One of the greatest assets in my life is a priceless community made up of my friends, family, and other community members. My community is greater than the sum of its parts. Saving me money is just one benefit.
Mutual mooching
I first read about mutual mooching in Amy Dacyczyn's “The Complete Tightwad Gazette,” but I paid little attention to it. Doing favors for people and getting favors back? Mmm, no thanks. I hate feeling beholden to anyone.
But that was then.
Now I see the benefits, the mutual benefits, of helping each other. As I mentioned in one of my audition posts, I have myself a nice, little “scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours” thing going. Mutual mooching will always have benefits other than financial ones.
If you focus only on the financial benefits of your community, you lose. When you do your best to strengthen the community because you care, and you view the financial benefits as simply a bonus, you win.
Take our friends and family with kids who have created “date night groups.” Four families are in each group. One month, two couples watch all the kids while the other two couples enjoy a kid-less evening. Everything switches the next month. Free, guilt-free babysitting. Like I said, mutual mooching has other benefits. In this case, the kids develop friendships with other kids.
My stay-at-home-mom friends also swap babysitting. Every Friday, for instance, one friend will watch a friend's kids. The next Friday, they switch.
“It's so great,” one friend said. “I can plan all my errands on that day. Or I can take some much needed me time and do something for myself that I never have time to do. I get two free days a month! And I love it.”
They all confess that it keeps them sane. Again, the babysitting is free.
Sharing infrequently used, big items is another way to build community and help one another.
For instance, our fixer-upper requires lots of home repairs, which requires lots of tools. We have some and borrow others. The rules? Return it in better condition than when you borrowed it. And if the tool spends more time at your house than at its owners, it's time for you to buy one for yourself.
How does everything sound so far? Easy? Not so fast…
Un-mutual mooching
We have a really nice lawn tractor. During the grass-cutting season, “someone” borrowed it two to three times per week. At first, we were quite willing. The “someone” filled it up with gas, no problem. But then one month stretched into two. And then one year into three. Finally, he or she purchased his or her own lawn tractor, and was surprised by how expensive it was.
Also, I live in the country, but I work in the city. Every day I drive almost an hour to get to work. Most of my friends and family live in the same area I do, but they work in the small towns, away from the malls and shops.
For them, a trip to pick up vacuum cleaner parts or a visit to Hobby Lobby eats up about four gallons of gas and a couple of hours…unless the person who works in the city picks it up for you.
And that's what happened for a while: “Hey, Lisa, I have (something) at (some store). Can you pick it up for me and drop it off on your way home?”
I did it willingly – for a few months. But then I realized it was adding 20 minutes to my already long day.
I got tired of it. Still wanting to be helpful, though, I worked out a mutual mooching deal: Sure, I will pick up whatever you need. And when I drop it off, I will also pick up a fresh, hot meal from you for me. If they don't want to pay my price, they find someone else to get it.
For the most part, it's worked out really well. Still, I've received a few comments like “Can't you just do this to be nice, instead of demanding something for every favor you do?”
That's not true, of course. I don't have a little notebook where I keep track of favors and check them off when the favor is returned. But in the case of Lisa's Pickup and Delivery service, I stand firm.
If you want it, you feed me and my husband. The end.
To avoid similar problems, when tapping your community for help, clearly communicate your expectations along with time frames. Kind of like what I ended up doing with my pickup service.
More often than not, however, what happens is something different.
“My washer is broken. Can I do my laundry at your house?”
And you say, yes, of course. You assume they are in the middle of shopping for a new washer and just need to do a few loads this week.
After a few weeks of timing your laundry loads around their loads, you realize that this might go on forever. You don't say anything because “at least they bring their own detergent.”
I made that story up, but you get the point. The deeper you get, the more awkward it is to get out. Ideally, you want everything to even out in the wash. We'll talk about more benefits next time.
Do you have any mutual mooching arrangements? How have they worked out? Do you ever end up feeling like someone else took advantage of the deal? Or are you the moocher?
Author: lisaaberle
Lisa Aberle is a college professor by day and a freelance writer by night. Always an aspiring writer with an interest in money, she once ironically misspelled “mortgage” during a spelling bee. Most of her current adventures take place on the four-acre mini-farm she shares with her husband in the rural Midwest (where she writes with gel pens whenever possible).
Great topic! And I like your “meals for wheels” plan — good thinking. As for the people who ask if you should always ask something in return, you could ask them why they don’t just give you a meal without anything in return. Time for time is a fair trade.
