We don’t insist on a brush-full of toothpaste, we eat store brands, and we shop at thrift stores. We do it without my old investment-bank salary, and there have been periods where we have done it on just one income. My family lives in an old house in one of Chicago’s nicer neighborhoods, and we like to travel. Raising six kids in an old house on a small farm isn’t exactly a frugal lifestyle choice, and Dacyczyn admits it. It’s not so much that everyone wants to live a dirt-cheap life, but that we all have things that are more important to us than others. The book has a lot of tips on saving money on long-distance and how to re-ink printer ribbons.īut what sticks with me is the philosophy. Other bits of advice are not applicable (I’m not going to buy and store 50-pounds bags of potatoes for a three-person family), and much of it is dated. Some of the advice was so darn obvious: of course the toothpaste companies run ads showing the entire brush covered with toothpaste when only a pea-sized amount will do! No matter how rich you are, why would you want to use more toothpaste than you have to? It doesn’t make your teeth cleaner, and you can’t impress other people with your toothpaste extravagance. I first found the books when I was a burned-out investment analyst, trying to figure out what to do with my life.

Dacyczyn has said that the irony of it all is that they ended up with more money than she and her husband ever imagined because they turned their thrift into a business. They started living frugally out of necessity, and they had so much fun with it that they kept it up. She and her husband wanted to raise a large family (six children) on a small farm in Maine, without sending the kids to day care. It’s a compilation of newsletters on thrifty living that Amy Dacyczyn started in 1990. I’ve been re-reading The Complete Tightwad Gazette, looking for inspiration for Chicago on the Cheap.

The tightwad gazette book