Buying into status

One of the biggest challenges to our overcoming materialism and our dependency on our possessions, is the problem of our purchase of status goods, items we purchase to demonstrate our social position to the world around us. Each culture and age had or has its status goods, whether they be a string of beads or $250,000 Porsche. We are so immersed in this code of status that we are hardly aware, most of the time, that our purchase decisions are governed not by quality or price, but by how our neighbors will view us.

In extreme cases, our dependency on material goods can affect our relationships with our family and friends and can even destroy our happiness and enjoyment of life. The huge overhanging credit card debt in the U.S. is only one symptom of this dependency.

This fixation on status extends to every level of our material cultural lives; from our cars and boats to our living room furniture, from our shirts and pants to the kind of watches and jewelry we wear. We also establish our status by the types of activities we participate in. How many of you know someone who "just returned from a trip to ... [name the location]. To the extent that we allow status and cultural "norms" to determine what and who we are and what we buy, we are slaves to materialism.

It is sadly true that our social class can be accurately inferred from the inventory of products we own. This was early recognized by studies by Francis Stuart Chapin a t the University of Minnesota beginning in the 1920s. See also Schor, Juliet, Sut Jhally, and Loretta Alper. The overspent American why we want what we don't need. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 2003 at page 35.

In order to break out of this pervasive system, we must first recognize our dependency on our material goods. We can only begin to make purchasing decisions based on our needs, if we recognize the difference between our needs and our wants and further, recognize the role material goods play in the perception we have of ourselves and our status in society. If we do not realize our addiction to status producing material goods, perhaps we need to go through the classic 12 Step program for addicts:

1. We admitted we were powerless over our material purchases—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

This program was designed for alcoholics but it will work for those who cannot control their purchases also. We all know someone whose buying habits we consider to be out of control, but how many of us recognize those tendencies in ourselves. If we would be prepared for tomorrow's coming hard times, we need to overcome our bad spending habits today.

Inch by inch, row by row

I'm gonna make this garden grow... It is amazing how a connection to the soil and growing things is fundamental to our well being. It is also important to our survival as individuals, as a society and even our survival as a race on this earth. It is also amazing how far away from the soil our society has drifted in its never ending pursuit of prepackaged, preprocessed, almost pre-digested food. I was standing the line at my neighborhood supermarket some time ago, I was supposed to get some vegetables for dinner. I believe I had a couple of artichokes, when a younger girl, probably in her twenties, asked what they were. I guess I stared at her for a second to see if she was serious and explained that they were artichokes. She wanted to know if we ate them or what. Now, giving her the benefit of the doubt, I do have to admit that some people probably do not eat artichokes regularly. But, because of the question, I got into a discussion with the attendant, and she indicated that this was a regular experience. Younger people did not recognize vegetables.

This experience has actually happened to me twice. I have also read about people having similar experiences. We have almost always had a garden, unless we were renting or living abroad, and over the years, I have found that most people cannot identify the plants growing in the garden. They do not recognize squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, or nearly any other plant. If you show most teenagers a vegetable, not only will they not recognize what it is, they will find it impossible to tell you whether it grows on a vine, a bush or a tree. Living in a warm climate, like we do, we have citrus trees. Many people who visit us have never seen a grapefruit or orange growing on a tree.

I see this as a problem. If we lose the ability to grow food, who will grow our gardens? When you visit the vegetable section of the supermarket, you will find little stickers on all the products, usually telling you that the produce was grown in Mexico, Chile, the Philippines or somewhere else. I recognize that there are adults who grew up hating to eat their vegetables. As for me, I love so many kinds of vegetables that I can't imagine that attitude. You cannot match the quality and taste of garden fresh vegetables with any factory farm produced Styrofoam imitations. Also, growing your own food, you become aware of what goes into it and you don't have eat ten or fifty different kinds of pesticides.

I am not always successful in growing any specific kind of plant. Recently, we discovered a strange plant growing in our garden. I wasn't sure what it was, since I hadn't seen that type before. I was pretty sure it wasn't a weed. When it started to flower, we realized that it was an okra plant. Now, we didn't particularly like okra. But because we had this huge plant, we learned how to prepare and cook it. We had a wonderful gumbo that we really liked. I can assure you that we would never have purchased okra in a store, but the growing experience helped remind us of a whole new aspect to gardening. Learning again to use and prepare new foods from scratch.