In any relationship, any community, there’s give and take, and in the end there has to be a rough measure of balance for it to work.
Because there are very few neat balances, you’re right, we need to find ways to deal with inequities. We’ve had several instances of relatives moving to the big city and staying with us “until they find a place of their own.” My wife is an excellent hostess, so the incentive to find a place of their own wanes rapidly, and we become a victim of our own success, so to speak. So, over the years, we’ve learned to be up front with a time limit: 3 months.
We’ve needed to learn all techniques from throat clearing hints to “we need to talk” when we see 90 days coming up and there’s no imminent plan to move out. In the short term, every such exchange started negative, because people get embarrassed.
In the end, though, strength of relationship triumphs. If there wasn’t enough strength of relationship to begin with, an inequity will kill what’s there. If the relationship was strong, all you’ve done is add a story everyone laughs at a year or two later when we all get together.
And community feeds on stories like that.
I had never really thought of it this way…..but we are definitely mutual moochers! We share tools with my parents and we have a baby clothing trading agreement with our neighbor. These kinds of arrangements are beneficial for everybody!
Yep… I’ve practiced mooching. We just returned a really tall ladder to friends on Saturday. They were happy to loan it, as it doesn’t get frequent use at their house. I used to live nearby my sisters. It worked out that each one of us had some piece of yard work equipment – and those were shared among all of us. It worked well because those were used infrequently enough that there wasn’t much conflict for scheduling.
I love the date night group concept. Great idea!
I hadn’t ever thought of it this way, but my family has a mutual mooching system for labor. Once a quarter, the six adults (my parents, my sister and brother-in-law, and me and my husband) all gather at one of our three homes to spend a Saturday working on whatever big projects need to be worked on. This past Saturday, we tiled my sister’s bathroom. Before that, we redid my front lawn.
It’s a great way to get our big projects knocked out, and none of us mind working for “free” since we’ll get it back when it’s our turn.
Though, since there’s now two small children in the family, it cuts down on efficiency since one of us has to watch them while the others work. But still.
My mom and my mother in law, who are long time next door neighbours, have a number of long standing mutual mooching relationships. Whether it’s snow blowing the drive ways, helping out with home repairs or lending lawn mowers they’ve always found ways to benefit from their neighbourliness. Sometimes it’s a little lopsided, but they’ve both been aware and cognizant of how to remedy that.
We actually belong to a babysitting co-op which is a great way of keeping track of ‘tokens’ or ‘time’ that each member has and my kids think that it’s a fun play date!
I’ve always referred to this as “social capital.” Like any other form of currency, you always want your social capital to be in the black… and if it’s not, you work hard to make sure it gets back there. Overall I’m less concerned with who specifically I give/receive than I am about whether – on balance – I’m giving more than receiving.
There will of course be times in everyone’s lives when they’re in full-on crisis and only “receive” mode – but if you’ve in the past been willing to help others, they generally understand and everyone can be graceful about it (in part because they know they will eventually have something similar).
Part of part two will cover social capital in action when I hit crisis mode.
I like what you said about always wanting your social capital to be in the black. So true!
I am very leery of the un-mutual moochers and won’t stand for it. I had a neighbor who after one dinner started calling me at work asking if I’d pick up her dry cleaning, then called me from the bar one night asking if I’d let her dog out. I ended the friendship immediately as there were other signs that she was going to be a perpetual moocher.
This past week at church I asked if anyone would be interested in pet-sitting my very sweet golden retriever over the holidays. I got a volunteer who agreed to do it in exchange for me giving the money to the church. Thought that was a very generous and mutually beneficial exchange.
We are going on about 2.5 yrs of our baby sitting coop. Every other Saturday all the kids get dropped at one family’s house (5 families participate) while the other parents get 4 hrs to do what ever they want. The kids love the chance to play as a big group and the parents love the free date nights. The only rule is you have to sit when it is your turn. A few hours of chaos with up to 9 kids is worth it for a couple months worth of date nights.
I know I have a really hard time with my negative feelings about ‘mooching’. I am VERY opposed to owing anyone and since we don’t have kids, we either rent tools we need for a short time, or buy our own and resell it. This is probably something I could work on. We don’t really know our neighbors, and our family does not live close by.
I understand your feelings about this. I’ve shared them. However, there have been some crises (coming in part two!) that hit me and my family and I know I wouldn’t have been able to get through it as well as I did without my community. Because of those things, I am consciously doing whatever I can to build my community (or social capital as Matt said above).
