Book Review: Meet the Frugalwoods

Bill here, while Teresa wrote a wonderful book on frugality called “Fed, Safe and Sheltered,” that doesn’t mean it’s the only book on the subject worth reading. While (spoiler alert!) she had some problems with “Meet the Frugalwoods,” she recommends two books at the end of her review that she feels are better.

I’ve done a lot of reading about thrift, self-reliance, and financial independence over the last two decades. It’s a subject near and dear to my heart as what could be more interesting than being able to do the work I want to do and not be a slave to some job I hate?

Financial independence is so important to me and my family that I changed how we lived so we too, as a household, could gain some freedom. I’ve established regular ways of doing things so we stay on our track of not spending any money we don’t have to. Despite everything I’ve learned, I still keep an eye out for new books on the subject as you never know when you will learn something new and useful. Also, reading about thrift and financial independence as achieved by other people helps me stay focused.

It’s inspiring. Other people’s hard work reminds me to keep going and that thrift, like physical fitness, has to be maintained.

You don’t get there and then stop, finished forever. Like life, it’s a process and you’ll never, ever be done until you pass onto your reward.

So I was very interested when I discovered Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living by Elizabeth Willard Thames. Naturally, I got the book from the library.

I had never heard of these people before but they, Mr. and Mrs. Frugalwood, live a happy, debt-free, self-sufficient lifestyle on their sixty-six-acre homestead in the woods of Vermont. Mrs. Frugalwood keeps a blog and has since 2014 or so. It details all their adventures in thrift and how this thriftiness enabled them to flee the city (Cambridge, Mass.) and made their current lifestyle possible.

It’s an interesting book, both for what it says and for what it doesn’t say.

I fully agree with Mrs. Frugalwood’s basic themes. Nobody cares about your family and its well-being like you do. You may not control the amount of your income, but you can control how you spend it. There are nearly always cheaper alternatives to buying new. Plan for the long haul. Distinguish clearly between needs and wants. Many needs are actually wants in disguise. You need a place to live in, but does it have to be in a special part of town? You need a car for transportation, but does it have to be brand-new? And finally, you can do it, if you really want to and you set your mind to it. But you gotta wanna. Financial freedom won’t drop into your lap without plenty of effort on your part.

This is all 100% true.

Doing all those boring, mundane things such as hanging winter laundry and saying “NO” continuously helped my household so when my husband got laid off, we weren’t thrown into an instant panic. Instead, he became the full-time writer he always wanted to be, and I’m writing too.

Here’s what I didn’t like about the book.

Despite all Mrs. Frugalwood’s self-flagellating discussions of her “privilege,” she carefully glosses over the most important privilege she and her husband have. A quick survey of Google shows that they are rich. They may not claim to be rich, but when the median income of a U.S. household in 2017 is about $58,000 and their annual income (based on public records since Mr. Frugalwoods still works for a non-profit and she used to) is over $200,000; well, you do the math.

They’re rich.

We’ve never earned more than the median income for our entire household. In fact, it was a happy day when we made a taxable income of $53,000 in 2012. We couldn’t believe we’d broken $50,000. Then my husband got laid off and since then we’ve lived off our savings as we make a go of the writing business. Let me tell you, this would have been impossible except we’d paid off our house and we had zero debt. I’d be standing behind a supermarket cash register right now, instead of writing this review. Even so, we’re burning through our savings and it has been damn difficult to compress our spending still further. Life insurance? Bye-bye! One car for four licensed drivers? That’s us. Free lunch program at school? You bet! Keeping the house at 64 degrees during the winter? Put on a second sweater and quit complaining.

I think very few of us have to spend every nickel that we do; there are always choices. But it is hard and the smaller your income, the harder it becomes to cut back spending still further to save up an emergency fund and to pay off debt. Money is freedom from hassle. Money is a safety net. More money means you have more freedom of action. The closer you live to the bone, the less room you have to make mistakes. If your income is below the median, you already know this and it’s hugely, enormously irritating to have some rich woman tell you to be thrifty and all your dreams will come true and financial freedom is within your grasp.

Don’t misunderstand me. Mrs. Frugalwood isn’t wrong. But she also isn’t admitting how the lower your income is to start with, the longer it will take for your household to get to financial freedom. She’s also not talking about how you, if you are starting way down on the food chain, may never get there. But you can get closer; closer so you have some money tucked away in an emergency fund to fix the car when the transmission falls out. Closer so you can take an unpaid day off from work when your kid gets sick. Closer so you can afford the upfront price of giant, economy size packages of toilet paper that cost so much less per roll than buying the small packages, just like the giant, economy size jug of laundry soap costs far less per load than those teensy, cheaper bottles cost when you price out what you are really paying per use.

If you look at what she says about how they got to Vermont by their early thirties and look around at your life and wonder why you haven’t been able to save half your income; well, you probably weren’t earning six figures either. Don’t compare yourself to Mrs. Frugalwood. She didn’t start at the start line like the rest of us; she and her husband were already a lap ahead of us at the start of the race.

But don’t discount her either. She’s not wrong. You can get closer to your goals by controlling how you handle your income.

It’s still hard to save serious money. Nothing in our culture encourages thrift. Reward yourself! You deserve it! Treat yourself! You’ve heard every one of those messages your entire life (I know I have) and those messages do not encourage staying home to eat frozen pizza and watch a DVD from the library. There are plenty of six-figure income people who live paycheck to paycheck. Unbelievable, I know, but it is true. It takes self-discipline, team effort, and a vision of a better future to say ‘no’ all the time. It’s so much easier and so much more fun to say ‘yes’.

So as for Mrs. Frugalwood’s book: should you read it? Sure, why not. She’s not wrong. However, get your copy from the library (she doesn’t need your money and your tax dollars already paid for that book) and read those one-star reviews online carefully.

The book you should buy is Amy Dacyczyn’s The Complete Tightwad Gazette published way back in 1998. The prices are dated and so is some of the information but Amy’s book is still the best guide to achieving financial freedom I’ve ever found. You can easily find a copy in most libraries or online at abebooks.com starting at $6. She made it possible for my household to get there. Start by reading the success stories at the back of the book if you don’t believe me. Those people made it and you can too.

The other book you should think seriously about is Your Money or Your Life: Nine Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. It’s been revised a few times since its original publication. The edition doesn’t matter since the important information remains the same.

The Frugalwood family website can be visited here.