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The Complete Cheapskate: How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out, and Break Free from Money Worries Forever
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| List Price: | $13.95 |
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Product Description
Let America's most popular cheapskate show you how to go from financial chaos to freedom and security--painlessly and in less time than you ever imagined.
Mary Hunt has helped thousands live a debt-free life with her popular newsletter, "The Cheapskate Monthly." In The Complete Cheapskate, Mary puts all the very best money advice she has in one place. Becoming a classy, dignified cheapskate is not all that difficult, and Mary shows how with her user-friendly principles of saving, restraint, and living debt-free.
This book will teach you how to:
- Create--and stick to--a monthly spending plan
- Live well off 80% of your income
- Climb out--and stay out--of debt's hole
- Stretch every dollar to its absolute maximum
- Manage savings and investments
- Lower bills on clothes, food, and gifts without lowering living standards
- Live within a financial plan that includes a margin for fun and spontaneity
With hundreds of tips on cutting expenses, The Complete Cheapskate is the indispensable guide for people ready to regain control of their finances, relieve the stress money has created, and prepare for their future.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #22735 in Books
- Published on: 2003-08-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 208 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Hunt knows how to live on the cheap, and she's proud of it. Although she's probably doing just fine (after the roaring success of her newsletter, "The Cheapskate Monthly," and her previous books, including Mary Hunt's Debt-Proof Living and Cheapskate Monthly Money Makeover), Hunt has thousands of tips for lowering bills, managing savings, getting out of debt and changing your attitude about money. In a chipper, conversational tone, Hunt explains how she became a cheapskate, what readers need to do in order to become cheapskates themselves, and how following her advice will help them achieve financial freedom. Eschewing heavy financial talk, Hunt focuses on simple methods for getting out of debt-e.g., how to develop a "Freedom Account" to handle irregular expenses, and how to shop more economically for groceries. This is an uncomplicated guide squarely aimed at helping those in tight financial straits.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Mary Hunt is the creator and publisher of "The Cheapskate Monthly," a newsletter that has provided help and advice since 1992 to overspenders and those burdened with debt. Author of several books on living debt-free and a popular speaker, she has appeared on such shows as Good Morning America and The Oprah Winfrey Show, and she has been featured in USA Today, U.S. News and World Report, Newsday, and The Wall Street Journal. She lives with her husband in Orange County, California.
Customer Reviews
Read it, Believe it, Do it!
This book changed my life. It only took five years. I now have $0 bills and a nice nest egg. Just follow the advice in the book to the letter. I give this book to everyone I care about.
PSA: The Author's a Fraud
Her style is annoying and smarmy, but that's the least of it. Claiming it came to her "out of the blue," Mary Hunt stole her newsletter idea (and story ideas and some illustrations) from Amy Dacyzyn's Tightwad Gazette (Dacyzyn has records that Hunt subscribed to her newsletter from Dec 91 - 93; Dacyzyn corresponded with Hunt regarding obvious "copying" of ideas and illustrations but Hunt did not reply or attribute the source).* First called "Cheapskate Monthly" and now "Debt-Free Living," the preview issue on Hunt's website likewise presents unattributed ideas as Hunt's own (Heloise's vinegar hints, for instance). She advises you to buy a house at half the price that you can afford, make double payments so that you can pay off the mortgage in "about five years," and then sell that home and buy the house of your dreams. This is a program outlined in Ted Carroll's LIVE DEBT FREE (published 1991), which she cites (amazingly!) in "Complete Cheapskate" but claims as her own idea on her website. "Owning your home free and clear," she says, "...is what Harold and I are working on now." (Cough, cough! She's had plenty of time to put her plan into action, plenty of dollars to do it, and she's "still working on" it?!?) Meanwhile she has churned out an armload of books and regurgitated her ideas for every TV camera she can find. She doesn't have to practice what she preaches because she hauls in the dollars of the faithful through coaching seminars, books, and her newsletter (a $29.95 value, she claims, but if you check it out, you'll see it is a compendium of links to other sources, outdated quotations, and self-promotion).
I'm afraid that with the current economy, a lot of people will be tricked into shelling out for this kind of warmed-over hash. Check it out at the library, if you must, but don't buy it. I've found Ron Blue's Master Your Money to be a more practical, Christian and truthful resource. Amy Dacyzyn's work is the original (which is why she is so widely copied). Flylady.net has budgeting and checkbook hygiene advice; googling will provide more information than you can ever process. Why doesn't Mary just admit that the way she got out of debt and broke free from money worries was not by being a cheapskate, but by being a plagiarist?
*Sept. 1996, Issue 76, The Tightwad Gazette
Doesn't help much
Being the ultimate cheapskate I went to the library to look at this book to see if I would want to buy it. I am so glad I didn't buy it first. Everything in this book you can look up in the net for free. There are no suggestions that I haven't seen before.
If you are brand new to the frugal experience, save your money and do web surfing instead. You are already paying for that.
