Living the simple life

CHICAGO (AP) — Keri Rainsberger isn’t rich. She works in the nonprofit world for a relatively low-profit salary. Yet as many Americans are scrimping for every penny, she hardly feels the pinch.

She still tithes 10 percent of her income to her church, even as other members have cut back. She rarely worries about rising gas and food prices. And she never bothers to balance her checkbook, because she doesn’t come close to spending what she has.

“I live so far below my means that it doesn’t really register,” says Ms. Rainsberger, a 31-year-old Chicagoan with a wiry frame and unusually sunny outlook. “I don’t have to think about money.”

How is this possible?

For starters, she has no car and commutes by bicycle each workday. She also has no mortgage payment and chooses to live in an “intentional community,” a partly shared space where $775 a month covers everything from utilities to meals.

“In one fell swoop, I pay for the roof over my head, the food in my stomach and the lights to read by. That’s a big advantage,” says Ms. Rainsberger, whose high-rise living space is part of the residential program at the Keystone Ecological Urban Center in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood.

Her private quarters is about 400 square feet, divided into a sitting room, a craft room and a small bedroom. She shares bathrooms, showers, a kitchen and a large dining room with 28 other residents whose ranks include young professionals, professors and retirees.

“It’s like a college dormitory, but with better conversation,” she often jokes.

Of course, the concept of sharing resources has been around since the beginning of time and is used today from Amish farms to the Israeli kibbutz. For low-income families, it’s often simply a matter of survival.

But those who track consumer habits say a growing need to cut costs, along with a wish to be more environmentally and spiritually conscious, is causing even more people to pool their resources, whether defined as an intentional community or not.

“The economy starts to tank. People get tired of it,” says Daniel Howard, a specialist in consumer research and behavior at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. “It’s people saying, ‘Let’s get together and help one another.’ And it works.”

Few may have the desire or even the ability to live the Spartan lifestyle that Ms. Rainsberger learned from her Depression-era grandmother. Not everyone is willing to bicycle, for instance, in the stifling mugginess of a Chicago summer or the cold, blustery winds that sweep off Lake Michigan in winter.

But those who advocate a simpler, less consumer-driven life say there are lessons in the strategies she and other intentional communities use.

By buying their food in bulk, for instance, Ms. Rainsberger and her neighbors spend $100 to $150 per person each month for meals. (Consider that the U.S. Department of Agriculture “thrifty plan” for a single person is $200 a month.)

Some residents who own cars also share them, drastically cutting overall vehicle expenses.

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