I attended a birthday celebration for a 99 year old last Tuesday.  She was still sprightly and has all her faculties albeit a habit of forgetting to take her hearing aid places which just endears her to me more.

Thinking of all that she would have experienced and learnt in her 99 years, I wondered what sort of life lessons (from a sustainable viewpoint) she could impart to my children & I.

Her early childhood would have been marred by the 1st world war and her early 20′s impacted heavily by The Great Depression (as an aside Australia was one of the hardest hit in the western world due to its extreme dependence on exports.)  Both these events would have forced behaviour like rationing, buying only the necessities to survive, making products last, growing your own vegetables and bartering within communities.  If you didn’t want to starve you just had to eat what was put in front of you – this is definitely a lesson my 5 year old should take on board as the majority of the lovingly prepared meals I put down in front of her are heavily critiqued and picked at with disdain!

If something broke there was no Ikea, 24/7 convenience store or KMart handy to buy a cheap alternative and you would either have to suffer the loss or repair yourself.  Which made it so important to have those handyman skills (no repair man on speed dial then) or to actually have products made to last and last and last …. I wonder how many people my age now have furniture that they could pass down to their grandchildren.

So with a 99 year old hat on, here is what I think we can learn from her …

• Write a menu plan for each week based on what you have available and write a shopping list of what you need to buy to supplement.
• Delay your shopping by a day or two to actually use up what is in the cupboards.  Check out this website to read about the $21 challenge which encourages people to itemise every single thing in their fridge, freezer and cupboard and only spend $21 in one week on groceries to supplement.
• Use a slow cooker for those sad vegetables and cheaper cuts of meat (recipes here)
• If you don’t have an ingredient work out a substitute (check out this website for substitutes for most common ingredients)
• Get in touch with your inner handyman (or woman).  There is a lesson for everything on youtube.com!  Just type in “how to” and your challenge and I guarantee there will be a video demonstration.
• Repair instead of replace – like my boots I wrote about in an early post there is a lot of satisfaction that can be gained when something is repaired and not thrown out
• Buy well crafted furniture & handmade items even if they cost more initially it will last a lot longer
• Buy from Farmer’s Markets or even better grown your own – it makes you appreciate food more, waste less and understand seasons
• Reuse reuse resuse – think before you throw away.  What else could the item be used for?  Ideas here

Above all, I think the biggest lesson is to be thankful for what you have and don’t take for granted anything in life which is a lesson I wish I’d learnt sooner.

Does anyone have any other lessons that we can learn from other eras?  Or any frugal recipes.  Please share.