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What’s the definition of a good life?

What’s the definition of a good life?


A thrift store haul from last year

My Dad loves to shop sales. He gets up at the crack of dawn on the days of the week the various grocery sales flyers come out. He is also generally the first person at the store when they open the doors. My Dad brings coffee for cashiers, knows about their lives and will remember if they need something picked up when he is on his weekly bargain-hunting trips.
He has done this all of my life. I remember being 7-years-old and him handing me cash to buy cases of sale pop because there was a per person limit. I hated that as a kid but I did love pop so I dutifully went through the cash knowing I wouldn’t even get pop if I didn’t help buy it on sale.

I suspect that he got it from his mother who was fastidious and organized but by all measures, she was a hoarder. She grew up super poor during the depression and was absolutely terrified that we would go through another one, so she had shelves full of soaps, canned food and other household goods. She also had multiple freezers full of butter, milk and meat that could probably have carried all of her 3 kids, their spouses and the 9 grandchildren through another depression. She wasn’t cheap though, the gifts flowed. One of my favourite times of year was when her and my grandfather would come back in the spring from their condo in Florida bearing gifts for all the grandkids. People express their relationship with money in the wildest of ways. For my grandmother it was to hoard the necessities of life and THEN spend lavishly on those she loved.

After my parents divorced, my father didn’t have a lot of stable places to live. He lived with my grandparents for a bit, a couple of girlfriends on-and-off, a trailer with another couple, a house full of bachelors at one point and then when I was 17 got remarried (and divorced, and remarried…and divorced*). He is now retired, in a stable relationship for over 17 years and just living his life meeting up with other retired colleagues for coffee, playing pool and grabbing beers with friends or visiting us. When he visits he ALWAYS brings food and treats for the kids because he is “just trying to help” us out. This is his idea of a good life.

It used to perplex me for a long time that a man who had a good pension and didn’t owe a dime was so obsessed with saving money via grocery sales. My Dad could probably eat out every night of the week and never ever run out of money. Instead, he rarely eats a meal out and he won’t pay full price for anything! It also makes no logical sense to drive to 8 different stores on 2-3 days of the week only to save the same amount in food dollars. It took me a long time to figure it out, but I did figure it out:

He enjoys it.

He enjoys shopping for sales.

IT’S HIS HOBBY!

Sure, when I was a kid it was probably a necessity but eventually he managed to build a career, get promoted and save a bunch of money. So even when he didn’t need to shop for sales, at that point it was so ingrained in his character and such a big part of his weekly routine (especially when he retired) that he kept at it. He brings the woman at Tim Hortons her favourite meats when they go on sale because he loves to share his finds. He brings us food because it makes him feel good to bring his grandkids cases of pop, some chips and cookies because he knows that we never buy it (although, in recent years I’ve pushed him into searching for avocadoes and peppers, too!). Every week, and I mean EVERY WEEK the day before the flyers come out he calls me and asks, “Is there anything you need?” (spoiler: there is never anything we need)

Figuring out my Dad’s motivation got me to thinking. Why have we associated a good life with spending money? There is this unspoken rule that you have to enjoy travel, eating out at fancy restaurants, the occasional luxury good – and god forbid you don’t think a $7 coffee is worth the money! Why, you are just depriving yourself! I would call it a problem if my Dad was so cheap that it was making himself and others miserable but it isn’t. My Dad is a very generous person. He just enjoys living his simple life and hanging out with friends and family and his hobby just happens to be shopping for sale food. Sure, it’s not an exotic life of adventure but he’s happy, and really isn’t that what it is all about? In telling people what is generally considered a “good life” are we inadvertently pushing our values on them?

I try to think of it like this: I love thrifting. The idea of sifting through shelves and shelves of housewares, reading the titles of books that are in no order whatsoever, and trying to find the diamond in the rough in a pile of florescent 80s stirrup pants fills me with absolute joy. I will happily spend a day hitting bunch of thrift stores (in my neighbourhood there are 3 within spitting distance) trying to find buried treasure, and to me, that is a banger of a day! Sure, I love the environmental and financial aspects of thrifting but the real pleasure is in the hunt. I pop a Claritin, charge my scooter, grab a bottle of water and off I go on the search for deals. Heck, I have friends who will also thrift with me** and The Americans*** and I often share our best thrift finds in the group chat to the OOOOHs and AHHHHs of the others. If there was competitive thrifting, my friends and I would all medal in the sport.

But I would be hard pressed to argue that thrifting actually saves me a ton money and it definitely doesn’t save time. But I enjoy it much more than popping into a store and buying whatever I need off the rack. Don’t get me wrong – there is a time and a place for shopping for new goods – but it’s not something I actually enjoy. I look forward to it like I look forward to blood work: sure, I recognize that it needs to get done but I won’t be happy about it. Don’t think that I also am rejecting branded goods, either: I have a fairly decent collection of Fluevogs that I love dearly. I just dread the concept of hitting the mall and trying on a bunch of clothes at stores all day long – the kind of day, I should add, that my kids find RIVETING.

