In order to understand, I need to take you back to the summer of 1982. It was the summer of parachute pants and John Cougar’s “American Fool “. Like many an adolescent (read, randy) American male, I wanted to take Diane up behind the shady trees, dribble off our Bobby Brooks and stand around naked and embarrassed. But since I couldn’t drive, didn’t know exactly where she lived anyway, and had absolutely no idea how to get her to take her clothes off or what to do once she did, I asked my Mom if she could take me to the record store so that I could buy the cassette tape. Then I could play the song over and over again on my home stereo system, which consisted of a single-speaker tape player/recorder.
Now, like most strip-mall towns of good reputation, Paramus, NJ in the early 1980’s had two music stores. The first, The Music Hut, was actually in Hackensack. The other, Sam Goody, was at the Bergen Mall. Typically, Sam Goody would charge $8.99 or $9.99 for the same cassette that you could get for $6.99 or $7.99 at The Music Hut. One day at the height of Cougarmania, it turns out that I’m with my Mom at the Bergen Mall and we stop in at Sam Goody’s. Not surprisingly, there are about 91 copies of American Fool in stock, retailing at $9.99! However, exhibiting early signs of the frugal shopper that I am, I refused to buy it at that price, instead, holding out for the cheaper version of the same thing at The Music Hut. However, shortly thereafter The Music Hut went out of business and I never did get a copy of American Fool.
You may be thinking, what is he talking about? But stay with me. Fast forward to the year 2000 and you will see why this little ditty about John Cougar makes sense. At some point early in our relationship (i.e., the year 2000), Rebecca decided we should buy a house instead of renting. I’m not even sure I had proposed to her yet, but whatever. We got pre-approved for a $300,000 mortgage. When we heard that we both laughed to each other. Clearly these people that wanted to give us this much money were not smart financial people. I had a $1,300 a week job and Rebecca was working at a non-profit, getting paid almost as much as you would find in loose change on the street during a good day. Buying a house for $300,000 would have meant having to ask our parents for money and maybe even having to get two jobs and missing the back-to-back Simpson’s episodes shown on Fox starting at 6 p.m. The latter was just out of the question.
Instead, we brought a much more affordable house in the wrong part of town, subsidized by a down payment from our parents, and contracted with my father-in-law to renovate it for free. The deal was home renovation in exchange for two grandchildren; which we have delivered. We are still waiting for him to make good on his bargain – but whatever. I don’t want to nitpick.
So, now you can see that being a cheap bastard has paid off! Buying a really cheap, small house like we did instead of buying a really expensive, small house like we could have was the right move. Our very affordable monthly mortgage payment left us lots of left over cash to bury in our backyard that we would otherwise have had to pay as interest to some nameless, faceless corporation. And that $9.99 that I didn’t spend on American Fool in 1982? It’s grown at a rate that you would not believe. It’s like $56,093.01 now.
Some of our other money-saving techniques include: eating dinner at least once a week at my in-laws; pirating music from friends rather than actually buying CD’s; trolling for free booze and other sundries on craigslist.org; and sending our children to a Co-op preschool.
On top of all that, when we contemplated going to Ecuador, we figured it would be easier to swing it financially if we were able to rent our house. As it turns out, the wrong part of town has actually turned into a pretty good and desirable part of town. So, asking market rent for a town house in our neighborhood, plus an additional hundred bucks or so to cover the included utilities and other expenses, would pay our mortgage, and hopefully, we hoped, our rent in Quito. We posted our place on Craigslist and in only a day or two, we got a response from the perfect tenant – a 50-something school teacher who will be coming to the area for the summer to visit with her sons, daughter-in-laws, and grandchildren. Think we need to worry about her trashing the place more than Maya and Jonah already do? And, to make it even cooler for me, the school teacher is married to an English professor at Montana State University who was a good friend and influence (of the drinking sort) on Richard Brautigan, my favorite author and poet, who writes great stuff like this:
Sexual Accident
The sexual accident
That turned out to be your wife,
The mother of your children
and the end of your life, is home
cooking dinner for all your friends.
So, when we get back on August 29, I can look forward to crapping on the same toilet as a man who once crapped on the same toilet as Richard Brautigan! Who wouldn’t want to come home to that?
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