Teaching Others to Pinch Pennies Is Their Stock in Trade
Frugality consultants aim to make their living by telling peoplfe how to cut costs, live leaner and save money. The challenge is getting someone to pay them.
“We’re telling people not to buy, which makes it interesting for advertisers,” said Gary Foreman, publisher of the Dollar Stretcher Web site and newsletter.
Still, professional tight-wads are finding enough interest in what they do to support dozens of part-time businesses across the country. A handful of people earn a full-time living, and, paradoxically, a few even get rich.
Probably no one has made more money preaching cheapness than Amy Dacyczyn, author of the Tightwad Gazette newsletter and three related books. Before she retired three years ago, Dacyczyn estimated more than 200,000 had subscribed to her $12-a-year newsletter and more than 500,000 had purchased her books.
Dacyczyn’s claims to fame were numerous, including saving $49,000 in seven years on an annual income averaging less than $30,000 while feeding a family of eight for less than $200 a month.
“After Amy ended up retiring in 1996, a lot of people scrambled in to fill that niche,” said Deana Ricks, an Austin, Texas, homemaker who runs a part-time seminar and newsletter business called the Frugal Family Network with her friend Angie Zalewski. “But nobody has grasped that market share.”
Ricks and Zalewski started two years ago by giving a seminar at their church called “Stretching the Family Dollar, or How I Bought a Minivan by Washing Out Baggies.” Zalewski, who did buy a van with cash saved from her household budget, was born into a frugal farm family. Ricks came to frugality late after growing up in a wealthy Oklahoma oil family.
The business has grown to include a $10-a-year newsletter with about 500 subscribers, an audiotape about frugal grocery shopping and a series of workshops, for which they get paid about $100 an hour. Their different backgrounds and previous careers--Ricks has a degree in journalism and worked in public relations, and Zalewski ran a speakers’ bureau--have helped them adapt their message for various audiences.
The pair would like to continue to expand the business and write a book. Ricks jokes that her husband is looking forward to the day when their frugal sideline makes enough money that he can retire. For now, however, the business enables them to make some money while leaving them plenty of time to spend with their families.
“We get to be home when the kids come home from school,” said Ricks, who, like Zalewski, has two school-age youngsters.
Balancing work and family life was also key for Deborah Taylor-Hough, a consultant and author in Olympia, Wash. She wrote her book, “Frozen Assets: How to Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month” (Champion Press, 1998), after discovering she had trimmed her food budget for a family of five from $700 a month to $300 simply by preparing meals in bulk.
Taylor-Hough is working on a second Champion Press book, “Choosing Simplicity,” due out in December, and gives seminars on once-a-month cooking. But her main occupation continues to be homemaker and home-school teacher for three children, ages 4, 9 and 12.
Although Dacyczyn folded her newsletter after six years because she was running out of new ideas, many of today’s frugality consultants say they have no problem recycling money-saving suggestions. In fact, the frugality business seems remarkably cooperative, with consultants regularly sharing information, writing for each others’ newsletters and plugging each others’ books on their Web sites. Taylor-Hough’s recipes and articles regularly appear on Foreman’s Dollar Stretcher, for example, and Foreman consults with other professional tight-wads about ideas and business strategies.
“There are only so many ways you can write about how to have a garage sale,” Foreman said. “But there are so many people out there who need help [in learning to save money] that there’s plenty of people for all of us.”
In the mid-1990s, Foreman was a purchasing manager for a computer company who helped downsize his firm and realized that he, too, would soon be out of a job. He drew on his skills as a certified financial planner to create a Web site and e-mail newsletter about managing and saving money.
He also drew on his own thrifty nature, learned from his parents and grandparents and honed through years of practice.
“People have been accusing me of being cheap since I was in high school,” Foreman said.
Foreman distributed the newsletter for free--it now reaches 70,000 subscribers--and concentrated on building traffic to the Web site at https://www.stretcher.com. The traffic in turn attracted advertising from such companies as Microsoft and Bank Rate Monitor, which pays the site’s costs and his own salary.
Foreman lost his purchasing job in 1997, at about the same time the business became profitable enough to support him.
“I probably would have laid myself off if the company hadn’t, because it [the Web site] was really becoming a full-time job,” he said.
Today, Foreman works about 65 to 70 hours a week writing and editing articles for the Web site and for a newsletter that he sells to credit counseling services and others who want to distribute a money-saving publication under their own brand names. He has hired two part-time assistants, but said his ambitions for growing the business are limited.
“I have no desire to be the next Internet IPO,” Foreman said. “I just want to support my family and have some fun.”
