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.

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.

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.

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.