http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2007/07/27/review-the-complete-tightwad-gazette/
Review: The Complete Tightwad Gazette
My first exposure to the Tightwad Gazette was on the sitting table at a friend’s house. I actually remember them having several copies of the original newsletter, and I flipped through several issues of it, utterly amazed that there was this much that could be written on how to save money. Some of them seemed massively over the top, some of them seemed like common sense (my family did them), and others seemed like clever ideas, but they were all entertaining. It’s very similar to the impression I have of it today, actually.
Promoting thrift as a viable alternative lifestyle is the proud, loud subheading on the cover of the massive Complete Tightwad Gazette. Weighing in at a hefty 972 pages, this book is a compendium of the entire six year run of The Tightwad Gazette newsletter, a publication written and distributed quarterly between 1991 and 1996. The focus of all of the material is on frugal living in some form or another.
What’s inside? Virtually every article ever published in that newsletter, organized in an almost random fashion. The book is actually just a series of articles, almost like blog postings, from a seriously frugal individual. I would roughly estimate that the book contains about 1,200 short articles on specific topics of frugality. While the original newsletters aren’t reprinted verbatim, almost all of the vital information from each one is included in this tome...
http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2008/12/28/review-living-well-on-one-income/
Review: Living Well on One Income
Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book.
A week and a half ago, I wrote a piece about Christian themes in personal finance books. I wrote that piece mostly because I was trying to work through my feelings about this book.
Living Well on One Income by Cynthia Yates is an excellent book on how to seriously cut your income, particularly if you’re considering a family situation where only one member of the family is working. The book is absolutely loaded with great tips on this topic and I quite enjoyed reading it.
At the same time, though, the author is a Christian homeschooler that wears both beliefs on her sleeve to an extent that it often comes close to overshadowing the great tangible advice that the book contains. There are points in this book where Yates comes right up to the line of making this book about Christianity with a personal finance theme than personal finance with a Christian theme.
I have no real problem with this, actually. Yates is simply speaking from the heart here, revealing ideas she believes in to everyone. Where I become uncomfortable - and this is where I get uncomfortable quite often when reading material from Christian writers - is that theology is often very uneven ground. Different people interpret the Bible differently, and even though I define myself as a Christian, I often completely disagree with the interpretations of others, and in places throughout this book, I strongly disagreed with Cynthia Yates and her interpretations.
In short, I would have enjoyed this book quite a bit more if it were not bogged down with a lot of theology. Thus, as I discuss the book in detail below, I’m going to intentionally avoid the theology entirely and, in essence, review the book that’s under the hood here.
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I did a search at viaLibri and just bought this for $14.00. There were other very reasonable listings and some not so reasonable. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. This thread has proved expensive. :)