In less than seven years we saved $49,000, made significant purchases (vehicles, appliances, furniture) of $38,000, and were completely debt-free! That is an annual savings/investment rate of over $12,500 per year, or 43% of our gross income.” (See p.4 of The Tightwad Gazette I) In book one, Amy says, “Over the years our average income has been less than $30,000 (including my husband’s Navy salary and all allowances, plus my spotty free-lance income). Since it was all written many years ago, sometimes the ideas seem outdated or something that you may not choose to do, like dumpster diving, but Amy gives so many great ideas, that you can pick and choose what you would like to do to save money.Īmy writes from experience since she accomplished her goal to buy a rural pre-1900 New England farmhouse on one income in 1989. The author, Amy Dacyczyn (pronounced Decision) has a humorous and practical approach to writing and to saving money.
It gives ideas for saving on clothes, food, vacations, buying homes, decorating, and activities with your children. The Tightwad Gazette is a compilation of ways to be thrifty. The subtitle of The Tightwad Gazette is Promoting Thrift as a Viable Alternative Lifestyle. The lesson from that is- it is much cheaper to eat at home, not buy uniforms, not run out gas, not pay for childcare, and not to spend money to reward yourself with vacations and pleasures to make up for working so hard. The weird thing is-we always had debt when I worked and was able to get out of debt when I didn’t. We, however, could not learn the lesson of the value of being debt free and later, around 2004, after I went back to work, once more accrued a frightful amount of debt and had to go through the hard process of paying it off, again.įinally the lessons took, and we have now been debt free since about 2011 and would never want to go back.
If memory serves me right, we had about $50,000 in debt at that time, which we paid off in five years using the principles from the newsletters and later books. While my children studied beside me, I absorbed the information from The Tightwad Gazette and put it into practice. We dropped down from two pretty good sized salaries to one.
At the time of publication I had worked in nursing for fourteen years and had taken a break to stay home with our two children to home school them. The Tightwad Gazette started as a newsletter and was later published in book form in 1993. I’ve been writing blogposts about heavy things lately and decided to lighten the mood today with a review of The Tightwad Gazette.
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