Part of the security of overcoming a dependency on our material society is learning the self sufficiency of growing your own plants and food, even in small quantities. I have found that even a small window box garden can produce delightful food and add to your understanding of the natural and real world around us. By the way, take time to educate your children as to where and how we get our food. Grow a garden, get in touch with life in our real world and become more prepared to face the challenges of the future.

There is still no free lunch

The phrase referring to no free lunch has become such a staple saying in our society that the whole phrase "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch," has become an acronym: TANSTAAFL (said tan-staffel). The phrase itself comes from Robert Heinlein's classic science fiction book, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The development of the concept of the lack of a "free lunch" has been attributed to the work of economist Milton Friedman. In the context of being prepared for hard times it is important to remember this principle, everything has an economic value. Just because we do not get paid (in cash or equivalents) for what we do, everything connected with our lives has a value or cost to the society.

If I chose to live on the street as a homeless person, with no belongings other than the clothes I was wearing, my life and existence would still impact the rest of society. Just one example, there are a multitude of public and private organizations and agencies that primarily monitor and assist the homeless. By being homeless, I create a need and a motivation for these organizations to exist

How I chose to spend my time and my resources will always have an economic impact on me, on my family and ultimately on everyone else in the world. There is no such thing as "free time." If I chose to watch television instead of working or if I chose to work instead of spending time with my family, in every decision there is always a cost associated with that decision. When I choose to spend my money on present gratification, rather than on food storage or some other method of being prepared, that choice will ultimately impact society as whole, especially, if I cannot support myself and my family and become a burden on the church or government's welfare system.

You may not be able to chose whether you are rich or poor, but you can chose how you allocate your resources. For example, the savings rate in China has been quoted as being as high as 50% in both the public and private sectors. Although some sources quote a much lower rate but in the U.S. the rate is less than 10%. There are likely many reasons for this difference, some cultural and others social, but it is undisputed that the higher standard of living in the U.S. does not result in a higher savings rate. It is also undeniable that by any standard in the U.S., the average Chinese standard of living would be considered very low.

Being prepared to face the challenges in the future implies a realistic knowledge of the cost of the various components of our economic life. Not only should we be aware of the cost of our food, shelter and transportation, we should also be aware of the cost of our decisions to spend our time in different ways. If we do make a decision to play a video game or watch a movie, we should do so knowing that the choice has an economic impact because there is no free lunch.

Fuel economy -- is it a real concern?

Even though the price of gasoline has moderated in the past few weeks, price increases are inevitable. One of the important factors in preparedness is evaluating the cost of our transportation needs. Gasoline price increases draw a lot of attention to fuel costs as a component of the overall cost of owning and operating a vehicle. If you are in the category of those buying expensive luxury cars, then you probably don't spend much time worrying about the gas costs. On the other hand, most of us are concerned about the extra expense of $4.00 plus per gallon gasoline.

Although most of the current car ads emphasize fuel economy, there is a real question about the relative importance of this particular component of the cost of operation. For example, if you are purchasing a $20,000 car on a contract at 6% interest, your interest cost alone, without compounding or any extra charges, would be around $1200 a year. Fuel costs would vary with the fuel economy of the car and the miles driven.

Focusing on the fuel costs, the Environmental Protection Agency has fuel economy guides for the present car years and for many past years. Even a brief review of the reports, shows that fuel economy varies dramatically. For example, minicompact cars vary from 13 mpg to 32 mpg. Assuming gas at $2.50 a gallon and an average of 15,000 miles driven per year, the cost of gasoline alone can vary between approximately $2,900 a year at the low end, to $1,200 a year at the high end. The largest range in efficiency is found in midsize cars which vary between 11 mpg on the low end, to 46 mpg on the high end. You can immediately see that any cost savings from buying a higher mpg car can be negated by the cost of borrowing money to purchase the car in the first place.

