This book is full of tips, and the risk with books full of tips is that you can sometimes miss the big picture for all the details. But! I really liked it. The broader philosophy is "trade time for money and you'll probably find that you don't need so much money" - the authors have taken it to an extreme. A lot of it is shedding societal expectations, creating a life for yourself that you actually like, and deploying financial resources strategically, which is theoretically easier to do because you've theoretically got more time because you're not working as much. And all of this sums up to a richer life. ( )

This really seems to suggest that certain things are a matter of personal choice and outlook, which is just not true. It is part of privilege to do the whole "work less work-life balance" thing. It's naive to think that individual consumer choice is the solution to over consumption and ecological destruction. Just typical neo-liberal trash, and not even fun aspirational lifestyle porn. ( )

When I die and someone has the task of doing the eulogy, they will probably say something about how I was a teacher, and how I read a lot of books, and then they will pause and wonder what to say next. Well, I hope they’ll go on to say something about how I was content with that, because I think contentment is one of my best assets. Contentment is also a key strategy for spending less while enjoying everything more, which is the subtitle to The Art of Frugal Hedonism.
#BeforeWeStart: you might think, if you have seen my library and its shelves groaning with books, that I am hardly the one to start spruiking frugality. But (apart from the fact that many of them are from the OpShop) at about 800 books with a reading rate of about 200 books a year, that is only four or five years’ supply (allowing for some that come from the library like this one that I’m telling you about). And all the time I am reading those books I am not watching commercial TV ads or reading lifestyle magazines that encourage me to feel dissatisfied with what I have. Reading is the ultimate strategy for saving money and consuming less.
The Art of Frugal Hedonism is not a sober instruction manual for making your own soap and recycling your undies into dusters. It is funny. The authors have a droll style, which is very engaging. In Chapter 9, ‘Stop reading those magazines’, they point out that lifestyle magazines pander to the idea that the people in them are people like you, if only you were doing what they are doing, and then it makes sense for you to throw about phrases like ‘time poor’ and ‘retail therapy’ because they do.

Very few people do much of the stuff that the media implies people do, and those who do work hard to keep up. But lifestyle journalism makes it easy to feel that there is a world of people out there effortlessly dressing, holidaying, exercising, eating and thinking in certain appropriate ways, and it is human nature not to want to be terribly out of line with what everyone else is up to. Steer clear of this homogenising influence is your authors’ suggestion. Spend your Sunday morning breakfasts perusing odd facts about breeding piranhas in captivity instead. (p.57)

The page is accompanied by a strip of photo images of people (and a leopard) smiling. It is captioned Sample facial expressions you might like to experiment with while declining to read lifestyle magazines.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/11/13/the-art-of-frugal-hedonism-by-annie-raser-ro... ( )