Title: Living Cheaply With Style: Live Better and Spend Less Author: Ernest Callenbach Year 1993 Publisher: Ronin Publishing Price: $9.95 US paperback Review by: Yvonne Jones Tripod Rating (out of four): 3.5

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I like thrift stores and flea markets more in theory than in practice. The dollar amount of my weekly paycheck would seem to demand that all my purchases come from places with "thrift" or "discount" in their names, but sometimes I long to rebel and purchase an item that hasn't been handed-down, marked-down, or sale-priced. When my twenty-something friends sneer that a mutual acquaintance is ridiculously "bourgeoise" or "some damn yuppie," I invariably think to myself, "God, I'd love to have enough money to have the option of becoming either one."

Still, I wouldn't mind being low-income if I had more of a flair for it. Living cheaply is easy when you have no other options. Doing so with style is a talent that has until recently eluded me. So when I found myself in a bookstore searching for some long out-of-print novel by a writer named Ernest Callenbach, and the clerk said sorry, but the only book they had of his was called Living Cheaply With Style, I considered it ... well, not a sign or anything, but something I'd probably want to take a peek at.

Callenbach says he wrote the book to help readers equip themselves to live a better life than they possibly could with a lot more money. Truthfully, there's little in the book that anyone living frugally hasn't thought about before. We all know that we should Avoid Buying Name Brands, Eat Before You Shop, Live By A Realistic Budget, Find Sources of Free Amusement, and Fix It Up and Furnish It Cheaply, right? So one tends to think not "Why didn't I think of that?" but "Yeah, I thought of that, what else ya got?"

But Callenbach is such a friendly and earnest writer, and as I read, I kept stumbling over more and more simple changes that I hadn't bothered to implement in my own life. Things that would not only accommodate my slender income, but allow me to save some of it and improve my life in quantifiable and qualitative ways.

I'm not saying he's my guru. But here are some examples of my life pre- and post-Callenbach. I now shop for the week, not just for the next day or so. I grow my own herbs, switched from my money-gouging bank to a credit union, learned basic auto repair so I wouldn't have to pay a mechanic for things I could fix myself, and asked my doctor to write prescriptions for the generic versions of drugs. When I became sulky because I could no longer eat out at restaurants twice a week, I established rotating potluck dinners with my friends (who have turned out to be, thank goodness, amazing cooks). As the price of public transportation climbed, I bought and learned to ride a cool, used bike and threw away my bus passes. Most amazingly, I learned how to sit down and do the "B" word, budget. I have yet to take up Callenbach on his suggestion to raise chickens or bees (!), though lately I've been finding the idea of honey in my back yard very appealing. No brain surgery involved in any of these changes, but there was something about seeing them laid out so simply in one little guidebook that made a big difference for me.

If you have traveled in foreign countries where the average cash income is far lower than ours, you have probably noticed that people do not seem unhappier than Americans. In fact, even people who would be considered desperately poor in America often live cheerful and productive lives. This contrast tells us that the ability to buy a lot of goods is not the critical factor in making human beings happy.
(p. ix)

Chapter 5 -- Travel Cheaply But Well: Try Exchanging Houses

You can sometimes arrange to switch houses with friends who live in nearby towns or in the country, thus giving both sides a change of environment. It's also possible to do this with strangers, usually by placing an ad in some publication read by the kind of people you'd like to exchange with, or in the local paper of the place you want to go.

In an exchange vacation you may be able to get near a beach, river, forest or some other naturally pleasant place; you might get to live in a city you've always wanted to visit; you might live in a houseboat, or just on the other side of town. In any case, it's a change -- but without all the hassle of picking up bag and baggage. It's the next best thing to the old pattern of a family cabin owned by rich relatives.
(p. 94)

I'm not quite sure how he does it, but Callenbach manages to talk about the downside of consumer culture, the silliness of most "fashion," overdependence on technology, and urban ecology without sounding like a Luddite, a hermit, or the Unabomber. He doesn't look down on people like me who don't care if something is cheap as long as it doesn't feel cheap. (You get what you pay for, as my mama still likes to say.) Living Cheaply with Style covers a lot of varied ground, including food, transportation, furniture, raising kids, and health. And as I proved by passing on the chickens and the bees, some ideas will be more relevant to one reader than another. But for the most part, Callenbach, the author of the only engaging pieces of eco-fiction I've read (Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging), gives good honest advice to people like me who are struggling to live better and spend less.

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Order Living Cheaply With Style online for only $8.95 from amazon.com. See? You're already saving money!

For more on living cheaply, check out The Thriftseekers, in which Tripod columnist Bernadette Noll brings an ex-yuppie into the world of low cash, high fashion.

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