It started out as an experiment in not shopping for one year.

And 11 months in, one Cochrane couple has learned the secret to happiness: Not buying.

Tom and Malora Mulhern’s story goes back to Jan. 1, when the couple, with their three-year-old son Noah, vowed to stop buying stuff for one year.

Under their rules of disengagement, the Mulherns vowed to only buy the essentials like food, and new socks and underwear when necessary. If something broke down or wore out, they would hit the thrift stores or go online to buy second-hand or swap goods with others.

Their goal was to downsize their lives and get off the consumption treadmill. They also weren’t out to judge others for their own buying habits. Rather, they wanted to examine their own shopping habits and ultimately see if they could actually cut out shopping for one year.

“We wanted to simplify our lives and break our buying habit and enjoy our family, and not be, ‘What else can we get?’ ” explains Malora, 27, a stay-at-home mom.

They have documented their journey at ourcompactlife.org.

Eleven months later, the Cochrane couple has wiped out a $9,000 student loan and put an additional $7,000 in the bank.

They’ve managed to do it living in a $400 basement suite on Tom’s $48,000 a year salary as a youth pastor at Dalhousie Community Church in northwest Calgary.

“It’s fabulous,” Malora says of the $16,000 total savings. “I feel like we’re broken (of our shopping habit).”

“It’s been a really good experience. We’ve learned a lot,” Tom adds.

Malora hopes their savings account might hit $10,000 by the end of the year but that may be a stretch, she says.

The couple weren’t big consumers to begin with but they have managed to become more conscious of their spending, they both say.

An unexpected result? They have been cured of keeping up with the Joneses.

“Taking yourself out of it is so liberating,” says Malora, who also spends one afternoon per week teaching a hearing and vision-impaired student.

Malora has become a wizard at the sewing machine, making and mending the family’s clothes.

That skill has produced an unexpected outcome, she says.

“I feel like you can define your style . . . when you’re not picking it from (chain stores).”

They believe living near Calgary has actually made their abstinence from shopping relatively pain-free.

“It hasn’t been too hard,” Tom says. “It’s almost easier being in a big city because there all these substitutes.”

“We know how to work our way around a thrift store,” he says.

Malora raves about the Mennonite Central Committee’s second hand store and the Value Village in northeast Calgary.

The Mulhern’s shopping hiatus mirrors a U.S. based movement that launched in January, 2006.

Calling themselves The Compact, a group of nine San Francisco-based environmentalists banded together in their own year-long shopping ban.

That group wanted to reduce their contributions to local landfills by reducing their own consumption. Food, medicine, underwear and toilet paper were the exceptions to the ban. Beyond that they borrowed, bartered or bought only second-hand. (The group can be found at sfcompact.blogspot.com.)

It’s about going beyond recycling, the San Francisco group proclaims on their website, and trying “to counteract the negative global environmental and socioeconomic impacts of U.S. consumer culture.”

It’s ultimately about simplifying their lives too or, as they call it, to “calm-pact” their lives.

That calming influence was something the Mulherns found too.

A trip to the mall is not the family’s default excursion on the weekend, they say. Now, the mountains beckon instead.

They feel more connected as a family, they both say.

While they head into the final six weeks of the experiment, the couple is looking forward to the lifting of the shopping ban, but vows they won’t slip back into old buying habits.

They’re also mulling over a new experiment — buying only Canadian and U.S.-made products for a year to lessen their footprint on the planet.

“We’ve learned how we just don’t need that much stuff,” Malora says. “And how to be content with less.”

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Robin Summerfield

rsummerfield@theherald.canwest.com