Book of the week: The Cheapskate Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americans Living Happily Below Their Means by Jeff Yeager

(Broadway, 256 pages, $12.99)

A few years ago cheapskates were laughingstocks, said Sara Eckel in Salon.com. “The cool kids” were going into hock to start wine collections and festoon their homes with plasma-screen televisions. They assumed that anyone missing the party had to be “joyless pennypinchers subsisting on ramen noodles.” But Jeff Yeager was already crisscrossing the country and taking notes on the small subset of Americans who shared his aversion to waste, debt, and overspending. To his surprise, his survey revealed that most cheapskates weren’t obsessive bargain hunters and coupon clippers. In fact, they generally wasted little time thinking about shopping, and though most weren’t rich, they rarely worried about money at all. If the rest of the country could learn their secrets, he figured, more people would be happy.

Even Yeager probably wouldn’t recommend imitating every habit of the tightwads he interviewed, said Michelle Archer in USA Today. One man he encountered often ate unfinished food off strangers’ restaurant plates. Some middle-class families he met stretched their grocery budgets by pulling discarded food out of supermarket Dumpsters. Yeager treats such oddballs with “folksy humor,” and admires instead the people who simply limited their spending wisely. In general, these “cheapskates” avoided consumer debt altogether. They spent much less than average Americans on food, clothing, and recreation. And they “bought less house than they could afford.”

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Happiness isn’t guaranteed for every skinflint, said Brad Tuttle in Time.com. Some fret so much about overpaying for even the smallest purchase that they’re said to suffer from Spending Anxiety Disorder. Still, most cheapskates just seem to have a sixth sense about the true worth of things, said Zac Bissonnette in DailyFinance.com. When you’re a person who buys only pre-owned cars, after all, you’re “letting the other guy pay for the depreciation.” Not surprisingly, Yeager’s cheapskates only regret about 10 percent of their purchases—compared with 80 percent for a typical American. The lesson that less stuff equals more contentment makes Yeager’s inexpensive paperback “the perfect personal-finance book for the new economy.”