I’m sure there are others around you who would love to work on a friendship with you.
Great topic, and I like the way you and your friends have made this a lifestyle. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, and my mother was always helping a neighbor or friend and they were always giving us clothes, food, little gifts for us kids, etc. As I grew up, it morphed into doing favors for friends and not expecting anything in return, which was good for awhile, but later changed into sharing info, advice, and having friends do things like make tablecloths for me, fix things around the house, give me rides and vice-versa, and then paying them for whatever they did. By this time the economy was much tighter, many of us were struggling financially, so there was a real benefit in doing something for someone and them slipping you a few dollars for doing it.
I think the important thing is in limits and boundaries, which you touched on in your article. It’s important to set limits on what works for you, so resentment doesn’t build.
It’s absolutely a lifestyle. Even so, as much as we all work together, older family members tell us we just “don’t know our neighbors like we used to.” I live in a farming community and I know farmers would help each other all the time which doesn’t happen as often as it used to. At least, that’s what I have heard.
As you mentioned, the financial benefits morphed into more…which, in my opinion, is the best part of all!
We’ve been in our neighborhood since 2004, the first year Mr. Sam regularly borrowed tools from one of our neighbors. He was eventually told, he needed to start getting his own (which was the right call by my neighbor). Now he has all the tools and we lend them out quite often. One neighbor regularly borrows our mower, but he also puts our trash out every week.
Our neighbors’ kids walk our dog for a small fee. Yes we pay them but not really enough that I feel like I’m paying for a service. The kids get to earn a little money, responsibility, independence, our dog gets walked.
I enjoy having the neighbors’ kids over to bake holiday cookies, I pay for all the supplies, I supervise and they bake the cookies, they take some home and I give the rest out as gifts.
One neighbor is a mechanic, he helps Mr. Sam once in a while with his antique car but we also pay him to take care of our regular cars. And if the antique car turns into more than a 15 minute help we pay someone else to fix it as we don’t want to take advantage of his professional time.
We are quite close with many of our neighbors and I think all the mutual mooching, as you put it, helps to develop a real sense of community spirit.
I think people think about this the most when they are raising children, as the drain on all resources is the most during those years.
I would swap babysitting with close friends, but I also got taken advantage of many, many times by people who found reasons not to reciprocate.
I also am to quick to help others out and have had to develop a harder shell over the years as I eventually begin to resent the he** out of the few who will suck your life blood.
I wish I had been smarter about this when I was younger.
I think most folks start out with good intentions of things being fair. We’ve helped a number of folks, but when you turn around to call in the favor–they don’t seem to remember. Worse yet you get the “I’d love to BUT…excuse.”
Now when I get the call, I apologize that we can’t help. Eventually the calls for help stop.
In my experience, I’ve found lack of reciprocation to be the exception rather than the rule. But it might be because of who makes up my community.
I don’t know.
Do other people have this experience, too?
Lisa, I wouldn’t even call sharing between friends and neighbors ‘mutual mooching’ (though it’s fun to be alliterative :). I’d call it being friendly, sensible and thrifty.
One thing you didn’t mention is that it takes social skills, sometimes advanced social skills, to share and practice community like this. Negotiating win-wins can be delicate and tricky. There’s creative tension, and the need to live with a little uncertainty, and there’s always some risk of conflict erupting, which then has to be managed. Some people are irritating, but will always be in our lives, for a variety of reasons.
The social skills that can meet all these challenges are probably worth tens of thousands of dollars over the decades in the goods and services we did not need to buy.
Moreover, buying all those goods and services over the years, rather than doing some sharing and negotiating as a way of life, may well enable those social skills to atrophy, like muscles that never get used. Some people isolate themselves, for example, with electronic entertainent like video games. And ending up as a proudly ‘independent’ person with a lot of possessions but in social isolation would be, to me, a type of real poverty.
Thanks for a great post about your skilled and thrifty lifestyle.
We’re not habitual mutual moochers, but we did have one instance lately: Several of our friends helped us with an in-town move and we provided pizza, snacks, and drinks. A pretty common trade!
But since we are renters and have no children we don’t really have needs for labor trades or borrowing home maintenance equipment. Once we buy a house and have a child, though, I’d love to participate in some of the kinds of partnerships you outlined.
