Books

If you’re interested in frugality and simple living, then you should consider reading some of the following books on the subject. You can get them at the library for free, usually, or via inter-library loan if you’re impatient and can wait. Otherwise, you can usually find copies of them used for next to nothing.

  1. The Complete Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn – This is the book that got me started on my frugal journey. Actually, it’s a collection of three books, which were, in turn, collections of newsletter articles that were published by Amy Dacyczyn in the early 1990’s. She’s got a great attitude, and the books are all terrific and well worth reading.
  2. Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez – This has gone through multiple editions, but the basic idea if that when you work for a living, you’re trading hours of your life for money. But the amount of money you’re getting in return is less than you think. For example, let’s say you make $15/hour and work at a 40 hour a week job. You think you’re making $600 a week, right? But you need to figure out how much of that is net profit. If you commute 30 miles to and from work each day, and you get 20 miles per gallon on your car, then it costs you 300 miles of travel per week to get to and from work. That’s 15 gallons of gas. In my part of the country, gas is $3.75 per gallon, so you’re spending $56.25 to travel to and from work. On top of that, you need to add your commute time to the hours spent at your job. At an hour a day, that’s an extra 5 hours, so you have to calculate 45 hours a week at work. And if you’re like most people, you’re actually at work 9 hours a day, because you get an hour for lunch, but you spend that time thinking about work. So you’re REALLY making $600 for 50 hours of work, or $12 per hour. Subtract that $50 of travel costs, which amounts to about $1 per hour, and your REAL net is $11 per hour. But then, do you have to spend money on clothes for work that you wouldn’t spend otherwise? You have to calculate that in and divide it by the hours you work. Keep this up for a while, and you’ll find that the net profit you’re making per hour at work is a lot less than you thought it was.
  3. Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach – He actually wrote a book about frugality, too, but Ecotopia is a much better book. It’s a utopian science fiction novel about a society that lives an extremely green lifestyle, and there are a lot of lessons about the real meaning of frugality in it.
  4. Walden by Henry David Thoreau – This is THE original book about the philosophy behind frugal living, and even though it was written over a century ago, it’s still as powerful and easy-to-read as it was then.
  5. Of Permanent Value: The Story of Warren Buffett by Andrew Kilpatrick – This is a huge book, but it’s illustrative of a number of really cool concepts. For one thing, Buffett is one of the richest men in the world. For another, he’s famously frugal. You can learn a lot about how to live life, how to be frugal, and how to invest your money by reading this biography.