A Frugal Find: Marcela chez Metscan

A while back, I wrote a post requesting new (to me) personal finance blogs. I miss some of the bloggers who've stopped writing! And I felt my blogroll was too weighted toward the lifestyle ladies. Thanks for the suggestions, folks, I will follow up asap.

HOWEVER--it turns out my lifestyle ladies can ring the frugal chimes, and satisfy my appetite for frugality stories. (Sorry--mixed metaphor alert).

So, for instance, I headed on over to read Metscan, for my daily dose of elegance and discrimination fresh from Finland. There I found a newish-to-me blogger, Marcela, who lives in Cyprus (oh, how I'd like to go there.)Marcela presented her "capsule wardrobe," showing how relatively few carefully chosen items can constitute a full and functional wardrobe. Not to mention an attractive one.

What was most interesting to me was that Marcela grounded her discussion of fashion and economy in the financial crises that beset her home country of Argentina during the years she was growing up. Although my father grew up during the Depression and my mother's family lost everything when they fled Austria in the late 1930s, I myself have led a sheltered life, in part due to my parents' good financial habits.

In the midst of all Marcela's good and frugal wardrobe advice was one of the most beautiful frugal gems of all. (Sorry about formatting, but the story is so moving that I think it's worth it):

At one particularly low time in our economy, my mum, my brother and I developed a
ritual: once a week we would drive to the McDonalds drive through and order 3
cones of ice cream, 0.50 cents each, and then sit by the side of the road and
eat them sloooowly, chatting about the day, the week, our hopes and dreams. In
the middle of a very difficult time, those small cones felt like the world, and
those are memories I treasure. We learnt, albeit not always easily, that money
comes and goes (and sometimes goes more than comes ;) and to distinguish the
truly indispensable from that we could do without. But, of course, the lessons
weren't always easy ones.

Family, values, frugality not by choice. Thanks Marcela for the beautiful post. And thanks Metscan for giving the post a home.