Today at Zen Habits, Leo reviewed “the cheapskate’s Bible,” Amy Dacyczyn’s The Complete Tightwad Gazette. I love this book — it’s one of my favorite inspirations for money-saving ideas. Leo also pointed to a 1990 article from Dacyczyn that describes how she made the leap to frugality, and how it helped her to achieve her dreams:
I am a compulsive tightwad. People who know me believe that I worry too much about money, that I don’t spend enough on myself, and that I don’t know how to have any fun. Even Depression-era relatives think that I am too thrifty. One Christmas an aunt gave me two boxes of aluminum foil after learning that I reused the stuff. (I made one box last for two years.)
[...]
This year we realized our dream. Our family (with four children) moved into our rural pre-1900 New England farmhouse (with attached barn). Were we too thrifty? When we got married our joint financial assets barely paid for the budget wedding. We owned almost nothing. In other words, we started from ZERO.
[...]
Certainly the reusing of aluminum foil did not greatly contribute to our dream. Rather, it was the attention to all the thousands of ways we spent our money that made a tremendous difference. Our success was very much a gradual learning process. We made many very big mistakes. Had we known in the beginning what we know now I am certain we could have saved several thousand more.
Dacyczyn’s story was one of several in the “What is Enough?” issue of IN CONTEXT magazine. Other articles I’ve bookmarked for 
later reading include:
- How much is enough? by Vicki Robin — “‘Enoughness’ doesn’t mean voluntary poverty — it means discovering who you really are.”
- Lifestyles of the rich in spirit — “Stories from people whose lives are a testimony to the possibility of a simpler, more meaningful life.
- Getting past hawkers by Vernon Huffman — “How to keep advertising from ruining your life.”
- Purging the urge to splurge by Vicki Robin — “50 simple things you can do instead of shopping.”
I’ve witnessed the power of frugality in my own life. Pinching pennies is painful at first, but when you begin to see the rewards, you realize that the sacrifices have been worth it.
[IN CONTEXT: They call me the Frugal Zealot]
SEARCH FOR RECENT ARTICLES
I checked out a copy of The Tightwad Gazette from my local library and tried to read it. I gave up about a third of the way through.
All of the techniques and recommendations seem so nickel and dime, so small potatoes, that they seem practially inconsequential. I have no doubts that if you implement *all* of them, you’ll save yourself a lot of money. I can’t help but feel that doing so would take a *huge* amount of time. An hour I spend washing out ziplock bags and flattening out tinfoil may save me a dollar, but that’s an hour that I can’t bill to a customer for web development. You can bet I’ll earn a lot more than that dollar I would’ve saved.
I appreciate that these tips may work better for a mom who’s primary job is raising kids and managing a household, and I respect that, but I don’t have kids and my wife and I both have a full-time day job as well as both doing freelance consulting and web development on the side. We’d lose more money than we’d save if we tried most of these tips.
I also returned the book to the library two days late. I’m sure that somewhere out there, Mrs. Dacyczyn is grinding her teeth over my wasted thirty cents.
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It is interesting to contemplate that The Tightwad Gazette was mostly about doing things to save money, but Amy Dacyczyn said that the biggest savings were in what you don’t do. Just think of it this way: if you don’t buy a new BMW for $40k, instead buying a used Honda for $10K you’ve “made” $30k in an afternoon.
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OK. So it seems the site refreshed and published my content before I was finished. Anyway, there are a ton of ways to not spend money, and only some of them involve reusing tinfoil and washing plastic bags. Some of them are big, like painting the house instead of having it painted (save $2.5K), some are medium sized, like replacing your own break pads on the car (save $30-60), and some are small like reusing tinfoil and plastic bags (save $3-10). If you follow the 80-20 rule and go for the 20 percent that spends 80 percent of your money, you will be significantly better off…
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Wishing you a prosperous future,
Daiko
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This is pretty funny, but I swear to Chad, no joke, on my honor: Two weeks ago I visited my parents, who, along with some friends, just painted their house and saved a ton of money on it. To prepare for the trip, I replaced my brake pads.
Those were the sorts of things I hoped to find in The Tightwad Gazette. I didn’t find enough to keep me reading past the first third of the book.
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It seems to me that attitude is more important than content in regard to the Tightwad Gazette. It reminds me of the 4 Hour Work week in this regard. If you are aware of what your time is worth and the task at hand is wasting money then don’t do it. On the other side of the coin, maybe occasionally doing something that you thought would be wasteful just to find out the truth for yourself couldn’t hurt either.