Most of the mutual mooching I’ve involved with lately is really a matter of “one man’s trash is another’s treasure.” Newspapers, toilet paper/paper towel rolls go to the bird owner; recyclable bottles go to the one who goes to the recycling center rather than recycling bin; plastic bags to the dog owner; bags of leaves to the gardener, etc. I recently sent a day canning with a friend with a fig tree but no canning experience. I supplied expertise and canning equipment/supplies while she brought the figs and other ingredients. We split the finished product.
Since we are each essentially giving away “trash” there is no need to think about where we are each in the red or black.
In my experience, this concept worked best when I lived in a heavily working class neigborhood. And I think it’s because we’d all see eachother working around the house when we came home from work, or walking around the neighborhood. I now live in a neighborhood comprised of older, modest homes along side McMansions,where a lot of the McMansion residents outsource their home maintenance to professionals. Oddly enough, I have made friends with the ones who live in the older homes, like mine. But it seems the social equilibrium (for lack of a better term that currently escapes me) is dogs. Meeting people walking their dogs while I walk mine has proven effective as a conversation starter, and hopefully will evolve into creating relationships where social capital can come to fruition. Either that or I’ll have to peddle my overabundance of summer produce grown in the garden from house to house. I’m having a baby this winter, so I hope that gets me more involved in the neighborhood, but I think everyone’s kids are all older. Wish me luck.
I have been a fan of mutual mooching for years. I have a group of friends & neighbors who trade tools, skills time etc.
Just last night I was on the recieving end of mooching. My printer broke and needed to be promtly replaced. A friend has a Costoc card & I do not. I called to see if see would be available to go to Costco with me. She was we had fun & I purchased a better printer than I would have been able to affor at the office supply store.
A neighbors knows to come to our house first before running all the way to the hardware store as we have a large stock of plumbing supplies. These were given to us when my husband helped someone else out etc.
There are endless ways to help yourself and others via mutual mooching.
It’s what makes us human, giving and getting. Giving and receiving. We are social animals, if we hadn’t started helping each other out in the cave man days, we would be extinct.
Still, it’s good to hear stories like this when each party sees a direct (as opposed to a serendipitous) benefit.
Picking up something from the store sounds simple enough, but it isn’t always so. There could be traffic, an accident ahead of you, a long line at the store, or any of a number of things. Getting a hot, fresh meal in exchange for running an errand sounds very fair to me! Wonderful idea!
Like Katherine, we live in a mixed neighborhood. We’re on the outer fringes of a university rental area. So half the neighborhood (going towards the university) is largely student rentals. The other half is more owner-occupied, but we still don’t get a lot of neighborhood interaction with these people. Most people (ourselves included) tend to stay inside, or be in the backyard, or just not be accessible to meeting others (when we’re walking the dog we’ll cross the street so that the dogs don’t try and show their aggressive sides). Has anyone experienced this and found a way to overcome this social isolationism?
I’m not in your situation, but do you belong to any groups that might be outside your neighborhood? A church? Sport or game group? Don’t feel too geographically constrained, though it’s nice to be close. Broadening your community covers a wide spectrum of places and parts of our lives.
Anyone else have ideas to break the ice?
When I moved to this neighborhood, I began walking just about every day. Believe me, I needed to. In very little time I met several different neighbors, and we eventually exchanged phone numbers and have even walked together and gotten to know each other better. It’s been a great experience. Have you thought of walking without your dog sometimes? It might be easier to approach you and start a conversation.
I also second Lisa’s idea of a church, not necessarily in your neighborhood, but one where you feel a sense of connection. Or a local community center with activities for adults might be great, too.
Thanks for the ideas. We are active in a church about 2 miles away from where we live, and have met great people through there. We’re not yet to the kids stage, but I could see us doing babysitting swaps and such in the future.
I know in my sister’s neighborhood there’s a group of people who get together for games, weekend trips, cookouts, etc., and I would love to have that same type of atmosphere in our neighborhood. But I think it helped that her neighborhood was in a new subdivision so people all moved in at the same time and established these practices (for people to join who weren’t in the neighborhood from the very beginning). Whereas in an already established neighborhood it’s harder to get things like that going.
There are so many great reader comments– I’m getting all kinds of ideas!
My boyfriend and I have a great dinner deal with a couple friends of ours that live together: Every week, one household hosts a dinner. I know that this sounds common, but the deal is, the couple that is being treated to dinner does NOTHING– No wine-bringing, no clean-up help, nothing. It’s like a combo of dinner at a friend’s house and going to a restaurant.
