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Amy Dacyzyn
interviewed by Brian Hecht on October 13, 1995
"You can find good things by trash-picking ..."
Amy Dacyczyn is the nationally known editor of the best-selling Tightwad Gazette books and newsletter.
Tripod: How do you define a tightwad?
AD: The word tightwad does have a negative definition in the dictionary. I've always used it with a sort of tongue-in-cheek reference, because to me it characterizes, not just someone who is frugal and thrifty, but someone who takes it to a level of a sport. It's something we find very exciting and thrilling to do.
Tripod: Is there a difference between someone who's a tightwad, and someone who's just plain old cheap?
AD: These are all words which have a variety of defintions. The negative definition of a cheap person, I think, is someone who saves money at the expense of someone else. Like you call your mother-in-law when you know she's not home and leave a message on her answering machine so she has to call you back on her bill. That kind of thing, I don't go for.
Tripod: What are some of your favorite ideas for college students to cut their living expenses?
AD: Generally speaking, frugality is the same for most people in most parts of the country, regardless of your age group or your economic circumstances. The ideas apply the same way. It's all the same stuff about buying things second-hand, buying things on sale in bulk. Even if you're a single person, you're not going to buy cases of peanut butter, but you might buy two or three jars when they're on sale. You can use the same principles, just on a different scale.
Tripod: Once you've graduated from college and you're furnishing your first apartment, there's a whole new world. Do you have any suggestions for someone who's facing an empty apartment and an empty kitchen?
AD: In terms of furnishing a place -- you can furnish someplace for just about nothing, particularly if you don't care what it looks like. Then, if you want to move up in the way things look, it may cost more money, it depends. So a really rock-bottom strategy is start from the bottom and work your way up, until you meet a quality level that satisfies your needs. And that will be different for every single item you buy. But when I say "from the bottom up," I mean, literally, you can find good things by trash-picking. Picking things up off the curb. This is really not news to most college students. In fact, the dumpsters behind dorms at the end of college semesters are just a goldmine. That's a well-known tightwad strategy.
Moving up from there, you want to shop at yard sales. Again, this is new territory for a lot of young people, but these are really terrific sources for things for just five or 10 percent of normal retail price. And of course, different types of communities have different types of yard sales. Nice new suburban neighborhoods have things that look like they come from WalMart. Urban areas, areas that have nice older houses -- those yard sales will have borderline antiquey things.
And also, look at things with a wise eye, in terms of seeing that something may be really ugly, but a coat of paint does wonders. Honestly, a lot of furniture -- particularly things from the '70s -- that sort of dark-stained polyurethane pseudo-colonial heavy looking -- with a coat of white paint, let's say, it might make it. It might look good.
Tripod: Speaking of the '70s, the greater tolerance for retro-fashion that you have, the more money you can save, probably.
AD: [Laughs] Yeah. I'm fascinated at the current fashions for 12-year-old kids. It sort of looks like the Brady Bunch. Very strange. The stripes. The bright colors. Mixed in with a lot of denim.
Tripod: Lots of people find they burn a lot of money on the weekends, when the impulse to indulge is the greatest. What are some for the tips for having fun for less money?
AD: Having fun is something you can do absolutely for free. There's lots of free entertainment. You can borrow books from the library, you don't have to buy them. The problem comes with the socializing. People feel like they want to do what their friends are doing. So it's nice to talk about going to the library to see a movie, but that's not what your friends are doing. It doesn't really work.
I was a single person once. I lived in Boston until I was 28. I bought into a lot of the idea that I needed to eat out, and go to movies, and go to theater, because that's what my friends were doing, and because this was the time of my life when I really should be having a good time. In the long run, when I was in my late 20s and got married, my net worth was almost zero. I had about 1,000 dollars in the bank and I didn't own anything. I sure had a lot of fun for a few years. I saw hundreds of movies ... But, if I had to list all those movies I went to, even a tenth of them, I couldn't even name. The tendency for young people is to want to spend money on temporary pleasures. But the thing to realize is that, in five years, or even a year from now, you won't remember where you ate dinner. What you do remember, what is important, is things that build net worth. Even quality furniture is better than going out to dinner for building net worth ... Young people have a wonderful opportunity now to start saving some money. And they can put away 10 or 20 thousand dollars, or 30, 40 50 thousand dollars by the time they're married.
Tripod: Do you see any social pressures for young people to start paying more attention to their expenses?
AD: No, I don't. We did do an article called "Generation X Supersavers," where we solicited from our readers who had saved money. And these people have saved tremendous amounts of money at a very young age ... People who owned their own houses in their late 20s -- that sort of thing, on the scale that most people don't even believe is possible.
Tripod: How did this become your passion?
AD: My husband and I saved a lot of money over the first seven years of our marriage. We were saving to build a New England farmhouse -- we really had to buckle down to do this -- we only had a $30,000 per year income to work with. So in seven years, we saved $49,000 total. In addition to that, we bought and paid for two new vehicles, furniture, and major appliances. We did things people didn't think we could do. We also had four children during that time period. We moved to Maine and bought our dream house. That enabled us to be a one-income family for the remainder of our lives.
That's when I started the newsletter. I really felt that this was information that we were not hearing anywhere in the traditional media. Nobody was talking about it. We were talking about how tough it was for young people to make it nowadays, and how you couldn't afford to have more than one child. I was hearing a lot of mythology. And a lot of things that people believe in our culture: "You can't raise children and dress them in second-hand clothes." I didn't believe it.
That's really why I started the newsletter. I've been publishing now for almost six years. It's been really exciting over the years to see people write to me and tell me their success stories.
Tripod: And there's two book compilations too, right?
AD: Right. There's the "Tightwad Gazette" and the "Tightwad Gazette II." And these are based on years one and two, and years three and four of the newsletter. And those are available in bookstores.
Tripod: How many subscribers do you have?
AD: Forty-five thousand subscribers throughout the United States. And the books have each sold in the hundreds of thousands. For people who are looking for a crash course I recommend the books. I make a lot less money on books than on newsletters, but they're available in libraries, you can even just go to the bookstore and flip through a book -- see if it's something that interests you.
Tripod: Now there's a tightwad recommendation -- go to the library.
AD: Absolutely! We have people sharing subscriptions, and I encourage that.
Free sample issue by sending SASE to:
The Tightwad Gazette
RR1 Box 3570
Leeds, ME 04263
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