Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

The following was published in the Sunday Times on 10 August 2008:
Sunday Times 10 Aug 2008
Second Hand Adventures
by Colin Goh

When I first told the Wife that my editor had asked me to write about how I was coping with the rising cost of living for a special ‘Pok Kai’ edition of the Sunday Times, her response was, “Ask for a raise.”

To tell you the truth, that’s about the only thing I haven’t done to cut costs since I left my lucrative and stable job as a lawyer ten years ago for a creative career with all its vagaries.

It was very hard adjusting from living the high life in Singapore to being poor in New York. The postgraduate tuition fees at Columbia University had sucked up my entire life savings with nary a burp, while my trickling freelance work barely helped to meet Manhattan’s exorbitant housing costs.  To qualify for discounted rent, the Wife and I moonlighted for our student dorm by organizing community events like discussion forums and fashion shows.

Meanwhile, all our furniture was second-hand, either hand-me-downs from departing dorm buddies or scavenged from the streets. We knew that at the end of every month, there would always be people moving out from their apartments, and we’d trawl their disposal areas for usable items like bookcases, desks, even TVs. A friend even taught me how to go ‘dumpster diving’, i.e. scout for where corporations threw out their office equipment, which were often still in decent working order, especially at the height of the dot-com era. I’d moan to the Wife, “If my mother could see her lawyer son rummaging in the garbage like this, she’d faint from the malu-ation.” There were many days when I felt like returning to the comfort and dignity of corporate life.

But we soldiered on. After we’d maxed out the time we could stay at our academic housing, we tightened our belts even further by moving out to an artists’ ghetto in Bushwick, a notoriously crime-ridden section of Brooklyn. There, the Chinese takeout guy would warn us, “Don’t come out after 8 pm, because the drug dealers will kill you!” However, just a few months ago, six years after we’d moved out, I was amused to learn that the New York Times had begun referring to our old place as “a landing pad for hundreds of postcollegiate creative types.” Apparently, we were amongst the pioneer batch.

As our creative work progressed and our life stabilized, we still didn’t let go of our bootstrapping orientation. We kept moving to cheaper and cheaper neighbourhoods, for instance, which made us unique amongst our friends because our rent kept going down instead of up.  Now, we live in a Chinese immigrant enclave, where everything from food to services is, by necessity, much less expensive than anywhere else.

And while we rarely (I won’t say never) root through garbage any more, almost everything in our house is at least second-hand if not third, mostly procured through Craigslist, the online classifieds website.  We even bought a car through Craigslist, which we paid for in full, by cheque – something we’re confident few Singaporeans have ever done.

‘Craigslisting’ has become addictive, not necessarily because we get bargains, but because every purchase brings an adventure. It was Craigslist, for example, that led us to buy an entire truckload of furniture leftover from the set of the Sopranos for only US$200 (an event I covered in a previous column). And because you get to meet the people you’re buying from, and see the way your purchase was originally used, you also come away with many stories: the woman who had to sell her beloved luxury sofa because she was afraid her husband-to-be would spill beer on it; the slimming centre that went belly up; the globetrotting journalist who arrived home only to find that his Indonesian teak dining set wouldn’t fit into his tiny New York apartment… Sure, going to Ikea is easier, but, I promise you, it’s a lot less interesting.

Some friends in Singapore think we must have either a secret trust fund or struck the lottery to be able to survive as long as we have in New York. But in truth, it’s just because we’ve learned how to be really – and I mean really – cheapskate, and like it.

So though the US economy is now in meltdown, we haven’t found the need to cut back severely, because we’ve already been in austerity mode for years. In fact, last week, thanks to both the Wall Street retrenchments and Craigslist, we managed to score a designer rug at a giveaway price from a banker-type needing to vacate his luxury loft.

So for those of you dreading the need to become cheaper, don’t. Embrace your inner karung guni. The experience might just be priceless.

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