Book Review – The Art of Frugal Hedonism by Annie Raser Rowland and Adam Grubb

By firebynumbers

Blurb

It sounds too good to be true. You can save money and the world, inoculate yourself against many of the ills of modern life, and enjoy everything more on both the sensual and profound levels? Preposterous!

Yet here is a toolkit to help you do just that. A tweak here, a twiddle there; every strategy in The Art of Frugal Hedonism has been designed to help you target the most important habits of mind and action needed for living frugally but hedonistically. Apply a couple, and you will definitely have a few extra dollars in your pocket and enjoy more sunsets. Apply the lot, and you will wake up one day and realise that you are happier, wealthier, fitter, and more in lust with life than you could ever thought possible.

Introduction

Let me just start out that I found this book incredibly fantastic, and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone. Regardless of any sort of financial reason, I believe this book could be useful to so many people for so many different reasons.

Many people on the FIRE journey are relatively frugal, it isn’t a necessity, but it definitely helps if you can save dollars here and there to boost that savings rate. Unfortunately, with being frugal, people always associate it with “missing out” and “sacrificing”, when this book really opens your eyes to see that you can be frugal and still live a hedonistic lifestyle.

The book provides 51 tips on ways that you can incorporate into your life to not only improve your frugality, but also improve the values found within your life. Each tip is realistic and achievable, and while not every one of them may be suitable (for instance, I am not going to go dumpster diving for dinner) there will still be dozens that can easily be implemented into anyone’s life.

Examples

I will go through a few of my favourite ones which will have the biggest impact of my life:

Number 11: Beware Fake Frugal

I won’t go too much into this one because I already did a whole post about it HERE. But it was a real eye opener and definitely provided a new perspective.

Number 14: Don’t Buy Drinks

Alright, so obviously this does not mean NEVER buy drinks, I mean you need to live after all? But next time you are at a Café or Restaurant, have a look at how much even a basic Orange Juice will cost you. It will probably be in the vicinity of $4 – $5 a glass, you can basically buy a 2L bottle of Orange Juice from the supermarket for that kind of money and end up with about 5 times as much drink. By the end of the meal, your drinks might end up being 50% of the cost of your meal. It is ridiculously expensive, and does it really add that much enjoyment? Do you really miss out on that much if you just drink tap water instead? You might answer that to you it does, and if that is the case then go for it, but I just have always found how excessive it is the cost of drinks.

Number 33: Travel Cheap

A lot of the time people feel the need to travel just to get away from the stress of normal life. They need a break to unwind and just forget about the real world for a week or so (or even a short weekend could do the trick).

But holidays are expensive, at least they can be, but they do not have to be. You can easily travel on the cheap and get just about the same rewards as you would from an expensive overseas holiday. Just go for a drive to a drive to some nice Air BnB place in the mountains and refresh and recharge for $100 a night. Go to a national park and reconnect with nature with some camping at almost no cost at all.

Say you do want to go overseas, you want to go visit France for a few weeks and check out the country. Instead of going between tour buses and hotels, look for a house swap instead and live in a charming village for a couple months. It will only be a fraction of the cost and you will probably end up with a more genuine experience than you would if you were just another typical tourist.

Travel does not have to be expensive, and if you do travel cheap, you will find you can travel a whole lot more regularly which may give you a much higher quality of life.

Number 42: Have Less House

This is a big one for anyone on the FIRE journey, or anyone who wants to improve their financial position. Basically, it means just live within your means in terms of your house size. Do you really need three bedrooms and two living areas if you are only living there with your partner? It might be a nice to have, but it just adds additional costs which may end up becoming burdensome in the long run.

Conclusion

I will not go into any further, but like I said there is dozens of really useful and beneficial examples spread throughout the book that I plan on incorporating into my own life. I thoroughly recommend this book, it is easy to read and gives a nice wholesome feeling while you turn the pages. I believe the authors live in Melbourne so it is nice to have more of an Australian feel to it as well.

There is also a really great list of resources at the back of the book for you to check out ways to improve your Frugal Hedonism in life.