The Good Old Days

Recently, I've been thinking about "the good old days" - when we were in college, first married, and trying to live on very little money. That first year we were married we were both in school full time, I had 2 jobs for a while but made practically nothing, and Scott had student teaching one semester and didn't work at all. Looking back, I'm not sure how we did it. I made maybe $500 a month...MAYBE, and our rent was $400. Yet we still ate, bought books, gassed up the cars, paid the utilities... Now that folks, is a miracle. It also helped that I am a compulsive saver and had been saving my money since I was, oh, lets say 3 years old. :) Scott even joined me in freakishly responsible saving when we were in high school when we bought a CD (not music!) together. Without that savings we would have been in dire straights for sure!

But back to the original train of thought... I've been thinking about some of the things we used to eat way back then. Some I miss, others...not so much. We used to take a can of cream of mushroom soup, some rice and a can of green beans (all generic of course), mix them all together, bake it, and eat it for 2 days. I kind of miss that one. We could get a bag of dried beans for $.69, make a big pot and eat that for several days. It was during this time that we also realized that some things just couldn't be generic after the cheap macaroni and cheese incident of 2001 (shudder). We would buy the cheapest hamburger meat we could and make 1 lb last for 3 boxes of Hamburger Helper. Don't miss that either! Fresh produce was nonexistent. I never bought fruit because Scott didn't like it and I felt that it was decadent to buy it if he wasn't eating it (I have since gotten over that one!), and we never bought anything to drink, subsisting on Muncie's finest tap water (double shudder).

But you know what. We were HAPPY, and thankfully HEALTHY (no insurance either, yikes)! Thinking about how little we had then makes me wonder why we would ever worry about money now. Truly, we are blessed!