News

I hate cheapness. I am broke.

These two statements, strung together, comprise the sorrowful lament of the single urban woman of modest means.

My wardrobe needs updating. The Insulbrick is peeling off the back of my house. The car has a broken mirror from a back alley wipeout in a blizzard. I could use a holiday in the sun but I just had my teeth fixed. I'm trying to save money by cooking at home so I drive across town to Price Chopper and have to stop for gas on the way, which costs me $75 - the price of a four takeout meals and roughly the amount of groceries I'd gone out to buy in the first place.

My income is as intermittent as my mortgage is constant, my tastes as refined as my credit is raw. I'm not completely busted - just bored to death with worrying about it.

Then this week I find out that all that subprime nonsense south of the border is actually going to have a trickle-down effect (honestly, that everyone should suffer because a bunch of suburbanites figured their rent-to-own flat screens would look better in McMansions they couldn't afford seems a bit unjust).

Apparently it's a bad sign when banks start selling themselves to their competitors for roughly the price of an Eames shell chair at a yard sale in 1977. Just as I wish I'd had the disposable income to buy up all those chairs in '77 (sadly I was two years old - and my parents were the ones selling them) I wish I had the dough to buy a major U.S. investment bank right now. They're going cheap, and everyone knows that's the time to buy. If this trend continues we'll soon see U.S. investment banks retailing for $1,200 for a set of six in trendy Queen West boutiques.

Did I mention I'm broke? Broke as a snow salesman in the Arctic. Broke as the Duchess of York after she missed out on a decent divorce settlement and had to write a children's book and do Weight Watchers ads instead. Broke as Michael Jackson in spite of the fact that he owns the Lennon-McCartney catalogue. Broke as ... well, everybody else I know, really.

All of my friends complain about money. Even the ones who have money complain about money. This is because while we all share a horror of cheapness, we secretly feel guilty for not being more frugal.

And now that the economy is collapsing, it looks like we're going to have to be. But how to be cheap without becoming completely unchic? Where, I want to know, is the middle ground between laying awake at 4 a.m. worrying about Visa interest and being one of those responsible dorks bicycling around town with a bottle of $6 chardonnay in the milk crate?

Last week I had a drink with a girlfriend who manages to do poverty with panache. She is one of those people who is, by her own description, "bad with cash," and entertained me with the story of how she recently maxed out her credit card at La Perla. The reason? A new lover had just sent her a first-class ticket to visit him in London. "The least I could do was have some pretty under things to wear," was her sound financial reasoning.

We were drinking overpriced martinis at the Four Seasons' hotel bar - a favourite watering hole for broke media-employed women in their thirties. (We were perversely comforted by the sight of all those grizzled old men in shearling coats with their impossibly young Eastern European girlfriends. If ever there was a visual manifestation of the cold hard economic truth of human society, surely that is it.)

When the question of dinner came up, my girlfriend laughed and threw back another handful of complimentary spiced cashews. "Are you insane?" she said. "I can't afford dinner."

But you have to eat, I protested. I have my priorities, and eating is one of them.

"No," she said, "what I have do is look nice in my new underwear."

This might sound decadent at our current economic impasse, but in fact, according to Ramit Sethi, the blogger and author behind the financial advice website, IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com, it's not what you spend your money on, but knowing what matters to you most that counts when trying to be frugal.

"We treat our purchase decisions in silos, not linking one to another," he writes. "Frugal people try to get the lowest price on most things, but spend a lot on items they really care about."

In other words, a maxed-out card at La Perla equals complimentary cashews for dinner.

As for me, I remain paralyzed on the issue of how to "cut back" without becoming hopelessly uncool.

An incurable pragmatist, no amount of filmy silk and lace can distract my eye from the peeling siding or shattered driver's side mirror. I'll always have groceries in the fridge but I might be lugging them home on the back of my bike in a milk crate.

It's a recession after all. And I'm broke.