I bought my copy of her first book, The Tightwad Gazette, from a sale table in 1996 and her second book, The Tightwad Gazette #2, a short time later. These books were printed in 1992 and 1995 respectively and are still not outdated. I doubt they ever will be as there will always be people looking for a more frugal life. I found her books approximately 2 months before she stopped her newsletter, unfortunately as I had been so looking forward to signing up for it so I considered myself lucky to have the books. Now, her 3rd book, The Complete Tightwad Gazette, is calling my name!
Everyone has their own reasons for their choice of lifestyle and Amy was no different. She and her husband wanted to have a large family and to be able to buy a special home - a pre-1900's New England house with barn attached and she didn't want to work away from the family in order to achieve this. They became spendthrifts in order to save enough money while living on 1 income to be able to reach their dream.
While I was not looking for the same kind of home or the exact same dream, there was still plenty of information in Amy's books to help me. One of her ideas was about buying items on sale in order to be able to afford extra of that item without going overboard with the spending. Having extra parts for both indoor and outdoor equipment meant being able to walk to a neatly-organized shelf, pick up the part and fix the broken equipment - IMMEDIATELY.
No down time and a full pantry of food meant a better life. With 6 kids (9 and under) in an old farmhouse in an area where it snowed - a LOT - I was tired of living hand to mouth -sort of. We always had food, especially meat. There wasn't much choice of meat, mind you - all beef or all chicken or all pork and a few times, all lamb - but at least there were usually 2 freezers full of meat. (The lack of variety gets really tedious after awhile, though). I was tired of running out of other things like baby formula, diapers, condiments, canned foods such as tomatoes, beans, etc. to make dishes such as lasagna, spaghetti, shepherd's pie, chili, etc. We usually were without hydro 4-5 times a year due to blizzards and even though we had a good generator, we couldn't get to town for days at a time. If the snow ploughs refuse to go out, you're not going anywhere, either!
I'd visit farmer friends growing up and watch them go to the shelves in the basement to retrieve canned fruit for dessert whereas my mom always had to actually make the dessert for company - we didn't have that kind of thing 'on hand'. I would follow them into their 'larder' or 'pantry' and even then wish that we had one. It didn't seem practical in the city though, to store extra food as we were surrounded by grocery stores that we could walk to and, of course, dozens more that you could drive to plus our house was not that big and we had no basement. That didn't stop me from thinking that those words - larder and pantry - were pretty cool words. Talk about invoking pioneer images!
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