So what does it cost to own a car? The actual cost includes depreciation, interest on your loan, taxes and fees, insurance premiums, fuel costs, maintenance and repairs. Edmunds.com has a True Cost to Own calculator. For example, a standard 4 dr hatchback, 2009 Toyota Prius costs $39,236 with an average cost per mile of $0.52. This cost compares very favorably with Nissans and Hondas in the same category. By comparison a 2009 Corvette Z06 costs $101,164 and the average cost per mile is $1.35. A car like the Corvette depreciates over $9,766 in the first year alone. Even by the fifth year, the car is still depreciating over $5,700 per year. Even the Prius depreciates from $4,246 in the first year, to about $1,655 in the fifth year.

Even with gas at $4.00 a gallon, for an average of 15,000 miles per year, even if you drive a Prius (or practically any other car) the depreciation cost exceeds the cost of fuel and that staple of the Arizona family, the 2009 Chevrolet Suburban, costs, depending on the model, over $1.00 per mile to drive and loses $19,244 in depreciation IN THE FIRST YEAR alone.

Since such a large part of a family's expenses go to transportation, part of being prepared in order to survive, includes knowing the true cost of your choice of vehicles. Fuel economy is only one of the very expensive factors to consider in purchasing a car.

You are not prepared if...

With the euphoria of a new presidential administration, you could almost believe that the end of the hard economic times will come as soon as the U.S. government starts spending the trillions of dollars it doesn't have. A look the current economic reports still gives pause for concern. November figures (the latest to be released) show a steady increase in unemployment and layoffs. The Consumer Price Index fell again in November by 1.7 percent.

The question still remains, are you prepared for the hard times? A Google search on the phrase "prepare for hard times" showed over a million responses. The Web sites tout everything from preparing for a coming nuclear attack, unlocking your brain's potential and secret Masonic rituals as the answer to preparation. Not having anything to sell at the moment, except some junk in the garage, I think the answer is really quite simple.

President Gordon B. Hinckley said:

We can so live that we can call upon the Lord for His protection and guidance. This is a first priority. We cannot expect His help if we are unwilling to keep His commandments. We in this Church have evidence enough of the penalties of disobedience in the examples of both the Jaredite and the Nephite nations. Each went from glory to utter destruction because of wickedness.

We know, of course, that the rain falls on the just as well as the unjust (see Matthew 5:45). But even though the just die they are not lost, but are saved through the Atonement of the Redeemer. Paul wrote to the Romans, "For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord" (Romans 14:8)...

We can set aside some water, basic food, medicine, and clothing to keep us warm. We ought to have a little money laid aside in case of a rainy day.

If we fail to head this counsel, we are not prepared.

We are not prepared if we are still in debt other than for a home and perhaps one car.

We are not prepared if we are still buying things we do not need.

We are not prepared if we do not save.

We are not prepared if we do not have a basic supply of food, medicine and clothing.

We are not prepared if we are not studying and learning.

The list can go on and on. Heed the counsel given by the Lord and be prepared.

The lure of materialism

Recently, I had two experiences that caused me to ponder the relationship between the way we spend our money and our perception of ourselves and our status in the community. Both experiences involved attorneys who were much younger than I was. In each case, each of them had recently gotten a job with a perceived higher salary and prestige. Notably, in each case, the attorney had purchased new Mercedes automobiles. The first time that this happened I dismissed the purchase as that attorney's problem and not mine. The second time this happened, with another attorney friend, I began to be very concerned.

In both cases, the attorneys were already driving very nice cars. These purchases were apparently not made out of necessity to replace an existing clunker. I attribute the purchases, rightly or wrongly, to status and nothing else. This type of spending is a symptom of the new consumerism and has been called conspicuous consumption. It is the antithesis of being prepared to face the vicissitudes of the current financial crisis and is essentially putting our trust in the arm of flesh. See Proverbs 11:28 and D&C 1:19

I am not concerned about purchasing Mercedes automobiles, as such, or any other particular brand, but in each of these cases the decisions appeared to be made based on status. This phenomenon has been studied extensively by Professor Juliet B. Schor. Her book The Overspent American was a bestseller a few years ago.

