In the past year, my husband, son, and son in law have all been laid off of their comfortably paid jobs in the Oil and Gas Title business. The boys have both taken jobs out of the industry at about a third the wages. Our daughter lost her position due to lay offs as a Zoning Consultant when Countrywide mortgage started having trouble. She now works in a day care for minimum wage. My husband who is not yet of retirement age is now recovering from a heart attack and frankly no one will hire him at this point. Our daughter in law and I work for the state where layoffs are less frequent.

The children have given up many luxuries (they were unaware before that was what they were) in order to keep their homes (1800 sq ft or so).

My husband and I are living of what is left of our investments after last year’s stock market tumble. This was supposed to be for our retirement. My income covers basic needs (mortgage, utilities car insurance, medicines and co-pays to my insurance which thanksfully is also on my husband).

Are we gardening? Yes. Do we entertain or go out for evenings? No. Are we beginning to get scared? Definitely.

Downshifting is happening to us whether we choose it or not. It is all in ourselves to decide how we will handle it.

My current MacBook Pro 15″ is over 2.5 years old and I’ve managed to withstand the release of 4 hardware updates since I bought it at the end of 2006 and I have no plans to upgrade it anytime soon. My iPhone might be a different story. Given it’s much lower price point, I’m feeling more compelled to upgrade to the latest model to get the latest features/benefits, but the release of the 3.0 software update for my existing iPhone 3G might help keep me satisfied enough with the new features it adds to my existing phone to ward off upgrade syndrome.

Similarly, when I bought my car back in spring 2005, I chose to finance it rather than lease it, with the plans to keep it for a few years after it was paid off. I’m hoping to get 10 years use out of it. Being able to possibly go 5 years without car payments is a very strong motivating factor in that decision.

All of this has made me realize however that if you do want to get out of the never ending corporate/marketing induced upgrade cycle, it really pays to adjust your purchase criteria to be more long term focused rather than short term focused. For instance, buying a cell phone whose maker has a track record of providing excellent long term feature upgrade support for their products rather than one that considers their phone disposable and requires you to buy a new phone to get any improvements. Or not getting tempted by a lower priced Windows PC that is going to feel really incapable of keeping up with the latest OS and software in a couple years and spending a bit more for a Mac that comes with more features and has a much longer useful life due to much more efficient software design.

If you want to buy a car to keep for 10 years, focus a little less on price and more on the quality and reputation of the manufacturer. Also consider rust proofing your new vehicle and make sure you bring it in regularly for all vendor recommended maintenance to keep it running in top condition. Cheaping out on maintenance could end up costing you a lot of money in the long run and mean cutting the useful life of a car by years.

Always remember the old saying, you get what you pay for.

Madgunde, you bring up good points both here in your comment and on your comments on my posting at your site, ArtofGeek.com. I agree that GreenPeace’s aims are good; their execution is less than impressive and generally focuses less on the real issue than on the flash in the pan part. And they don’t generally help with real ways to improve things either.

As you note though, hopefully government regulation will help solve this.

First, Greenpeace’s info is incomplete and inaccurate at best. They only focus on negative aspects, never pointing out the positives (like the fact that the Nintendo Wii uses probably 1/2 the amount of material in both product and packaging that it’s competitors do). They also focus way too much on what a company isn’t saying about what they do, rather than focusing on what the company is actually doing. So for instance, a company that pledges to reduce harmful chemicals will be lauded, while a company that actually does reduce harmful chemicals, but just doesn’t have an official policy will be demonized.

Secondly, with only 3 console choices in the market, all three targeting slightly different demographics and all three having a poor environmental track record (according to Greenpeace), consumers don’t really have much choice, do they? Furthermore, with console generations lasting 6-7 years between new releases, the situation won’t change much for some time.

Hopefully government regulations will be a lot tighter and environmental impact a higher priority for consumers by the time the next generation is ready to hit the market.

Your suggestion of going abit lower is an excellent one, Madgunde; one issue might though be the savings trade-off of lowering the temperature at night to 16C versus the possible amount needed to bring the house up to the normal temperature when at home. I do have a programmable thermostat and it’s great to have; I think I’ll try 17C and see what the savings is like.

This is of course much easier to accomplish with a programmable thermostat, so the temperature can automatically come back up to a comfortable level before you get out of bed in the morning.

Congrats on the ISP switch and the new blog!