This book caught my eye at Borders, so I flipped through the pages a bit and bought the book off of Amazon when I got home. (I'm probably not doing my part to help Borders out of bankruptcy, but oh well.) Jeff Yeager's The Cheapskate Next Door is a well-researched 231-page tale of his trip across America that took him to households that revealed “the surprising secrets of Americans living happily below their means.”
It's always a challenge to put a unique spin on frugal living, because the ever-present theme of “living below your means” tends to be as exciting as watching a couple of pennies turn green. Mr. Yeager wrote a book on frugal living that was fun to read. Mr. Yeager is a lively writer with a delightfully corny sense of humor. The bulk of the book is his conversations with various and sundry cheapskates across the nation and the lessons we can learn from them. Throughout he's peppered “Cheap Shots” — little money-saving tips to which he's affixed a dollar amount for the savings that you, the reader, can realize by carrying through.
The book has sixteen chapters:
- The Phrenology of Frugality: 16 Idiosyncrasies of the Cheapskate Mind
- Good Habits Are Hard to Break
- Money Management, Cheapskate Style
- The Oxygen Mask Approach to Raising Kids (think airplanes here)
- Thrift: The Greenest Shade of Green
- Clean Your Plate . . . and Save $1,500 a Year
- Come on and Take a FREE Ride
- We Can't Retire. We Went out to Dinner Instead.
- The Joys of Horse Trading
- Break the Mortgage Chains that Bind Thee
- Bon Appe-cheap! Come on into the Cheapskate's Kitchen
- Don't Laugh. It Gets Me There . . . and It's Paid For.
- Cheapskates Come out of the Closet
- Insurance: Betting on Yourself
- Cheapskates Just Wanna Have Fun
- Back to the Future?
Everyone picks out different nuggets from books with a lot of good ideas in them, and this book is no exception. Here are a few that rang true with me:
- Buying things made out of 93% post-consumer waste isn't green. Not buying the stuff in the first place is. Daniel Newman, a person Yeager quotes in the book in Chapter 5, page 103, said: “Cheap equals green. I'd go a step further and say that cheap is the only green. It's not about consuming green products. It's about consuming less.”
- “Don't sell yourself short by naming a price.” (Chapter 9, page 139) This is in reference to haggling, and hearkens back to when I read Roger Dawson's Secrets of Power Negotiating: The first person who speaks loses. I recently bought a drum set from a pawn shop. The marked price was $450. If push came to shove I'd probably have paid $425, but I asked the guy what he could do on the set. He came in at $325. I would have paid $100 more than I needed to if I had offered my price first.
- “Shopping isn't a cheapskate sport.” (Chapter 1, page 25-26) This one hit me at my core presents on The Interwebs: “There's a common perception — a misperception, in my experience — that “cheapskate” is synonymous with “bargain hunter.” Ouch, that hurts a little bit. 🙂 But the point is well-taken: The drive to not shop at all is more cheapskate-ly than the drive to shop for the best price.
I recommend Jeff Yeager's book The Cheapskate Next Door. No doubt just one good idea that hits your thrifty bone in the book will pay for the book many times over.