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Oh, please, you could wash a whole year’s worth of ziplock bags in a hour. Do you throw out dishes because they take to long to wash? Somewhere is one of the Tightwad books there is a study of the time versus money saved in reusing bags.
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Lynda Says:
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Oh, please, you could wash a whole year’s worth of ziplock bags in a hour. Do you throw out dishes because they take to long to wash? Somewhere is one of the Tightwad books there is a study of the time versus money saved in reusing bags.
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I think you’re either missing my point or avoiding it. If I spent an hour washing ziplock bags, re-flattening used tinfoil, making children’s halloween costumes out of cardboard boxes and spare parts from the garage, mixing my own granola, or most of the other *literally* nickel and dime hints in this book, I’d certainly save myself a few bucks. Let’s say I somehow manage to collect a whole bunch of tips out of these books. Some save more money, some save less. Let’s say I pick good ones, ones that on average take a minute to do each (including the time it takes to switch between tasks, putting away the last one and getting out the next, because we aren’t going to spend all day washing ziplocks). Let’s say these good ones average me ten cents saved each time I complete a task. That’s the same as ten cents *earned*. Not bad, right?
Ten cents a minute. Sixty minutes an hour. Six bucks an hour? What kind of wages is that? Man, I need better tricks. How about some tricks that earn me *fifty* cents a minute? That would pay me… thirty dollars an hour. Not bad, I guess. Are there a lot of tricks in there that average out to fifty cents a minute? I didn’t see them.
The next part is an exercise for the reader. Ask your friend the freelance web designer how much she charges per hour. Ask her if she’d earn better money doing an hour of contract work, or spending an hour on two dozen ziplock-washing-type tasks.
Somebody higher in the thread mentioned the 4 Hour Work Week. I haven’t read it myself, but I’m familiar with it. I don’t have solid numbers to back this up, but I have a hunch that if I squeezed Tightwad Gazette dry, I’d have ten or twenty hours worth of stuff I could do each month to save money and I might save fifty or sixty bucks. If I spent *one* hour freelancing I’d make more than that, and I’d have the rest of the time to spend on… well, not washing ziplocks, you can be sure.
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Heh.
The books themselves say that most of the “tips” are examples of how to solve the problem of not spending money.
You’re paraphrasing the article on calculating hourly wage.
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Washing out ziploc bags makes no sense when we are in the middle of a drought.
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I love those books. I read all of them several times. She found things that worked for her and had the newsletter with people who also shared their ways of saving money so that they could be financially independent and she did not ”require anyone else to do it.”
I easily wash out a few ziplocs. It saves me money, sure only a few cents on the bags, but also the time to walk, or the fuel to drive to the store to get more of them. Saves a little space in the landfill and hey, took me no more time than rinsing a plate.
I don’t dumpster dive, but have been known to pick up furniture from the side of the road and refinish it to use or give or sell. One mans trash…
I don’t think it is just for house moms. I think it is a mind set. How do I hold onto more of my money and how do I have more time that is just mine, are the questions she asked herself each day. And apparently she saved enough money to be financially independent, work as much as she wanted, did not get into credit card debt and is probably making a very small carbon footprint on the earth. She shaved away all the ”vanity” and the ”status symbols” in her life to make a better life, a responsible life–car insurance, health insurance, investments,–living in a way that won’t interfere with other peoples choices. She isn’t looking for the gov’t to pay her healthcare, she took charge of that. And she only suggests to those who want to hear it. There are people who love to live in credit card debt–which is code for living beyond ones means, usually because they feel they deserve it even though they have not worked for it. There are tons of folks who don’t mind living on food stamps–mostly used for junk foods and using medicaid–to treat ill health due to poor habits and nutrition, for those categories of people her observations won’t work. But there are others who want something different and they can have their place in the world as well.
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Anyone who think it is time consuming or wasteful to wash a ziploc bag is missing the point. You wash other things in your kitchen. While you are cleaning up, it takes **seconds** to swish a baggie around in dishwater, rinse it off and turn it inside out and upside down to dry. It takes no more time than walking to the trash can and throwing one away, or walking to the drawer or cabinet to get a fresh one.
You don’t save dirty baggies until there is a whole load of them like you do laundry, wash it off as you use them like you wash the dishes!
This is not an either or concept. Just because your time is valuable as a wage earner doesnt mean you don’t have time for simple concepts that can save both time and money! Do both and you will maximize the money that you do earn. If you take the time to eat and wash your dishes then you have the time to do tiny things like wash the baggie and the foil too. Living frugaly is all in having an attitude of using less and spending less.
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