America’s Cheapest Family

The book America’s Cheapest Family Gets You Right on the Money: Your Guide to Living Better, Spending Less, and Cashing in on Your Dreams by Steve and Annette Economides is a book I would recommend to all of my readers. The Economides are the parents of five children and have pinched pennies to stay out of debt and build up their savings. They have paid cash for used cars, mastered thrifty shopping and paid off their first home in nine years, on an average salary of $35,000/year. They are now paying off their second, larger home and employing their same habits of thrift. This book shares how their budgeting, disdain for debt and money saving habits have helped them achieve these goals and taught the value of saving to their children.

This book has great suggestions on cutting auto costs, saving money at the grocery store, buying clothes for less and saving for vacations. The book also addresses the problems with debt and the virtue of savings. Although many of the ideas in the book I have learned other places, I picked up a few tips on saving money on healthcare and entertainment.

The main idea that I was impressed with in this book was how the Economides set up their budget. Their process is a little in-depth, so I’ll do my best to summarize but I would recommend either checking out this book at the library or buying it just to read about their system of budgeting.

Throughout the month the Economides recorded every transaction in their main checkbook and would pencil in a category (food, gas, recreation, etc) next to each entry. Then twice a month when they received their paycheck they would get out their budgeting notebook and do a more in depth budgeting session together.

They set up their notebook so that each category had its own page and was a “subaccount” of the checking account. The total of all of their categories was the amount they had in their checkbook. First they would transfer all of the transactions from the main register into each category and subtract what they had spent. They then would divide their paycheck up into each category and add in how much they had budgeted for each category until everything equalled the amount in their main checking account.

So for example, here’s what their subaccount clothing might look like.

97.00 (starting balance)
-20.00 (garage sales)
77.00
+30.00 (bi-weekly allotment for clothing)
107.00 (ending balance)

The thing that I liked the most about this system was that it’s set up so that you know how much money you have available for clothes, or repairs or other items at any given time. This way, even if it looks like you had $3,500 in your checking account and should have plenty available for entertainment, after you had seen how much was set aside for repairs, insurance, clothing, vacation and other expenses you would see you had much less available than you thought.

Overall, this book was a great read and got me psyched up for our savings goals this year. I also learned more about the different type of emergencies we should be saving for. I have to thank my sister Shaunda for recommending this book to me and I would recommend it to all of my readers regardless of your gift at thrift.

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• America’s Cheapest Family
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