The Personal International Co-op

This is not one particular institution, but a concept I’ve come up with that anyone can implement.

Here are the conditions that I believe make international co-operatives a possibility for many of us:
The Internet and better telecommunications have resulted in many of us having friends from everywhere, and being able to communicate with them easily and cheaply. Many of us also travel for business or pleasure as a matter of course.
Although globalisation has been around for some time, many things easily available abroad – in places where we know people - are still not available where we are, or available at much higher prices. Actually, a lot of things are pretty expensive, even local stuff.
Most of us operate with excess capacity.

Now, the personal international co-op means leveraging on your network to get things you want more easily and cheaply. And you getting things for your friends, too, of course. But instead of squeezing each other, we rely on each other’s “excess capacity”.

For example, I was visiting a community garden where I know some of the gardeners. They were digging up old plants that they didn’t want any more and offered them to me. I’m always happy to accept free plants. One of the gardeners mentioned that the flowers and the leaves of this plant could be eaten, and demonstrated by stuffing a bloom into her mouth.

Great – that reminded me of a Japanese friend in Singapore, who told me he’s always looking out for edible flowers to use as garnishes. (I’d given him some bunga telang before). So I texted him, and he came over to get some. Over tea, he mentioned that he was thinking of taking up photography more seriously, and buying a dSLR. From Japan, on the second-hand market, so he wouldn’t waste too much money if he didn’t like the trouble of using an SLR - changing lenses and so on.

I saw an opportunity. While he was looking, could he also keep an eye out for a particular lens that I wanted? Sure. He was going to Tokyo soon, no problem!

So the plants were the gardeners’ excess capacity, and since I had several, I could give some away. My Japanese friend was already going to shop for camera equipment, and one more lens wouldn’t be too much to carry back. So we both benefit, without anyone being really inconvenienced.

Another friend once told she had a great recipe for home-made hair conditioner, but it required castor oil, which she didn’t know where to get. I mentioned this to my sister-in-law, who immediately said she had some bottles of the magic ingredient, which she didn’t want anymore.

Another time, I was looking for a book which costs just US$0.01 on Amazon resellers, but was chagrined to learn they don’t sell to Singapore (globalisation letting me down again!). Then I remembered my sis-in-law has a sister in New York. Would she oblige? “Just send me everything in an email, so I can forward it her.”

A couple of weeks later, sis-in-law forwarded me an email from New York saying the book was bought, and would be couriered down by a visiting friend, who was travelling light. Ta-dah!

Everyone has the potential to contribute, since everyone comes from somewhere and knows someone. Recently, Lena, who works as our maid, went back to the Philippines for a break. I wasn’t about to ask her to carry anything into the Philippines, since she needed every kilo of her baggage allowance. But coming back was a different story. I asked her to get a bottle of Tanduay rum for me – good brown stuff, aged five years, only costs a few bucks there.

She hardly carried any baggage home – in fact, she didn’t bring back any check-in luggage. But I think she was gratified to see how pleased I was with the rum – which is useful for sangria and parties. And if you don’t care for that sort of thing, pass some of this “excess capacity” on to someone who likes baking fruit cakes.

The network is already there, because it is your normal network of friends and relatives. The only thing necessary to turn it into an international co-op (or even a local one) is to let people know what you want, and to find out what they want.

If you’re going somewhere, and have excess capacity, say you have shopping time and can carry things back, just let people know a little sooner, to give them time to think about what they might want.

Or, if you want to get rid of something which is still usable, get the word out early.

And encourage your friends to do the same.

Christmas presents to please an economist

I’ve been reading these pop economic books recently – stuff that brings economics into concrete aspects of our lives, along the lines of Freakonomics. Turns out that giving Christmas presents is not smart economics. The thing is, for every $1 I spend on your gift, the chances are you only get $0.82 cents worth of utility from it. Bummer!

I can see it’s kind of true – I tend to get a load of junk from loved ones (and not so loved ones) at Christmas.

However, I think I’ve found a way to make economists happy without turning into Scrooge.

What about spending less on gifts? I don’t mean being cheap. What about shopping for Christmas year-round, in order to pick up nice things when they go on sale?

It takes a bit of organisation – you have to keep the things for a few months – but you can get things cheaper, and if you buy stuff as you see it because “this would suit so-and-so rather well”, you'd probably pick gifts better-suited to the recipient than if you were going out last-minute with a long list of names to buy for. I usually find I pay more than I intended for less than I’d hoped for if I have to contend with last-minute shopping.