But often thrifting and sale shopping for groceries gets categorized as something people associate with a poverty mindset. When we talk about saving money these are some of the more popular things that get thrown into the ring as examples of ways to save and it’s become du rigeur to tell people they don’t have to be shamed into doing those things (that they may not enjoy) just to save money. I get it – unlike the 90s and 00s, shame doesn’t sell as well as it used to. A kinder, gentler approach works better. So, it’s one of the things that “money experts” looooooove to shit all over. “I am not saying you have to use coupons and save $2 on a case of pop,” they sputter. But let’s discuss the elephant in the room: when I was a kid that $2 meant getting pop vs. not getting pop. If you don’t have to make those kinds of decisions and have never had to – congratulations! But there is a reason that most of these gurus focus on upper/middle-class individuals – those are the people who will buy books and courses on how to fix their money problems, which is how these money experts make their money. But even if people could probably benefit from some of these frugal skills they don’t want to, because it would challenge their identity as upper/middle-class individuals; it would make them feel poor. They want to buy a book or a course that tells them that they can have everything without deprivation. But for the most indebted, that is rarely the case. Conversely, truly poor people are too busy deciding whether or not to pay the electricity or the phone bill than to even consider taking a $300 course on how to live a “good life.” For them, every single dollar needs to be accounted for. In all fairness to these money experts as well, they probably feel unqualified to tackle the realities of the super poor – you can reduce your costs but you can’t eliminate them. You can’t budget if you have no money left to budget with.

As for me, I don’t like waste, and considering we have enough clothes to clothe the planet for the next 100 years, so every time I buy something from the thrift store I get giddy about how it’s one less thing going to the landfill. Is it making a HUGE difference? Probably not. But I enjoy it. I suspect my Dad gets the same excitement when he finds a 50% off roast to share with one of his friends – less food waste & people get to enjoy a hearty meal. While I will spend lavishly on the most incredible vacation imaginable (I never count my pennies when I travel – I do whatever the heck I want to!) I still can’t bring myself to pay full price for an LL Bean sweater knowing full well there will be piles of them filling the thrift stores once spring hits.

Entertainment, savings and saving things from the landfill? Sign me up for those hobbies. There are worse ones to have.


*His most expensive hobby, tbqh
**The best kind of friends
***These are my Americans, get your own

“It was the 90’s!”* OR: On nostalgia (1 of 3)

“It was the 90’s!”* OR: On nostalgia (1 of 3)

Watch out, sweet thing, a change in the weather is all that you bring
–Love Spit Love

Because I have a case of the olds now, I tend to have a LOT of past to look back on. Mr. Tucker and I often reminisce about how we were young and (very) poor but despite it all, we did manage to have a good time when we were younger. A lot of it centred around friends and hanging out because that’s all we could really afford.

There were a lot of late nights with friends, drinking coffee at people’s houses, staying up all night playing games, listening to music, making music or painting, watching movies and a lot of walking and biking (we couldn’t afford bus fare). We’d go to bars and coffeehouses with change in our pockets and buy the one drink we could afford, and nothing else.

The one thing that separated me from many other people though (including Mr. Tucker) was that I was an early adopter of technology. I didn’t come by it honestly, instead I just happened to know a LOT of geeks and by virtue of knowing them, I had my first Freenet account when they were still in the B’s. I still remember when there was a magazine called MONITOR that listed all of the BBS’s in the area (of which my friends ran quite a few) as well as tech news and computer ads. At the risk of sounding misty-eyed, we were all super hopeful about how technology had the opportunity to bring the world together and how it could level the playing field for everyone to communicate.

Online you could speak to people from all over the world via IRC and usenet. I loved every moment of it and delved deep into niche communities of varying interests. I did often just stay close to home though, making friends on the Freenet IRC and staying up all night to chat with them**. We often found ourselves deciding to hop in our cars at 2am and we’d hit the 24-hour Perkins in the east end where we would drink coffee and smoke cigarettes until dawn. Those were some of my favourite years and I am still close friends with some of those people to this day.

I feel like every generation has a time that they are nostalgic for. A time where things seemed simpler, where you felt more connected with friends, before the demands of life got in the way. But of course, if we are honest with ourselves, we are only really romanticizing the good parts. I remember poverty being an absolute shackle, keeping me stressed about a series of shitty minimum wage jobs and worrying constantly about paying rent and trying to stay fed. I remember the relentless calls of the bill collectors and the awful way they would make you feel so small. It was frustrating to be bone tired and still not have money to do things. There were some genuinely horrible moments where I felt so stuck that I could barely breathe.

Strangely, my salvation came from an unlikely place: a book of the month club. Like it’s more famous cousin, Columbia House (full disclosure, I also had CH!) was for music, BOTMC was for books (obvz). The premise of all these club was the same: get X amount of products for a Y amount of money and then promise to buy Z amount of products at the regular price. For those of you young enough not to know, these companies practiced what is known as negative option billing. That means if you didn’t send in a postcard saying you didn’t want that month’s selection, you got sent the selection and were billed for it (usually, at a higher price than retail). Being young and stupid, I regularly did not send in the cards and I ended up with a lot of books I wouldn’t have chosen otherwise. One of those books was The Tightwad Gazette II. It changed my life.

Arguably, the TWGII is the least interesting of the three TWGs but it opened my mind to this radical idea: you could reduce your expenses by making better choices and end up with the same lifestyle for less money. Cooking at home was cheaper than eating out. You could save on your energy bills. You could buy everything you needed on the secondhand market. I know this all sounds low stakes in 2023 where every second personal finance blog extols the virtues of frugality but to 18-year-old me in the early 90s, it was a revelation. When I finally got to TWG III I discovered Your Money or Your Life in an article and my life has not been the same since.

Clearly, we know how this story ends: I retired at 42 with a disability pension. We recently paid off our house, the kids are thriving, and shortly Mr. Tucker will hopefully be retired as well.

But this means that it is also the start of a new story, which we will start with a wee bit of a segue… in the next post, to be released on Wednesday, August 9th.


*with apologies to Kevin J Thornton
** Freenet had this thing where it eventually moved to only giving you 2 hours a day in 1 hour increments – and then it would kick you off and you would have to call back. It had become so popular that in order to balance the load, you could only have unlimited time between 11pm and 7am so we all hopped on during the unlimited time.