On Borrowing Less and Owning What You Have

I have, on the desk in front of me as I write this, a library card I had forgotten about for most of a decade. I rediscovered it last autumn, more or less by accident, and the resulting period has been, in a small way, one of the more financially consequential years of my adult life. Not in dollars saved, exactly. In the number of things I have stopped buying.

The library, in 2026, is not what most adults who do not use it remember. It is, in most American cities, a lender of books, audiobooks, e-books, films, streaming subscriptions, museum passes, board games, video games, sewing machines, hotspots, and, in a growing number of branches, hand tools and small appliances. The library card is, among other things, an undiscounted subscription to several services most households are paying for separately.

The Buy Nothing movement — neighborhood-level gift economies, organized mostly through Facebook groups or the Buy Nothing app — operates on a similar premise. People give away what they no longer need. People ask for what they do. There is no money. There is, often, a surprising amount of what you might have otherwise gone out and bought. I have, in the last year, given away a toaster oven and received a kitchen scale, a wool throw, and a working bicycle pump.

Tool libraries are a smaller, slower-growing institution, but they exist now in most mid-sized cities — a public lending library specifically for hand tools, power tools, and occasional larger equipment. The yearly membership is, in most cases, between twenty and fifty dollars. The collection is what most homeowners would otherwise buy, use once or twice, and store in a basement forever.

The repair café is the last of the institutions worth knowing about. They are pop-up events — typically once a month, at a community center or library — where volunteer fixers will, at no charge, attempt to repair small appliances, electronics, clothing, and bicycles. Most things come back working. The whole enterprise is part of a slow re-learning that the things we own can, in fact, be kept.