Review: Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living

Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living by Elizabeth Willard Thames
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Distinctly not a how-to book on financial independence and early retirement (aka FIRE), Thames uses this book to tell her life story. After beginning by explaining how she has been the recipient of white/class privilege (a topic she returns to time and again throughout the book), Thames describes her life from college through her early career years, including her marriage. The couple determine that an early retirement is a good goal early in the second half of the book, and their story of saving and scrimping, while also determining what they really want from life, conclude the book. They do end up downshifting and focusing on activities they enjoy, including hiking. Retiring? Not so much. The husband appears to still be working, and the wife has become a blog writer, author, and speaker. The author includes some description of how they were able to accomplish this ruralizing, but while some generalized financial advice is provided, you can tell the author’s heart is not in it. She’s here to provide herself as a case study in FIRE. If you’ve read some of the popular FIRE blogs, or other FIRE books, this doesn’t provide much new to think about, but there aren’t a lot of book-length descriptions of a couple working toward FIRE. I found the limited financial and retirement planning advice to be repetitive to what I’ve read before on various blogs, including the authors. I found the story interesting in parts, and valuable in the level of detail the author is able to provide not limited by blog length writing. I liked the description of the author’s work in fundraising, which provided an interesting dichotomy to her retirement goals. This could have been the base of some deep and interesting analysis in comparison, but the author mostly just told her story. I found the author’s voice to be questioning of the impacts of privilege, but not much willing to do anything much about it beyond taking advantage. Overall, this felt like a suburban, upper class woman trying to come off like she’s the next Amy Dacyczyn writing an updated “Tightwad Gazette”, but not having the right kind of experience to pull it off. Another decade of living frugally would probably do it. 2.5 stars. I expected more.

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