The $1,000 Challenge

[nsarwark]

Accidentally posted this in the wrong forum before.

Brian O'Connor wrote a nice book, "The $1,000 Challenge" adapted from a series of newspaper columns about how he cut $1,000 per month out of his family budget.  It's nice to see a personal finance writer taking things a bit farther than the standard "stop buying lattes at Starbucks" line.  My quick review of the book is here.

-Nick

[grantmeaname]

Nice, I like the tie-in to MMM in your review. So the book was pretty funny?

[nsarwark]

It was funny at times.  The author has a column called "Funny Money" and tosses little jokes in with his advice.  They're not so frequent as to be annoying and help the personal finance advice read a lot faster.

One of his columns, as an example:  Presents make for a dangerous shell game.

-Nick

[sekritdino]

I just read this book yesterday and I agree with your review. The one sentence description of this book should be: The author is Mr Money Mustache Lite.

Some things bothered me a lot, like how he started off the entertainment chapter saying how he was flipping through crappy cable channels and finally turned it off and just read a book. Then he was so happy about switching cable companies and saving like $80 per month because of it. Why didn't you just cancel it all together when you were just talking about how crappy the cable TV was!?!?!!

I think it is a good start for a lot of people to read this book, but to be a true badass you need to cut stupid spending on MMM levels.

[marty998]

@ sekritdino, if he wrote "cancel cable" what proportion of people do you think would actually appreciate that advice?

In order to get published, authors need to appeal to the masses. It's generally why crap books sell so well. The masses like garbage.