Once again, I'm hampered by reading the second book when the first book is "the real one."  Yeager's first book was entitled The Ultimate Cheapskate's Road Map to True Riches, and it apparently has all the meat and potatoes.  This, his follow up book, is mostly just illustrating, expanding upon, and exploring some of the fall-out from his first book.

Which, you know.  Kind of a bummer if you haven't read the first book.

The problem is that The Cheapskate Next Door doesn't really stand on its own as an advice sort of book.  However, it does a great job of helping to encourage the frugal lifestyle.  I love reading all about other frugal people and their wacky frugal ways.  It makes me feel more normal about my own cheapskate-ery!  And it inspires me to do better - because really, we can all do better.

The book is loosely modeled after The Millionaire Next Door, the bestselling book which introduced the concept of "strategic frugality" to a lot of people (myself included).  After his first book, Yeager took a tour of the best cheapskates our country has to offer.  He conducted interviews, and teased out each person's ethos and best advice.  This makes for an anecdotal, chatty sort of book which is designed more for readability than as a functional reference book.

Despite this, there is a lot of great advice.  Yeager uses his cheapskates as a framing device, as when he visits Pastor Mike Overpeck, who drives a beat-up 1972 pickup truck he bought for $500.  (My car is a good 12 years younger - but I got it for free.  So I felt like we're even on that score.)

Yeager introduces Overpeck, and then swings into his main point for the chapter.  "The cheapskates next door understand something that many Americans don't: If there's a new car sitting in your driveway, you probably can't afford it."  

None of the advice given in The Cheapskate Next Door is exactly Earth-shaking.  But then again, nothing about living the frugal life is particularly innovative.  I enjoyed reading this book as far as it went, but I'll definitely keep an eye out for a copy of Yeager's first book (at the library, where I get 95% of my books, natch).  

A funny side effect of reading this book is that it made me want to read The Millionaire Next Door all over again.  I first read Millionaire when it was published in 1996, when America was just on the verge of sweeping into the Dot-Com boom.  The message of the book was that "frugality will get you rich in the end," one of the first books to really champion frugality in a culture that was all about consumption.  I feel a bit sorry for Millionaire, even though it was successful enough.  It was a lone voice crying out in the wilderness until the most recent economic downturn got everyone thinking frugal.

The great benefit to books like these is that they normalize frugality.  Which is arguably more useful than rehashing the same old basic advice!