Amy VanDeventer says she’s always been a cheapskate. The recession is taking her to new extremes.
Before the economy tanked, she was still wearing maternity clothes from her last pregnancy, clipping coupons and using hand-me-downs to dress her daughters, ages 2 and 3. Now, she’s salvaging bagel scraps for pizza toppings and cutting tubes of lotion in half so she can scrape out the last drops.
“I was already cheap,” said VanDeventer, a 36-year-old mortgage-loan underwriter from Broomfield. “Now, I am neurotic about it.”
The recession is changing behavior among many types of people, from Wall Street bankers shopping for groceries at Wal-Mart to teens thumbing through piles of status jeans at secondhand shops.
VanDeventer says she saves about half of her take-home pay, double from a year ago.
Merchants, already reeling from the sharp pullback by spenders, say miserly behavior could only worsen the decline.
“Frugal people are now looking at more ways not to spend money,” said Lynnae McCoy, whose blog received 110,000 hits in January, up 30 percent from a year ago. The Associated Press
