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The Cheapskate Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americans Living Happily Below Their Means - Softcover

Yeager, Jeff

 
9780767931328: The Cheapskate Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americans Living Happily Below Their Means
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0767931327 ISBN 13: 9780767931328
Verlag: Crown, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

America’s Ultimate Cheapskate is back with all new secrets for how to live happily below your means, á la cheapskate.  For The Cheapskate Next Door, Jeff Yeager tapped his bargain-basement-brain-trust, hitting the road to interview and survey hundreds of his fellow cheapskates to divulge their secrets for living the good life on less. 
     Jeff reveals the 16 key attitudes about money – and life – that allow the cheapskates next door to live happy, comfortable, debt-free lives while spending only a fraction of what most Americans spend.  Their strategies will change your way of thinking about money and debunk some of life’s biggest money myths.  For example, you’ll learn:  how to cut your food bill in half and eat healthier as a result; how your kids can get a college education without ever borrowing a dime; how to let the other guy pay for deprecation by learning the secrets of buying used, not abused; how you can save serious money by negotiating and bartering; and how – if you know where to look – there’s free stuff and free fun all around you.
     The Cheapskate Next Door also features dozens of original “Cheap Shots” – quick, money saving tips that could save you more than $25,000 in a single year!  Cheap Shots give you the inside scoop on: 
 
-- How to save hundreds on kids’ toys;
-- What inexpensive old-fashioned kitchen appliance can save you more than $200 a year;
-- How you can travel the world without ever having to pay for lodging;
-- What single driving tip can save you $30,000 during your lifetime;
-- Even how to save up to 40% on fine wines (and we’re not talking about the kind that comes in a box). 
 
From simple money saving tips to truly life changing financial strategies, the cheapskates next door know that the key to financial freedom and enjoying life more is not how much you earn, but how much you spend. 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeff Yeager is the author of The Ultimate Cheapskate’s Road Map to True Riches, and has appeared as a guest correspondent on the NBC Today Show and Discovery’s Planet Green network. 

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Chapter 1

The Phrenology of Frugality:

16 Idiosyncrasies of the Cheapskate Mind

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four

Americans is suffering from some form of mental

illness. Think of your three best friends. If they

are okay, then it's you.

-Rita Mae Brown

Are you saying that people will be happier if they shop less?" Judging from the way she was sneering at me across the faux-news desk, it was clear that the local noonday TV anchorwoman wasn't asking a rhetorical question. She looked like she'd bought-and was wearing-one of everything that QVC was selling that day. And her clothes clearly weren't all she'd bought. Her extensive cosmetic surgery reminded me of a roadside billboard I once saw for a plastic surgeon just across the border in Mexico: "U Pay 4 UR Face + Hips?. . . I do UR Breasts 4 Free!"

I'd endeared myself to her earlier by arriving for the interview on my bicycle, in a sweat-stained T-shirt. Suffice it to say that we came from different worlds.

"But shopping is what we do. Shopping is what makes us happy. Are you crazy?" she said, looking at me like I must have been hitting the box wine in the green room before the interview.

Well, the cheapskate's brain is definitely wired differently, of that I'm convinced. You don't need to spend much time around us or be trained as a psychiatrist (or local news anchor) to figure that out. Whether we're born that way or we pick up certain attitudes and beliefs about life as we go along, the cheapskate next door sees the world a bit differently than most folks.

Here's a brief tour of the cheapskate mindset-a synopsis of the sixteen key synapses that set the cheapskate next door apart from the typical American consumer.

1. The Joneses Can Kiss Our Assets

"Welcome to the Taj Mahovel!" Jacquie Phelan greeted me with a big smile and friendly hug on the doorstep of the eclectic house in Fairfax, California, where she's lived with her husband, Charlie, for the past twenty-six years.

As I'd driven down their street, I had trouble spotting addresses on the immaculately maintained, über-yuppiefied, overly remodeled houses that lined the pleasant lane. But when I saw the warren of little outbuildings strung together by pergolas constructed of every type of salvaged material imaginable, I knew I'd arrived at Jacquie's house. This was clearly the house of someone who wasn't concerned about what the Joneses think. This house had to belong to a cheapskate.

