Last year they sold their fully loaded Nissan Maxima for a small minivan. They stopped going to movies and let the cleaning woman go. But some habits are hard to break. Buying back-to-school clothes for her daughter this fall, Mona knew she should have gone to Walmart, but she ended up charging $500 at Gap.
"I felt good," she says. "It's not rational. I can go with bad clothes, but I don't want Karen to. . . . It's a silly, silly thing I did."
A petite woman with large dark eyes and a wedge of shiny black hair, Mona covers her face with her elegant hands. She is the guest for a rare lunch out at a Cheesecake Factory. Karen is singing and dancing in the aisle while her mother talks about avoiding malls and other temptations.
"If we make it through the next 18 months, I can put my baby in day care and go find a job," says Mona, who has worked in finance.
Later, she describes bitterly the lavish gifts her husband gave when they felt flush. When Mona's sister was marrying, Amar presented her with a $5,000 diamond-and-platinum ring to give her new husband and a week at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
"I wish I had that money now for our daughter's education fund," Mona says.
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Fran Alvarez rarely spent lavishly, as she describes it, during the five years her husband, Carlos, 43, was making $250,000 writing software programs for Credit Suisse. He will be earning half that in his new job away from Wall Street. It was either that or sell the house with its $3,000 monthly mortgage.
At 41, Fran is the caretaker of their daughters, Gabriella, 6, and Isabella, 4. In the last five months she has gone back to her daughter-of-a-mechanic mentality. She canceled magazine subscriptions and expensive cable -- and stopped buying soft toilet paper.
"Growing up, my mom used to buy the scratchiest toilet paper, and when we complained she would say, "When you get your own job, you buy the expensive type,' " Fran says. "Well, we're back to the scratchy stuff."
When Carlos was on Wall Street, they lived without thinking how they spent, she says. They renovated their kitchen, took the kids to Disney World. That was all before.
"Before, I would go crazy on clothes for the kids even though they were so young and couldn't care. Before, if I didn't feel like cooking, we'd go out. Before, if we were thinking about a vacation, we bumped up to the better hotel," she says. The other day Carlos picked up Gabriella at piano and Fran yelled at him for stopping at Dunkin' Donuts for coffee.
