My husband and I now support ourselves by depleting a finite resource: our life's savings. This is unnerving after a two-career marriage where our bank accounts were regularly replenished and inflow tended to match outflow.

Without conventional pensions, it's hard to shake the nagging anxiety of geezerhood: Will we outlive our money? A New Yorker cartoon hanging on our refrigerator says it all. A man tells his wife: "If we take a late retirement and an early death, we'll just squeak by."

Actually, my husband and I both took early retirement, naively figuring we were covered. We knew Social Security would be a relative pittance, and saved accordingly.

While our employer contributed to our profit-sharing plans, we pumped the maximum possible into individual retirement accounts and profited from the real-estate and stock-market booms. Our combined earnings afforded us luxuries like English riding camp for our daughter, vacations on the Loire and -- before the boom fell -- a pleasure boat for retirement.

So why am I now clipping grocery coupons and scoring 99-cent loaves of bread at the Big Lots store? Plunging interest rates have left us with less than half the retirement income we anticipated. This isn't to say we're suffering hardship; our financial worries are trivial compared with those of vast numbers of Americans. We count ourselves lucky that our house is paid for and our nest egg didn't vaporize in the dot-com bust. Still, we are dipping into capital, despite a frugality we haven't experienced since the early years of our marriage.

Simple Relief

Yet here's the big surprise. We're finding it's a relief to have bailed out of the high-octane consumption culture of the New York area, where we spent our working lives. As one of my former colleagues once observed: "New York is a place where you earn enough money to buy yourself out of problems that don't exist elsewhere."

Indeed, I've reached the point where I blanch at news articles about the $800 haircuts now offered in our old, suddenly chic Greenwich Village neighborhood, or the must-have kitchen tool of the moment: a $2,500 Japanese knife.

Sure, I still get a twinge of envy when friends regale us with reports of their far-flung travels, or when I see someone's $50,000 kitchen (how I loathe my Formica countertops). I felt fleeting irritation when I couldn't coax my husband to spring for a sale-priced TiVo. Sometimes, I'm nostalgic for the rush of a big-ticket purchase -- the sheer thrill of acquisition. It was fun to spend freely.

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