank, renders us credit-worthy.
Within six years of that first budget we had achieved our goals: to buy some motorbikes (clearly luxury items), have a decent honeymoon (for a whole $2000 - it was a lavish expense then but the motorbikes were part of the adventure), pay off a sizeable chunk of the mortgage, and to travel overseas. It was time to reassess and set some new goals.
We decided it was time to tenant the flat and find a humble 140K suburban home where we could start a family. Suddenly things like life insurance, wills and appointing a power of attorney took priority, along with obtaining adequate household and car insurance, maintaining car payments and superannuation - not to mention all the usual bills and living expenses. For some time it felt like we were standing in the flow of a waterfall with a sieve, trying to catch our entitlement of water before it cascaded over the cliff. The budget was tight, but fortunately we’d beaten our bad habits to keep a tight reign on the spending. All our debts were manageable and paying them got us slowly, slowly, closer to our goals. They are Americanisms but these days people talk about snowballing and snowflaking as a means of managing their debts. That’s how we did it and we haven’t looked back.
We’d never previously been worthy of the fantastic plastic but suddenly the bank was our friend and we used credit cards to streamline our finances. Putting all our living expenses onto a credit card made them easy to track and budget on a monthly basis. It also enabled us to reduce the number of transaction fees which the banks had introduced, and prevent over-use of the automatic teller machine and cheque book. There was also the added bonus of accruing mileage points on money we would be spending every month anyway. Nothing like a free holiday! Of course, the essential part was to pay the debt in total at the end of every month. This method worked really well for us, though it may not suit everyone. Naturally, the first step is to completely free yourself of credit card debt in the first place, but because we never let the debt accrue, we knew exactly how much we were spending.
So with tenants paying off the last of the mortgage on the flat for us, and by pouring every last cent we earned into our domestic mortgage payments, which could be redrawn if required, we began to make significant headway. We utilised automated bank payments as much as possible so that utility bills could never be forgotten and damage our credit rating. In 2005 when we accepted my husband’s overseas job transfer and sold our house, which in four years had appreciated more than twice the purchase value, our debts were comparatively small and the bulk of the revenue was ours to turn over to a block of land where we dreamed about building our future family home. Selling a few well-timed investments allowed us to go ahead and build that dream home and pay out the mortgage in full, in next to record time.
So here we are today, nearly forty and happily debt-free - or very nearly. We still have car payments and we have a negatively geared investment, neither of which impact on the security of our home and both liquid enough to off-load in a hurry if our situation should suddenly change for the worst. But we have achieved the stage where we have enough and need nothing more to live well. We don’t have the very best or latest of everything (as much as I’d love to buy that Dyson!) but what we do have serves our purposes perfectly, without want, or envy, or excessive waste. We still put money towards investments, and the kids’ trust funds, because it’s wise to have a contingency plan. And I no longer shut down and tune out about money. Which is why I’m prepared to bare all in a blog, in the name of HERevolution.
June 28th, 2009 - Posted in gratitude, partnership, consumerism, sustainability, beliefs, wisdom, money, self-care | | 4 Comments
Travel bug
picture by alexisbellido
Confession time: I have itchy feet. I reckon I was born with them but just couldn’t recognise it until I created a means to travel in my mid-twenties. No one in my family, aside from a great aunt, was ever a traveller. And my family have accused me of taking after said aunt on more than just our keenness for travel. I have always been attracted to people from foreign places. I have always been curious about people who speak English as a second language (to the extent that I learned how to teach ESL) and I desire to achieve a degree of fluency in a language one day (I have functional Japanese, but not conversational expertise).
My husband travels for a living and we have occasionally had opportunities to tag along with him. Our first ever trip was a confidence booster for me, when Master 9 was just a babe in arms. We took him backpacking through the southern provinces of China and returned to Tokyo, our old haunt, to show him off to friends. We’ve also trailed their father (me, three children and a grandma) to the UK and Ireland for a speaking engagement turned family holiday that we’ll always remember as a landmark event for our family, even if the kids were too small to remember it. We’ve followed him to the US for an extended stay, a trip they do remember and that stands out in my memory as one of the happiest times of my life, not least of all because Miss Three was born there. Hubby regularly travels to Asia, India, Eastern Europe and the US, and we’ve learned to cope with his regular absences. We’ve decided this is to be only a short period of his career and we look forward to a future where work doesn’t dictate our family’s circumstances.
Now he’s preparing for yet another business trip but this time I’m experiencing a little pang of envy. How I wish I could tag along with him on this trip to Japan! How I wish we could have just a weekend to tour around Tokyo as a couple and reminisce about our time there over ten years ago. How dare I dream of travel without my children!
But I simply can’t justify it. Even if Swine ‘Flu was not an issue, the financial cost of recreational travel is a setback I don’t want to endure during an economic crisis. Then there is the carbon cost of recreational travel. What right do I have to travel for pleasure when I’d be contributing 0.75 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents to the atmosphere? OK, so I could probably offset that if I were serious about it, but then there’s the tiny issue of child care to consider, or the prospect of taking the kids out of school and dragging them along with us - which they’d probably love - but which isn’t really part of my travel fantasy at this point in time.
What’s a girl to do? This is such a first world, middle class ‘problem’. I really ought to be ashamed of myself! But at the same time, I yearn to use my limited Japanese language skills, eat cheap noodles standing up beside drunken, suit-clad business men, and to be white-glove pressed, sardine style, into the peak hour circle line, just one more time. For old time’s sake.
June 12th, 2009 - Posted in consumerism, nostalgia, play, money | | 0 Comments