Not only is the problem what we buy and why we buy it, but the problem is buying anything at all solely for the purpose of appearances. One way to address this problem is through a strict budget, making decisions in advance as to how or why we are going to make purchases and setting realistic limits. I ran across a touching example of this in Burning Bushes and Blackberries. You should also read the comments.

I remember hearing about a neighborhood, just north of mine, where the young children who showed up at the bus stop wearing the "wrong" kind of clothes were unmercifully persecuted. Recently, in a library, I watched a four or five year old child throw a tantrum because his mother wouldn't let him borrow an R rated video he apparently knew all about.

We buy food and consume it until we are overweight. We buy beyond our means and live lives of desperation trying to make ends meet. A negative reaction to this type of purchasing is not limited to a few crazies living out in the desert. There are organized groups trying to help people get control of their lives and finances. One of these groups is called The Compact.

When we are coming out of a buying season with visions of people being killed by anxious buyers looking for bargains, I think it is time to really reflect on how we view purchasing and possession.

Teach yourself to fish -- acquiring survival skills for a modern world

There is an old quote, supposedly a Chinese proverb, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." I suggest that, figuratively, you may want to teach yourself to fish, that is, learn the skills you need to take care of yourself in this modern world. Here are some challenges for areas where learning will enhance your chances of survival in threatening financial times:

1. Learn how the system works. This challenge involves learning how the systems around work in the real world. For example, learning how the banking system works so you can get errors in your bank account corrected and find all the hidden charges you are paying. Another example, learning how the insurance system works so you can get lower insurance rates and actually have the coverage you need. Ignorance in this area results in people always thinking the system is out to get them. They live in a siege mentality all the time because the never understand how to manipulate the system to their advantage. They are the people who show up in court ready to defend themselves without knowing what is going on. They are also the people who end up paying more for everything, especially for repairs, because they don't understand how their car works, or their computer, or their dishwasher. Ask yourself, can I fix a leaking faucet? If the answer is no, then you are someone who needs to learn how the system works.

2. Use the right tool. One day a friend and I were trying to fix the front steering arm ball joints on my car. We worked most of the day trying to separate the ball joint to remove the steering arm. (If you don't understand what I am talking about, go back to No. 1) We finally gave up. The next day we talked to another friend about our problem. He said, we needed a ball joint fork. We got one and the job actually took two minutes. The point here is that there is usually a specific tool to do a specific job, whether it be taking pictures, camping, snow boarding, flying a kite, whatever. If you always get the right tool, you will be able to do the job without hiring expensive outside help every time. Buying the right tool is usually cheaper than hiring someone to fix the problem. Sometimes you may just need to rent the tool, however.

3. Anticipate trouble. This is a variation on the motto of the Boy Scouts, be prepared. But more than being prepared it is a frame of mind that says that things will go wrong and what can we do about it. For example, when traveling in a car long distances with children, you can assume that someone will throw up. So you plan for the inevitable or you clean up throw up. There is a simple solution, always carry a throw up can or bowel. If someone even thinks about getting sick, make sure they have the No. 10 can well available for use. If you are always thinking about what you are going to do if you lose your job, you probably will come up with a strategy to make some income rather than going to work at MacDonald's.

4. Learn how to dodge the ball. This challenge can be conquered by staying awake and watching what is going on around you. You should always be acquiring new skills, getting additional education, learning everything you need to take advantage of opportunities as well as avoid the anticipated trouble. Now is the time to go to school to acquire that degree or learn how to do upholstery or bake bread or sew. When is there ever going to be any more time? It is always heartwarming to hear about a wife who goes back to school to support her newly disabled husband, but why wait until the guy is disabled? Go to school now. Take an online course, attend continuing education classes. Don't just take some fluffy feel good stuff, but learn real skills like welding or tire repair. Learn how to make flint arrowheads. Learn how to fly or whatever, but always be learning a skill. That is how you dodge the ball.

5. Get off the couch. If you are going to play computer games then become the best and compete nationally. There is always a challenge. We used to have state and county fairs and people could show off their handiwork. Today we have the same thing, only it is all on the Internet. Learn how to do something really well. Become the best whatever and then get in the Guinness Book of Records, or at least try. Life is too short not to try. Try looking at the oldest performing ballerina for inspiration.

Get to work. Tempus fugit.