My sis-in-law has another suggestion – get some utility out of the gift before you give it. No, she doesn’t listen to CDs before giving them away, or wear clothes before wrapping them. Perish the thought. She recently took up a craft, and has been making gifts. That way, she reasons, the recipient gets a gift with a personal touch, and she gets some satisfaction from having made it. The best case scenario is a win-win, and at worst, the recipient isn’t too happy, but at least someone had fun making the gift...

We can also just plain make the gift, whether or not we have pleasure in making it. There’s the home-made food option – jam, cake, jelly, savouries etc. Always useful given the amount of eating that goes on this season. Cuts down on the chances of people not appreciating it – even if they don't like eating the food, they can feed it to visitors.

Hope shopping for the season doesn't make anyone broke. Merry Christmas!

Uberfrug: Overdoing it?

I read with interest the excerpts from the book Men In White: The Untold Stories of Singapore’s Ruling Political Party that appeared in the Straits Times. What struck me was the part about Goh Keng Swee’s legendary “thriftiness” – which I would classify as lokekness.

Apparently, after a hard day of campaigning on a sweltering day, Dr Goh stopped by a sugar cane stall, gulped down his drink and then told the rank-and-file who had clustered expectantly around the stall – and who I presume had been working to get him elected - “I have paid for my drink. If you want to have a drink, go ahead” before walking away.

One of the cadres who went thirsty that day hails the attitude as being good for Singapore. “He wasn't squeezing us. He just didn't want to squander money. Every cent counted,” Chan Chee Seng said. “We were lucky we had ministers like Dr Goh. That's why Singapore could save a lot of money and become one of the most affluent countries in the world.”

I prefer to laud Dr Goh’s savvy of buying of gold in 1968, as recounted in Ngiam Tong Dow’s book, A Mandarin in the Making. Now, 100 tons of gold at US$40 an oz sounds like a much better way of becoming affluent than pinching pennies. I’m also glad that Singapore pitched in to help tsunami victims. Though it cost us, it was a neighbourly and humane thing to do.

Mind you, I’m aware of every cent that I spend, and try not to spend any of it in a careless way. One friend laughed at me the other night - benignly, of course - when we were in Fairprice and got some stuff. Since his tally wasn’t quite $10, I passed him some of my things, and a spare bag, so he could get the ten-cent bring-your-own-bag rebate, which kicks in on purchases above $10.

I’m careful, but I also pay for the drinks and meals sometimes when I go out with friends. On the practical level, I doubt I’ll have too many friends if I only sponge on them all the time, and on the personal level, I’d feel quite ashamed of myself if I became a parasite. On the spiritual level, the Bible tells me to “Withhold not good from whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do it” (Proverbs 3: 27). It also warns that “there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty.” (Proverbs 11: 24)

Well, Dr Goh isn’t poor, so maybe he stayed just within the bounds of withholding what was meet (ie proper).

Still, I think he could have done things better. For instance, he would bring soap flakes on trips to use to wash his underwear in the hotel bathroom. Fair enough – some of us still do it, to economize on hotel laundry, which can be really expensive. But get this: “Former diplomat Maurice Baker visited Goh in his hotel room during a trip one day and saw him drying his one and only piece of underwear on the heater.” (page 164)

I’m sure he was decent. The point is – how much underwear? Having just one piece of underwear would be justifiable if underwear never wore out. One could argue that two pieces was 100 percent more than what was absolutely necessary.

Since it does wear out, I don’t see why Dr Goh didn’t make his life easier by getting two, or even three pieces of unmentionables. This would save him great discomfort if the stuff wasn’t properly dry when he needed to use it again – think of what it must be like putting on damp underwear. If he had three pieces, he could even afford a change in the middle of a sweaty day.

But then, that might make too great a dent on his soap flakes...

Famous Frug: Jeff Smith

Long before “Frugal Gourmet” made it to our small screens as a segment in Primetime Morning, the moniker belonged to Jeff Smith.

The original Frugal Gourmet was a TV cooking programme that ran for 14 years, from 1983 to 1997, predating Martha Stewart. Smith, the “Frug”, was called "the most visible gourmet" of the 1980s by Time magazine. He was part of a movement to get Americans shop for, prepare and appreciate food. More specifically, low budget cookery.

He also wrote 12 books, which is how I got introduced to him - at the bargain bin of Borders. The 12 books he wrote sold more than 7 million copies, and his first two books occupied the No. 1 and No. 2 spots on the New York Times best-seller list simultaneously, and by 1992 he had sold more cookbooks than any other author.

