Make Do and Mend

Over the course of our marriage, Janet and I have been required to live a minimalist lifestyle for significant periods due to lack of money. Those times have been tough due to the constant requirement to watch expenditure, but they have also been times where we made the absolute best of every penny and where we prioritised the family unit.

The final year of university for me was also the year that Janet and I got married. So, we started off our marriage with one income and made the best of it. To be honest, that was the pattern for the first couple of decades of our family life as either Janet or I went out to work and the other person stayed at home to look after the children. So we became experts at cheap days out with picnics and large bottles of drinks. We tried to go to McDonald’s for our evening meal where we could because the children saw it as a real treat. I became a master of the cheapest way to shop whilst still making healthy and filling meals. I’m still brilliant at that to this day. Janet and I hardly ever went out but we were happy to forgo that in order to make sure the children could go to clubs. I gave up drinking for nearly a decade and never really went back to it. Those times were tough in some ways but we were able to find so many opportunities to bond as a family because of it. As a result we are still close with our children and when they and we get together we enjoy each other’s company. I think we have benefited from the way we had to live within our fairly limited means. As a result we are going to be quite happy to go back to this type of minimalist lifestyle as retirement beckons.