FARMINGTON – Kathy and Gary Snow’s dream is to build a campground, something rustic and cute with a diner and sites spread far enough apart so you can’t see into your neighbor’s tent.
They have 29 acres on Lucy Knowles Road, where they live. The property forms a peninsula into Wilson Stream, a fine spot for fishing, canoeing or beaver watching.
“The biggest obstacle is getting to the point where we can go into a bank for a loan without getting laughed out the door,” said Gary, 38.
The electric company turned off their power in June for a late bill.
A car insurance company threatened to cancel coverage in July because they missed a payment, again. Two maxed-out credit cards need to be paid. Now.
The dream might wait a while.
He’s patient. She’s trying to be.
They’re like lots of working families in Maine, barely getting by. Patience is a must.
Kathy, 34, fell for Gary the first time when she was 11. The handsome older boy let her share a seat on the Rangeley school bus, on their way to ski lessons. He was shy, she proper. They didn’t reconnect until 20 years after that first bite of puppy love.
They have six children, three each. Their marriage is his third, her second. Divorces left hard feelings and debt, and forced Gary to take a job at half his old pay to stay closer to home.
The past few years have been an adjustment for everyone.
The phone, Kathy said, has been shut off more times than she can count.
So they revel in cheap and free and thrifty – a slab-of-oak-for-a-car-bumper thrifty – and say they’re finally getting a handle on the debt.
It’s not their spending so much as their income. Stretching $2,000 a month has become a science of budgets and unending yard sales, of put-off appointments and little white lies.
Free truck, Cheerios splurge
Kathy is blond, warm and crafty. She makes afghans with other people’s leftover yarn – she calls the unique designs “crazy grannies”- and when the pieces get too small she knits tiny baskets to hang in trees, for birds to plunder and line their nests.
She does one big grocery trip a month. It’s always early in the morning, and she always hits the Hannaford meat counter first.
“I call that my ‘yellow sticker’ shopping,” she said, referring to the discount labels stuck on hamburger and roasts with rapidly approaching “sell by” dates.
The deli is next for cheese and meat ends sold at a steep discount, to be diced up for pasta salad. Nearly everything on her list is store brand. In one month she’ll spend $300 on groceries. The family relies on the corn, cabbage, carrots, beets, celery, tomatoes, cucumbers and herbs from their gardens for the rest.
Almost everything gets cooked from scratch.
On a recent trip to Hannaford, Kathy picked up two boxes of Alpha-Bits cereal, declaring it “my splurge.” She also grabbed name-brand Cheerios for her husband. He doesn’t like the taste of generic. She likes to spend more on him since he’s making the money.
Gary is burly, with big brown curls. He likes to tinker and he’s responsible for the family’s odd assortment of cars, trucks and a newly rehabbed off-road Jeep. It was missing seats and a tire.
They have a 1996 Hyundai Accent bought for $150 after it hit a telephone pole going 45 mph, caving in the trunk and bumper. Gary found a replacement trunk and nailed the oak to the back. Another vehicle, a 1988 Ford Ranger, was found on someone’s lawn marked “Free Won’t Start.” Its owner was in a nursing home. Gary recharged the battery and got it going again.
He works for the Department of Transportation. In winter he plows routes 17 and 133 in Livermore Falls. In the summer, it’s lots of ditching and responding to roadkill complaints.
Gary takes home $1,000 a month after insurance. He also collects that much in Social Security benefits for his two oldest children. Their mother died in 1998.
Kathy doesn’t work, for now.
She’s got a plan for a new business, Assorted Domestics, something to bring in money but keep her close by for the kids. His 14- and 15-year-old live with them.
“I like the idea, they’re at school and they get sick, they can pick up the phone and she’s at home,” Gary said. “My mom was home when I was little and that was my fondest memory,” coming off the bus and getting asked, “How was your day?”
His youngest daughter lives with her mother. Kathy’s oldest is at Good Will-Hinckley in Hinckley, a home for young people in need. She’s fighting her ex for custody of her two little girls. They visit on the weekends.
$600 vs. $21? No contest
The family was caught short this winter when it didn’t qualify for low-income heating help for the first time in years. On paper, they made too much.
“We were, like, lost,” Kathy said.
They burned wood, wore lots of sweaters, and when they had a few dollars and knew kids would be coming over, bought a few gallons of off-road diesel and turned on the furnace.