While the Frug hit great heights, his career skidded to a halt over claims that he had sexually assaulted young men. Three civil suits were filed in 1997 by eight men. One was dismissed, while Smith settled the other cases before they went to trial. He always protested his innocence, but his career was over, hence the bargain bin.

Whether or not the allegations were true is still debatable, with one man’s word against another, and nothing said before Smith attained fame and fortune. One thing is sure though – he wrote good books, and the persona behind the writing was generous, and frugal. This is not a contradiction.

Smith’s generosity came across in his readiness to acknowledge the sources of his recipes. In the acknowledgements section of one book, he says he notes that “the list is long, but each name is important.”

He gave little introductions to each recipe, in which he mentioned restaurants, magazines, and individuals, from which he picked up the dish, sometimes giving the method verbatim from the grandmother, say, who passed him the recipe.

In these introductions, he passed on little nuggets of information about the culture that gave rise to the food. In introducing Scottish eggs, for example, he declares: “I do not like the remark about the Scots being cheap. They are not cheap, they are frugal. They waste nothing, a trait that Americans should certainly admire.”

It was only in Smith’s books that recipes would include the admonition to “save the poaching liquids for another use.” Compare that with the usual “drain after poaching” from other, less frugal, books.

Smith passed away in 2004, but he still has his fans – one website, http://www.recipezaar.com/cookbook.php?bookid=34702&ls=o&pg=3 posts his recipes, and has drawn responses. Some of his programmes are even available for loan from our National Library.

Check them out some time.

Famous Frug: JS Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach is what I call a famous frug – a famous person who happened to be frugal. Like Benjamin Franklin. Not a person famous for being a skinflint, like J Paul Getty, for example, at one time the richest man in the world, who installed a pay phone in his house, and refused to help pay a ransom for his grandson until one of the boy’s ears was delivered to a newspaper. Getty was also famous for a disastrous personal life - he was 0 for 5 marriages. In my books, a rich guy who refused to pay a ransom for his grandson (he got the boy’s father to pay him back the ransom, plus 4 percent interest), and who made visitors pay for their own calls is an “infamous frug” – a person who gives frugality a bad name by confusing it with stinginess.
By contrast, Bach was "temperate, industrious, devout, a home lover, and a family man; genuine, hospitable, and jovial. Frugality and discipline ruled in the Bach home, also unity, laughter, loyalty, and love."
The ravings of an enthusiastic biographer? Perhaps. While all the biographies I’ve come across claim a happy domestic life, I’ll stick to the financial facts. Bach was obviously not motivated by money, and knew how to live within his means, whatever they were. The composer had been Kapellmeister ("chapel master", whose responsibilities were to compose and conduct the music at a church, cathedral, or royal chapel) to Prince Leopold of Cöthen. A happy situation, as the pay was good, and his second wife Anna Magdalena Wilcken, was a singer at the court, drawing a salary that was half of his.
However, his aim in life was to write "well-conceived and well-regulated church music to the glory of God." In pursuit of this, he moved to Leipzig, to become cantor at the St. Thomas School. He accepted a 75 percent drop in salary.
Bach stuck to it for the last 27 years of his life, managing to make do for his family (he had 20 children, though half of them died before adulthood), while entertaining friends, students and relatives (and not just with music). And of course, writing some of the most amazing church music ever. He also wrote lots of secular music, like the Goldberg Variations and the Musical Offering, so he wasn’t exactly a frog in the well. A little aside - Beethoven played his Well-Tempered Klavier as a music student.
Bach was a frug, perhaps because of the meagre salary, but it was probably also a personal preference. Early in his career, he wanted to hear organist Dietrich Buxtehude play. So he walked 250 miles to hear him, and the same distance back again.
On another occasion, a relative, Johann Elias Bach, sent him a barrel of new wine. On November 2, 1748, Bach wrote, thanking JE Bach for the gift, but saying that "the excellent little cask" "was almost two third empty, and . . . contained no more than six quarts; and it is a pity that even the least drop of this noble gift of God should have been spilled." He knows that his cousin would send another, but tells him not to, having calculated the cost of freight, delivery and town excise. Thanks, but too expensive.
I like to think that the frugal lifestyle contributed a little to the musical genius. Bach didn’t waste time any more than he did money, and was constantly reviewing his work. He had a good attitude to his gift, stressing hard work and learning from others, either making copies or adapting works by other composers. "I have worked hard" he said, "anyone who works just as hard will go just as far."
Well, I don’t know about that. Maybe revising his pieces, which he did continuously, helped make them really well-thought-out, with no clumsiness. But is that enough for greatness?
Maybe another factor was divine. Bach was very devout, and many of the manuscripts of his works start with the initials JJ, which stand for Jesu,juva, (Jesus, help). Many pieces end with SDG, an abbreviation for the Latin Soli Deo Glori, (Only to God the Glory).
One of his famous quotes on music is: “The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.” Another: “Where there is devotional music, God is always at hand with His gracious presence.”
Perhaps the Almighty was gracious enough to touch his industrious, frugal and pious servant with that special something that made his music immortal.
One thing I’m sure of – hardly anyone will remember JP Getty in 100 years, or even 50 years. But JS Bach will still be a household name.

