Before I launch into reviewing Kath Kelly's book I want to make a couple of general comments about this genre of book and the ones I have chosen to review. Feelings on eco-thrift/ frugal/ money scrimping books seem to be split mostly into two clear camps - in the green corner the devoted disciples who already live this way or who have pledged to turn their lives around and never touch a new item again, and in the red corner the cynics who criticise the writers for being kill-joys, smug middle class experimenters or mad idealists.
I have looked at quite a range of websites, blogs and books on the subject of saving money and surviving the recession. The first thing to say is that there is no magic one touch solution sitting out there that will revolutionise your finances and take all your problems away. The answers and the methods primarily require simple common sense, an amount of self control and willpower, some work and effort, and being orderly and organised and keeping track of things.
Some of the cynics who would toss these books onto the nearest landfill site seem disappointed and let down to find yet another book with the same fundamental message instead of a map to the promised land along with free first class tickets.
The second thing is that most books and blogs are written from a particular standpoint and will not cover every possible personal situation. However, most have a selection of ideas that you can take away and use or adapt to your circumstances. You just pick the things that are useful to you and leave the others be.
So, onto "How I lived a year on just a pound a day" by Kath Kelly. Kath is not a "smug middle class intellectual" carrying out a social experiment as one Amazon reviewer claimed - clearly they hadn't read the book very well or possibly at all. She starts the book living alone in a rented room and working in job that I would imagine was not that well paid. The whole adventure begins because she needs to save up to buy her brother a really good wedding present and she can't think of any other way to do it - and a deal of alcohol encourages her thinking too.
Actually alcohol is a bit of a recurring theme through this book - any poor students who want to drink for free should definitely read/buy this book as it will be a godsend to them and their student loans.
Kath's situation and outlook were very specific so unless you are single with no dependents and willing to do things like hitch hike, walk a great distance in all weathers and scour the supermarket shelves just before closing time for whatever is available, you won't be in a position to take on her formula in its entirety. However, providing you accept and understand that, and aren't so blinkered as to see that as an insurmountable barrier there are still plenty of ideas that you might harvest for your own situation.
She is never arrogant enough to suggest that everyone should live this way, although she certainly becomes more evangelical as the book progresses and the anti-consumer culture turns from a financial necessity to a way of life and a new outlook. And although she does not dwell on it, in fact just the opposite, living like this for a year was hard work. In fact that would be one of my criticisms of the book. She makes light of all the obvious physical privations she had to put up with but if you have to do this for real then a good percentage of it is pretty demanding, for example:
"Because I was living on a pound a day I didn't use any heating in my room the whole winter" (but you have to bear in mind it was a shared house so chances are she benefited from the fact that other people were using heat, and possibly slightly more each day because her room was so cold and drawing any heat to it).
A lot of things were made easier by virtue of living in a large city (Bristol) with a strong cultural life. If you live in a small, dull provincial town or the depths of the countryside you'd find it so much harder to do it her way. Her social and cultural entertainments depend on free events and the fact she can walk or cycle to them:
"Bristol had so much to offer, was so good to me. I couldn't imagine having so much fun, on so little money anywhere else in the world". Well, quite, my point exactly.
Photo by Mike Warren
She also joins Freecycle, an online way of recycling items you don't need or want any more. Living in Bristol also makes a big difference to that:
"Undoubtedly living in a big city helped. It was easy to link up with people and pick up or drop off things". But at least she concedes that, and as I mentioned earlier you can't take the whole thing and replicate it but most people should get at least a few good ideas or leads from the book so you shouldn't let that put you off.
Pretty much everything is either common sense or things that you probably could find out about fairly easily surfing the web, and there is not much that you won't either know about already or be able to work out pretty smartish if you had only a single pound coin to your name. But it is good to have so many ideas together and to hear about her real life experience living this way.
I do get the feeling that one essential thing that really helped Kath to make a success of this year is a lot of natural optimism and resilience. It could also be that she has missed out the descriptions of the really bad days when everything goes truly horribly wrong and she just hides under her blankets wailing and gnashing her teeth and dreaming of a life of luxury, or just some warmth and a big piece of pie. I know that if I wrote this book chances are a) I would simply not get very far through the year, and b) you would read frequent pathetic descriptions of me feeling miserable and cold with sore feet and a streaming cold. Darned good job I didn't write it then!
The things I didn't like or found too odd were:
Occasionally the writing is a bit clunky - "for once I got out of the building without encountering any precipitation". Come on! How often does the conversation in your house go "hello dear, you look wet" - "yes, nasty lot of precipitation out there tonight".
I found her logic or her way of justifying things a bit out of kilter in places. She shows how you can live on virtually nothing and embraces the anti-consumer mantra - you don't have to spend money to be happy or get things out of life, but seems to miss the point that someone else has to pay for a lot of these things and thus they have to remain tainted by the evils of a consumer life:
- Whenever she hitch-hikes she might travel for free but someone had to buy the car and fill it with petrol, and her added weight will have increased the amount of petrol used.
- She attends a great many free cultural events and makes the most of the wine and food on offer, but again even though she isn't paying someone else has had to.
- She meets a man near the end of her year and when they start meeting up she makes him promise not to take her out for meals saying "I really want to get through this year and be able to say I'd done it without cheating". But why is someone buying her a meal any different from someone giving her a free ride in their car? Its not really is it?
One of the strangest things in the book is the amount of dropped money she picks up from the streets. Apparently there are literally millions of pounds in loose change down the back of the nations sofas, but also glittering across the streets. Kath seems to find lost £20 notes and piles of small change with amazing regularity and amasses over £100 this way. This felt like it had an element of truth in it but I found it hard to totally accept it. I have very good eyesight and I'm good at spotting all sorts of things and often troop along staring at the pavement, and I have to say I've only once in my life found a dropped note.
Photo by Marcin Wichary
Overall I would say this isn't a perfect book, but it is generally interesting and has a lot of ideas about every area of life and how you could live for less. It possibly makes it sound a little too easy, and perhaps a few more descriptions of dire moments when she wanted to give up or had the day from hell would have made me feel more sympathetic towards her. Having said that, I have to take my hat off to her for accomplishing something I know I could not have done, probably not even for a month let alone a year. It is certainly worth borrowing from your library, even if all you do is skim the last few pages for the lists of suggestions and particularly websites.
I'm not going to score it out of 10 because I'm rubbish at that sort of thing, but I will be interested to see how it compares to India Knight's book. That will be a contrast between the ordinary person and the little rich girl.
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