Going into 'survival mode'
As economy slides, New Englanders hunker down, channel inner Yankee

By Don Aucoin, Globe Staff  |  March 25, 2008

When a recession hit in the 1970s, Kathleen Carter barely noticed it. She was young, single, working as a bar manager in a restaurant, and on the verge of buying a home. Economic gloom registered only as a distant echo.

Now she is 55, and the current slowdown is impossible to ignore. Its effects bear down on her every day. She has had to put every household expense under a microscope, and she is cutting back wherever she can.

"I've gone into survival mode," said Carter, a married mother of two who works part-time as a singer and lives in Kennebunk, Maine. "I'm asking: How much do we need, really need?"

It is a question that is echoing across New England, where economic anxieties are prompting many residents to pinch pennies and streamline their lifestyles in a kind of behavioral downsizing.

They bring their own lunch to work. They forsake dining out in restaurants and take part in neighborhood potluck dinners instead. They hang bed sheets and towels on racks to dry rather than popping them into the dryer. They repair torn clothing rather than replace it. They purchase food in bulk at the less expensive grocery stores. They buy books or CDs secondhand, or get them free from the library. They reduce their cable TV package from premium to basic. They cut back on gift-giving. They hold on to that old rattletrap of a car rather than buy a new one, or they give up driving altogether in favor of public transportation.

Some are embracing this new austerity in the spirit of that archetypal New Englander Henry David Thoreau, who enjoined his countrymen: "Simplify, simplify." For others, though, these quality-of-life trade-offs stem from a fear that they are one setback away from financial disaster. They are in no mood to split hairs about whether the slump meets the technical definition of a recession. It looks and feels like a recession to them.

In this, they reflect a national trend. The consumer confidence index is at its lowest level in five years. A recent USA Today-Gallup poll found a heightened sense of vulnerability even among those not in financial crisis themselves, with 42 percent of respondents rating economic conditions as poor and 55 percent saying that "someone close to them" had lost a job, filed for bankruptcy, faced foreclosure, or been turned down for credit in the preceding three months. That widespread feeling of vulnerability emerged in more than a dozen interviews and responses to an online query by the Globe.

Hilda Marshall, 46, of Somerville said she has had to take on more hours at her second job because her custom-Jєωelry business is slumping. "Sales are in the toilet because no one is spending any money," she declared. Meanwhile, Marshall says she seldom buys milk or eggs, because of their soaring prices, and has begun to make, rather than buy, bread. Jeanine, 39, who lives north of Boston and requested that her last name not be used, said she, too, is working two jobs and has largely stopped entertaining because of high food costs, adding: "Now, I simply eat to live and buy as I need."

To some, that doesn't sound like a bad idea, even in prosperous times.

"We have reached the stage where we have too much, so it's good for us in many ways to think about: 'Do I really need these sneakers? Do I really need a flat-screen TV?' " said Margaret Isham, 52, an artist and writer in Providence. "We all wanted so much: the best champagne and designer clothes and the latest computers. I'm guilty of it, too."

So Isham sold the kayak used only twice a year. She began to take friends up on their offers to stay with them when she traveled, rather than get a room in a hotel. She walks to the supermarket rather than drives, and says she has only used her car once in the past three weeks. She used to throw parties where she would buy all the food and drink; now she takes part in potluck dinners with neighbors and friends. "The honest truth is, this is a time when we come together in our communities, when you're tightening everything up," said Isham.

Necessity being the mother of invention, some have found ingenious ways to save money. For instance, Carter, an amateur gardener, didn't want to spend $100 or more for plant stands. So she bought a pair of used radiator covers for $5 apiece, and they did the job just fine.

Carter and her family moved from Massachusetts to Maine four years ago, but she has not been able to find a full-time job near Kennebunk. So a couple of times a week, she drives to Massachusetts to sing at church services, including weddings and funerals. Her husband also has to commute to his job in the Bay State, which means they have to shell out a total of $600 a month for gasoline.

After a semester at the University of Vermont, their older daughter transferred to the University of Maine, enabling the family to save money via in-state tuition rates. Even before college costs were added to the equation, the family was in debt, with the balance on their credit cards "out of hand," Carter admitted, because they had to use them for basic purchases. "When it comes right down to the bone of the matter, we're hurting," said Carter. "I say, 'Any day now, I'm going to find a job.' Well, I've been saying that for two years."

A music lover, she has given up attending Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts and now listens to ensembles that play for free. A Red Sox fan who was a regular at Fenway Park, she plans to stay home this summer and instead go to Hadlock Field, home of the Portland Sea Dogs, a minor-league team. "Nine dollars for a seat, and not even two bucks for a hot dog," she said. "I can splurge and get two."

Even people who have prided themselves on their spending discipline, like Ken and Stephanie Gosselin of Westford, are having to make tough choices.

"Here's the room we never finished," Stephanie Gosselin said as she led the way into her living room on a recent weeknight, before adding wryly: "We decided to pay oil bills instead."

It is a graciously appointed room, but its windows are bare, with no curtains. Gosselin, 47, and her 48-year-old husband have good jobs in relatively safe professions. She works in instructional technology at Westford Academy, and he is the academic administrator in the neurology department of UMass Memorial Health Care in Worcester.

But Ken Gosselin commutes 60 miles a day to and from his job, which really adds up when gas costs more than $3 a gallon, even though he sold his Lexus and now drives a Honda Civic. And their heating bills now exceed $2,500 a year, even though the house is well-insulated.

It helps that the Gosselins have long hewed to strict spending limits. They have gone out to dinner only once in the past six months. (They are not alone: The March edition of MarketBrief, which publishes consumer research for the restaurant industry, reported that customers are cutting back on visits to fast-food and full-service restaurants alike). The Gosselins have bare-bones cable TV, Internet, and phone packages. They upped the deductible on their auto insurance, reducing the premiums. They buy electricity from a wholesaler. Ken Gosselin summed up his attitude as: "Keep the money in your pocket. Be a good Yankee. Defer your gratifications. Get that Beemer after you retire."

But for those who switched from lucrative careers to more personally fulfilling ones, such as Scott Williams of Boston, it is not luxuries but the soaring cost of day-to-day necessities like food, heat, and gasoline that are jolting.

"It's nothing now to go to the store and spend $100 on basic groceries," said Williams, 40, who a few years ago left high tech, where his annual salary and bonuses came to $85,000, to become a teacher in Amesbury, which pays him in the mid-$50,000s. So when he needed to replace his car, he bought a used Volkwagen with 15,000 miles on it rather than a brand-new car. He also ran smack-dab into the real-estate slump when it took him nearly a year to sell his three-bedroom condo in Newburyport, and even then he had to settle for much less than his asking price. He now lives in a one-bedroom, 500-square-foot condo in Charlestown.

All in all, Williams has little patience with arcane debates about which benchmarks add up to a bona fide recession. "Highly paid government officials and experts in economics will paint a rosier picture than it really is," he said. "On Main Street, I think it's tougher. If a fourth-grade teacher can feel it, I don't know why the economists can't."