America's Cheapest Family

Question: You mention using a price book to help you establish a “buy price.” Can you describe how you set up a price book?  I am good at clipping and using coupons, but I have a horrible memory when it comes to remembering prices on everyday items.

Our son Joe goes to the batting cages every week to practice his hitting. He's playing baseball in college now and needs to keep practicing.

The staff at the batting cages recognizes him and he always uses a coupon—buy 2 rounds get one free—downloaded from the web site of the batting cage (actually a large fun park near our home with go carts, bumper boats, golf, mini-golf, batting cages and volleyball courts). The coupon has no expiration date on it.

This is really cool! We sent several advanced copies of our new book to a bunch of our frugal friends to see what they thought.

Usually when frugal people read a new book on frugality, they'll say something like, "This book is a good beginner manual, but I didn't really learn anything new."

But, that's not what we heard.

We asked these people to be gut level honest with us. Take a look and see what two of them said. (we'll share a more comments in the next few weeks)

Question: I am a big saver and “cheapskate,” married to a big spender. The more I save, the more he spends. We have two young children and I have to resort to trash picking to get the things we need while my husband drives his new sports car and wears his new clothes. He thinks he’s entitled because he’s the one earning all the money. We don’t have any credit card debt and we do have some savings — I know I should be grateful, but I’m frustrated.

In addition to about 30 citrus trees, we have nine large pine trees on our property.  The pine trees provide great shade, but they also drop a lot of pine needles. For years we used to spend hours raking them up and almost as long stuffing them into 40-gallon trash bags to be thrown away. It wasn’t a fun job trying to bag pine needles, they poke you and scratch you and get stuck in places that really hurt—even if you wear gloves.

Okay, it's June 25th (only six months 'til Christmas) and it was 113 degrees outside today. But it's a dry heat.