"A few years ago we heard a realtor walking past our house with some prospective buyers, and they were talking about how tacky some of the homes on the street are," Jacquie told me as we sat having lunch under a lean-to made of scrap lumber (aka "The Habitat") in their jungly side yard. "And I piped back to the real estate agent from inside the Habitat, 'It's going to stay that way, too!' "

My lunch with Jacquie and Charlie, by the way, was chicken soup and a truly tasty array of little finger foods, most of which

my Freegan hostess told me she'd salvaged the previous evening from dumpsters behind area markets. "Hmm?. . . ?trash-can tapas," I thought to myself. "There's a first time for everything." (Among other journalistic enterprises, Jacquie writes about her unique approach to food and cooking on her blog, "Salivation Army," at phelanfood.wordpress.com.)

Don't get me wrong: Jacquie and Charlie's house isn't a public hazard or anything like that. In fact, it's kind of cool and rather pretty in its own Hobbit-treehouse-ish way. It's just that it's a house designed to please the people who live in it, and not necessarily the people who live next door to it. According to Jacquie, it's also the couple's personal attempt to help "stem the seemingly inevitable shift of the neighborhood from a cozy place, filled with humble homes" into one of "investment (properties) for upwardly mobile but of course deeply-in- debt people" who have no time to become part of the community-and no intention of staying there once they can afford to move on and gentrify the next modest-but-content neighborhood.

Will Rogers once said, "Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like." Well, he wasn't talking about the cheapskates next door.

When asked the question "On a scale of one to ten, with one being not important at all and ten extremely important, how concerned are you about 'keeping up with the Joneses' (i.e., maintaining economic status/ appearances with your peers)?" roughly 85 percent of cheapskates ranked it as "one," not important at all. (Incidentally, of the remaining 15 percent of respondents, more than half took the liberty of going off the chart and rating it as a "zero" or even less!)

Because of the cheapskates' strong sense of self-worth, they rarely covet the lifestyle or material possessions of others, and have little desire to try to impress other people or keep up appearances. Dylan Davis, of Twinsburg, Ohio, wrote: "We make more money than almost everyone we know, but spend less than all of our peers?. . . neither of us cares what other people think about us."

That's not to say that cheapskates are always immune to peer pressure. And luckily, there are things you can do to ward off the big green monster when he does come calling.

Gerald Thomson told me about a time when his wife, Julia, came home from work feeling a little envious of the big homes some of her coworkers were buying. "She sat down at the computer and submitted our financial information to see how much of a mortgage we could qualify for. Once she saw that we could qualify to purchase a larger home, she felt better. As long as she knew we could keep up with the Joneses, but choose not to, she was able to keep focused on our early retirement goals."

2. A Cheapskate Values Time More than Money

In my conversations with the cheapskates next door, I was struck by how often they spoke about the value and cost of things not in terms of dollars and cents, but rather days and hours. It's like cheapskates have their own currency. They automatically convert the price of things into the currency of time-their own time.

We've always heard that "time is money." Cheapskates tend to reverse that axiom, making it "money is time." A new pair of boots might cost $150, but for Clara, the cheapskate who makes $32,000 a year, those boots cost close to two days of her time spent working in a job that she doesn't really enjoy. When Clara looks at it in those terms and considers what else she might do with that time and that money, she decides that her old boots will do just fine.

The idea of translating money into the cost of your time was popularized-and maybe pioneered-by Vicki Robin and the late Joe Dominguez in their bestselling book Your Money or Your Life (Penguin Books, reissued in 2008). The authors present various formulas and exercises to help readers determine the true value of their time-or "life energy," in the authors' words-and evaluate whether you're really getting the most value out of the limited time we all have here on Earth. This classic book is credited by many cheapskates, myself included, with fundamentally reshaping their attitude toward money and life, and it was one of the most frequently recommended reference books by those responding to my questionnaire.

It's not unusual to encounter cheapskates who actually carry around a card in their wallets or purses with a homemade conversion chart on it, showing how much they earn in their jobs by the minute, hour, day, week, and so on. "It helps to put the true cost

of things in perspective," one card-carrying cheapskate told me. "When I think of the joy I get out of having a day off with my kids, or reading, or relaxing, or whatever?. . . stuff and the...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767931327
ISBN 13 
9780767931328
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Three Rivers Press
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