This time of year one’s thoughts turn towards family, friends, the best rum to decant into eggnog and – if you are like me, three years out of five – the vertiginous mountain of debt on your credit cards, and the financial reckoning that is breathing into your nostrils.
I’m not a reader of self-help books, unless cookbooks and old poetry anthologies count. But this time of year I often find myself lingering in the personal finance section of bookstores, hoping some painless and rain-making tip rubs off on me. Sometimes I’ll buy one of these crisp-looking money books, by Suze Orman or Dave Ramsey or some other brand name, and place it by my bedside, and then read something else.
This year the book that leapt into my uneager arms was Clark Howard’s Living Large in Lean Times, a tightwad manifesto that’s been lingering on the New York Times how-to best-seller list all fall. Mr Howard is himself a brand name. He has a popular daily syndicated talk radio show, a weekly programme on the HLN cable channel and is the author of several previous books. He sometimes refers to himself as “El Cheapo Man”.
His new book is at once gloomy and upbeat, like an Arcade Fire song. He believes the American economy is a full 5 to 10 years away from rebounding. He also believes that if you devote yourself to his admonitions – that is, to the tormenting details of “saving more, spending less, and avoiding getting ripped off” – you can get a handle on your wallet and maybe even your life.
Much of Mr Howard’s advice is commonsensical and timeless: check your credit card statements carefully, comparison-shop for healthcare. Yet some of it delighted me. Who knew you could make one disposable razor blade last for a year simply by drying it well after each use? Or that Century Gothic is the most economical font to print in? The companies that charge gouging sums for razorblade and ink cartridge replacements are loathsome, and any chance to stick it to them must be aggressively seized.
One thing to know about Mr Howard is that he will ask you to relinquish a good bit of your pride. Mr Howard’s book is not about elegant thrift. It is about unhip and sometimes unhinged penny-pinching, qualities that have endeared him to his fans. “I have always been cheap,” he says, “which I define as being willing to accept lower quality for a lower price.”
Thus he will have you buying an artificial Christmas tree, used clothes and off-brand electronics, and also attending a community college, at least at the start of your higher education. You will clip coupons and perhaps operate a call centre out of your living room. He will make you pay attention as never before to Benjamin Franklin’s dictum that one should “beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.”
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The only way to read a book like this one, packed as it is with gimmicks on every page, is to filter it for advice that seems plausible and might fit how you live. When I saw that Mr Howard’s very first tip was to “search for unclaimed money in your name” on websites like MissingMoney.com and Unclaimed.org, I nearly gave his book to my dogs as a chew toy.
When, in full reportorial mode, I entered my name into both sites, however, I was floored to get three hits, two for my late grandfather from West Virginia and one for me. These will probably turn out to be time-consuming red herrings. But I stopped scoffing at (most of) Mr Howard’s tutorial.
I focused intently on the food sections in Mr Howard’s book, because that’s where a lot of my money goes. Mr Howard will have you taking a second look at grocery store house brands, which he says have improved, ending your consumption of bottled water and steering clear of organic products unless the label reads “100% organic”.
He’ll have you reading novels that are in the public domain, and thus free, on your Kindle. He likes Netflix, hates cable and satellite TV firms and recommends renting movies from those kiosks where they can be had for one dollar a night.
He loves Twitter as an outlet for consumer pique. If you ask a hotel to bring up clean towels and they put you off, he suggests, tweet about it. “Hotel management may ring your room and offer, ‘We’re sorry you were unhappy with the lack of clean towels today. Can we come by now and drop some off for you?’ ” These Twitter outbursts work best if a) you have plenty of followers and b) your tone is less outraged than wittily perplexed.
Two things will probably prevent me, now that I’ve read this book, from picking it up again. One, the writing is generic at best, the prose equivalent of truck-stop lighting. Two, Mr Howard makes it clear how much effort and devotion it takes to live the tightwad lifestyle; one must constantly troll dozens of websites for deals in every aspect of one’s life. It’s the sort of time only the unemployed truly have.
Still, here’s a warm holiday toast to El Cheapo Man – the bubbly is prosecco, not Champagne – $7.95 a pop at budgetbottle.com, and actually pretty tasty.
CLARK HOWARD’S LIVING LARGE IN LEAN TIMES
250+ Ways to Buy Smarter, Spend Smarter, and Save Money
By Clark Howard with Mark Meltzer and Theo Thimou
258 pages; Rs 18
©2011 The New York Times News Service