It all boils down to the difference between what you WANT and what you NEED.
What do you NEED?
Food
Water
Clothing
Shelter
What do you WANT?
A house with a seperate bedroom for each kid
Nintendo
Two cars
A computers (to post on APS, of course)
A trip to Disney World
Cable TV
Coffee every morning
Prepared meals (dine out or delivered)
A cell phone, and one for each kid
Private school
A stereo
Guns, lots of guns
A shop vac
A propane bbq grill
If you want to cut your expenses in half, get half as much stuff. Buy half as much house or get half as much apartment. That will instantly cut your single largest expense by 50%.
Buy a car that's twice as old. Get a good tool set and a Chilton's manual. Do all the repairs yourself, even the one's that take special tools. You can probably buy the tool for a lot less than what you would pay someone else to to the work. And you end up with a repaired car AND a nice tool.
Budget, and stick to it. Only buy what you absolutely need, and what you can't make yourself. Figure out what your average family medical expenses are for a year and set that money back in a pre-tax MSA.
Take all the 100w lightbulbs out and replace them with 60's or 45's.
Prepare your own foodstuffs with basic commodities that you can buy in bulk and store - rice, beans, etc. Buy flour in bulk, parcel it out in to gallon freezer bags. It will keep almost indefinitely. Get a good set of cookware and a Betty Crocker book. Use it. A lot. I can show you how to live on a $30 a month per person food budget and still eat nutritiously. It's not much fun but it IS possible.
And don't whine about "the man" monopolozing everything. It ony hits you if you let it. And you let it by lifestyle choices and by living to a point where you HAVE to rely on corporate America. If you don't like it, then scale back to the point where you don't have to rely on it. Prioritize. And learn to say "No" more often.
And finally... if you don't like "the man" monopolizing their employee base in search of shareholder wealth, THEN DON'T WORK THERE FOR CRYIN' OUT LOUD!! Get another job. Any job. Or stay where you are and quit grousing about it. And don't whine about not being able to get the same pay somewhere else. You either stay where you are and put up with it for money, or go somewhere else and enjoy it for less money. After all, it is YOUR CHOICE. No one has a gun to your head forcing you to work somewhere.
Sorry this was so blunt, but it needed to be. Scaling back is only as hard as you choose for it to be. And griping about a job being a pain in the butt while staying on for the pay is just stupid. Either shut up, work, and collect your paycheck, or get another job that you like and change your lifestyle to fit the pay.
Coporations only do what their employees, customers, and stakeholders allow them to do. If people choose the lifestyle or the position then the corporation taking every opportunity to maximize the positive return from that position is just good business sense. You can only take advantage of someone who has no alternative. Unless you are being held at gunpoint, there is always an alternative. Crying "foul" that the corps are being mean just because someone wants the same compensation for less work or less responsibility is silly. And getting mad at the 'big 'ol mean corporations' for making money is sillier. That's what they exist for!
Brad