I do, however, have a friend who has sort of forced a mutual-mooch relationship on me– She brings me her (very stylish and in great shape) hand-me-downs, but then later demands that I help her do strenuous things like clean her house (crazy messy all the time!) or go with her on long, boring, time-consuming errands, etc. I like the clothes but feel like the mooching is a bit unbalanced, since I don’t need/ask for the clothes and she is getting rid of them anyways.I would much rather help her “just to help” than for her to feel that it is owed to her!
I think it is a great idea. I did a bit of mutual-mooching with a friend last year. I live in Italy and teach English as a foreign language. When I couldn’t get home on time to supervise my kids on their half-day, my friend would come round and keep an eye, in return for English lessons.
I am now wondering if I can find a violin teacher or dog trainer who’d like to mooch in the same way.
Cool topic. It’s definitely better to set up expectations at the beginning and ask questions so you know what the favor entails, or how long it will be going on. I think the example you give about parents babysitting one day, and then the other family taking the kids another day is the best idea here. I have a few friends who understand this concept and definitely make an effort to reciprocate favors when I do one for them, and others who are so oblivious to the fact that they are putting me out that they don’t even offer and then next time I have to say no.
My husband is much better at this than I am. I am always more than happy to help others, but I have a hard time asking for help. I know this is something I need to work on. I would love to find a babysitting co-op like someone described above, but pretty much everyone we know that has young kids has family nearby that will watch their kids for them.
I love the date night group idea. I’ll keep it in mind for the future when I’m married with kids and all my friends are married with kids (not quite there yet!).
One of my good friends asks me if I want to stay at her apt. in the city when she’s out of town for a weekend. In exchange for watching her adorable kitty, I get a nice place to crash while I hang out with friends in the city (I moved back home to the suburbs).
Love the idea, not sure about the term. “Mutual mooching” has a certain flair, but I fear that the “mooching” part denigrates what is a fabulous, fabulous way to build community and share resources.
I now live in a community where people understand the benefits of helping one another out, trading time, tools and know-how to get things done. The social benefit in the shared experience and memory, the deepening of friendships, is fun!
I hope more people discover this upside of the giving and receiving of helping out.
We mooch from a neighbor with a huge extension ladder. We can afford one, but we have nowhere to store it! He has a custom-sized extended length garage that fits the ladder nicely, and our garage is barely big enough for a compact car. We offer him cash when we borrow the ladder and also help him out by doubling the chore for him (i.e., when we use it to clean our gutters, we do his too).
I love the dinner idea. Awesome. I mooch more in terms of traveling. I travel a lot and the way I afford ro do that is by living with friends in various parts of the world (even as I write this I’m living with my cousins and am preparing to move countries/ continents in February and another friend is going to host me). So yes I mooch but when I sm living with someone and invading their space I buy groceries and cook and in return they can visit me wherever I am in the world, if I have my own apartment. Luckily many people mooch back and visit me, which makes it fun and fair.
We have a carpet cleaner. We share it with two other couples who don’t have one, but occasionally need to use one. It works out well for us, because the washers in it can dry out and crack if it sits unused for too long, so it gets used far more often than it would otherwise, and we really don’t mind sharing it when we’re not using it.
I actually did it with my cooking. I really like to make things like brisket, pulled pork, braises, roasts and many other things that only make sense to make in large quantity. Even if I was considering food for the rest of the week it was still way too much for one person. So I worked out a deal with someone. Whenever I returned from Costco with a pack of meat I planned to cook, they would buy some of the meat from me while I cooked the whole thing. I only charged the for the cost of the meat. Some people thought I was getting a raw deal because I was offering my labor for free but that’s not how I see it. Whether I cook 4 lbs of meat or 15lbs I do the same work and it’s something I was going to do anyway for me. If I can get someone to buy 8lbs off me then I consider that the same as originally buying 4lbs of meat but at Costco prices. So I get the portion I want but at the prices of Costco. Meanwhile he gets cooked food but at the cost of the ingredients.
As for the un-mutual mooching, in my situation there’s always an unspoken rule to return the favor or that you just owe them one. Like when I’m out of town and a friend looks after my cat for me I always come back with a bottle of wine or a gift of some sort. If the friend had a cat it was pretty much assumed we were each others cat sitters without making it explicit. We never kept count so even if I looked after their cat 10x more then he looked after mine, it didn’t really matter. It was more important for me to know that I had a free cat sitter rather then think about how I am getting shafted. Plus I’m a believer in karma, if you do something enough the guilt builds up and they’ll either tell you to stop or do something in return.