That had been the only state assistance they received. The Snows make just a little too much for food stamps. The children don’t qualify for CubCare because Gary is a state employee.
Medication and insurance are huge expenses every month.
Sometimes, when Kathy leaves a doctor visit or counseling appointment, she’ll pretend she forgot her checkbook, to put off the $15 or $10 co-pay. It works for the moment, but the office always comes calling for the money in the end.
She had headaches for a year because she put off buying glasses. A while back Gary needed a root canal. The whole family has dental coverage, but it was still going to be $600 out of pocket.
He couldn’t see paying that much so he found a new dentist in Auburn. “For $21 they knocked me out and pulled it,” he said.
Retelling the story, Gary is matter-of-fact without a hint of bitterness.
There’s pride in being frugal and finding ways around things.
More than a dozen compact discs – AOL starter freebies – dangle on string over the garden, their flash of silver enough to scare away birds and pests.
They have an informal trade with a neighbor up the road, keeping him in lettuce from the garden and getting his church supper leftovers.
“We have baked beans coming out our ears sometimes,” Kathy said. She makes chili with them.
They got one pet, Zeke, a schnauzer-Chihuahua mix, in trade and rescued a second, Shazbot the painted turtle, from the middle of the road. For gifts, she makes blankets, jams, jellies, pot holders and spice mix. She also sews clothes for the family and for the girls’ Barbie dolls.
Kathy’s decorating preference: other people’s mistakes. She’s got a stockpile of mistints in the basement, single gallons of paint someone ordered and didn’t like. Hardware stores sell it cheap.
Their home was built by Gary’s former father-in-law. He dismantled a pig barn and rebuilt it on the site of a burned-out house. Shazbot lives in a tank in the kitchen. Kathy has filled the living room with lots of family photos and snowman knickknacks, a nod to their last name.
Typical weekend entertainment for the whole family: long drives on dirt roads scouting for bottles, berries and rocks. Rocks are for Kathy’s garden -“I border almost everything”- berries are for jam and bottles for extra spending money. They call it nickel picking.
They wait to cash in returnables at a local market on special 6-cent Saturdays, when each can is worth an extra penny. The biggest take ever was $18, enough for tickets to a car show and the movies.
‘Who’s going to shut us off first?’
Kathy has a harder time sticking to a budget than Gary.
“I’m awful at paying bills. I can justify anything,” she said.
On her big shopping trip, she easily resisted chips, chocolate, ice cream and soda, avoiding those aisles altogether. It was the Corelle plates with a little blue and green flower pattern that got her.
She’d wanted a set for a long time.
So she started justifying. Her own heavy stoneware chipped all the time. “We’re pretty caught up, we just had a good yard sale,” she said. They have one most weekends. Family and friends give things to sell. The old stoneware could go in the next sale.
Kathy did a “Gary won’t be happy but” and put the big pack of plates, dishes and bowls in her cart.
He wasn’t happy. He wanted that $48 for car parts.
This spring he took the checkbook away for a month to cool her spending.
Gary’s in charge of setting the budget and paying bills, after she has decorated each with stars, a highlighter and exclamation points to denote urgency.
“The way we pay our bills is, ‘Who’s going to shut us off first?'” said Kathy.
Gary heard that description later and laughed. “Doesn’t everybody?”
With two mortgages and various other debt, they figure they owe $100,000.
Starting the campground, small with no frills, would cost $50,000. Something with a lodge and pool would cost four times that.
When Kathy was single, she went to Central Maine Technical Center through Maine’s ASPIRE program and graduated with a degree in hospitality management. She wrote the campground’s business plan as part of a class project.
They have a name picked out, Summer Snow’s Campground.
Kathy would cook in the diner, offering simple fare that could feed a family of four for $12. Gary would run the rest of the show. He wants to be the type of owner who people can just walk up and talk to.
“I love talking to people,” he said. “One thing I love about old people is listening to their stories.”
They’ll try the business after refinancing the house and cleaning up their credit, Kathy said. They need steady payments on their record.
“Once we’re propped back up with a couple dollars in our back pocket, that’s our plan, to start,” she said. “Gary calls it his escape. It’s wonderful to think about, when everyday stress and the bill collectors start getting to him, all he has to do is sit down and say, ‘When I have the campground, I can do …'”
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