99 Ways to Stretch Your Home Budget, by Cheri Gillard

If you have ever read a book or magazine article about budgeting or personal finance, you have probably run across most ideas in Cheri Gillard's little book.  In fact, if you stop and spend 20 minutes right now brainstorming with your spouse or a couple of friends, you could probably come up with many of the ideas here.

That said, Gillard's 99 Ways to Stretch Your Home Budget puts together some practical ideas in one place to spur the reader to live a bit more frugally.  Some of the ideas are so obvious they hardly seem worth writing down: drop cable TV, eat out less often, check out books and movies from the library.  Others seem a little silly: make your own baby wipes, shower at the health club as much as possible (why not just save money by dropping the club membership?), flush the toilet infrequently, give up tanning beds (just kidding, that's a good idea) and quit smoking (on smoking and tanning beds, why pay for cancer when you can get it for free?).

So maybe she's not the most original writer in the world, but if you're looking for a few new ideas to save money, or need to be reminded about some you already know, take a gander at Gillard's little book.  You can at least find a way to save a couple of bucks for the price of the book!



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