The St Michael’s Church jumble Sale - what happened

Went down after lunch , as instructed, and was a bit disappointed. “Not so many things this year,”” said a friend, and indeed, the amount of stuff looked miniscule.
I needn’t have worried. As I helped put out handbags, travel luggage and other bags, they went upstairs and brought more things down. And more, and more. Great for a scrounger like myself, but it does say something about our consumeristic society too.
A couple of bags caught my eye (“is $3 ok?” asked the organiser) and got deposited in the car. So did an old but working fax machine – mine died, and this one, which works on thermal paper, suits my low usage needs perfectly. Nevertheless, I told them to sell it to someone else if possible – after all, it isn’t totally essential for me, but I’ll use it if no one else wants it.
With so many goods, things had to be sorted, hung up and so forth. Just as well, as it saved me from foraging for my own shopping pleasure. But not for long.
Soon, I found a couple of books, a grating machine with a few blades and a pristine cake decorating set, right down to the cloth bags for icing ($1 each).
Then the mass was over, and maids and foreign workers, and parishoners came down. With bags at my stall going for $1 (used), $2 (new) and $5 (branded, not guaranteed genuine), it took just a couple of minutes to reduce the carefully set-up stall to a mess.
Some people, with say, eight bags in their hands, asked for discounts. I was a little reluctant, as the prices were already very good, right? But I agreed in a couple of cases. When I reported what I did, half expecting to be frowned at, I was told, “Good!”
This put me on the right track. I’d been on the Singapore mindset, which, if not trying to squeeze as much out of people and things as possible, was at least trying not to be “had”, and possibly anxious about getting scolded for being soft - a bit “us vs them” and basically nasty – whereas the whole point of the jumble sale was to help people. I must try to remember this more in my day-to-day interactions.
I called it a day at about seven. I got the fax for $5 in the end, as there had been no takers. Spent about $30, got a fax, four new handbags (I’ve given two away do far), one computer bag, a belt, a magazine, two books, a teapot and the cake decorating set and grater.
Satisfied the shopping instinct for a while, and more importantly, for a modest sum. I also felt a bit embarrassed when I saw the stuff others gave, and compared it with the things I had contributed – do I wear things out more (good), or do I just give junk (bad)?
Something to bear in mind as I work on the books for next year’s NLB book exchange.

Charity, in deed!

The St Michael's Church jumble sale is on this weekend, 12 and 13 sept!

This one of my favourite events of the year.

First, it's a chance to get rid of stuff that I have no use for. The chances are they will find a new home, and new usefulness. Then I might actually see something I want, and it's nice to know that it's all been "pre-owned", so I don't have to feel bad about buying something that, though frivolous, has grabbed my fancy. Finally, it's all for charity, and this jumble sale is charitable in more than one way.

Of course, the money raised will go to charity. But the church also gives coupons to less fortunate people so that they can get some things too, and join in the fun. And the prices are charitable as well - nice and low. I think it's rather good that buyers don't have to choke up huge amounts for something because it's in the name of charity. Yes, I know we're supposed to give until it hurts, but it's nice to feel the pain after you get ten items, rather than slink off, broke, after buying just one item.

I sat out the Great Singapore Sale because I realised I didn't need anything, but the combination of pre-owned stuff (less bad for the environment!), low prices and charity is hard to resist.

And I've come across some pretty weird and wonderful things before. Once, someone donated glasses decorated with 24 carat gold - I got sets (5) of martini, wine and brandy glasses at a few bucks (less than 5, I can't remember exactly how much)each.

I'm not Catholic, but I really like what this church does. Among other things, they also give out free food to less fortunate people.

If you want to just give, that's great too. Pop by around lunch time with your stuff.
If you want to buy, the fun starts at around 3 or so.

Church of St Michael
17 St Michael's Road,
Singapore 327976