the complete tightwad gazette the tightwad gazette iii

You can fight back, and The Complete Tightwad Gazette will show you how. The culture wants you to mortgage your future - and thanks to college loans - your children’s future, to fatten the coming quarter’s bottom line. The culture is focused on enslaving you in debt in order to make a profit. Successfully fighting the culture of spend spend spend? Only an idiot would do that, she implied. She said that he deserves our pity, not our scorn, for diverting potentially as much as a $100K away from the banks and into his own pocket. Recognizing a threat, she claimed that “he didn’t have much of a life at all” for those three years he worked on cutting his debt. If people could learn self-discipline and self-education and not buy her advice, she’d be out of a job. Helaine Olen, the author of “Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry,” had decided that Cooper represented a threat to her livelihood. Recently, a personal finance writer at Slate lambasted a thrifty Canadian, Sean Cooper, who paid off a $255,000 mortgage in little more than three years. A 2015 survey found that 47% of people could not come up with $400 to meet an unexpected bill without borrowing it. Then she started a newsletter to share the news that you didn’t have to have two incomes to raise a family, that you could pay off the mortgage early, that you could live a good life by ignoring the culture that demanded you get into debt and buy a lot of things we don’t really need to be happy.Īs a result, we live in a society that is largely debt-free, that saves for retirement, where advertising is ignored, and people who are very good a saving money are looked up to, while those who ostentatiously flaunt their wealth are rejected.Ĭan you still hear me? I might have my tongue too far into my check.īecause the truth is that frugality is looked down on.

She married a man who was in the Navy and who shared her dream, learned to scrimp and save, cut corners where she could, and succeeded.

Back in 1980s, Amy Dacyczyn began fulfilling her dream of having a large family and living in a pre-1900 New England farmhouse with an attached barn.

The complete tightwad gazette the tightwad gazette iii