Forget Budget Living: Save Your Money
Written: Feb 01 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Colorful pictures, a few good tips.
Cons: Few worthwhile ideas, Gaudy presentation and layout is overwhelming, Generally tacky
The Bottom Line: Okay if you're into gaudy decorating. If you're looking for solid ideas on living well on less, there are many, many better resources out there
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| mrlarry's Full Review: Budget Living Magazine |
When I first got an ad for Budget Living, I was excited. The cost was only $14 a year and I figured that if I got one good tip out of it, the price would be worth it. Meanwhile, since I wrote a budgeting/finance column for www.betterbudgeting.com, I thought it would give me some good ideas.
That’s why I was so disappointed when I actually got the magazine. It is a bunch of fluff with pretty pictures, but not much else.
I have the February/March issue in front of me and I’ll show you the table of contents:
Features: Playing House, Main Squeeze, Kitchen Aid, Climbing the Walls, If You Build It They Will Come
Departments: From the Editor, Contributors, Your Two Cents, Loose Change, The Goods (with subsections titled On Decorating, On Gadgets, On Fashion, On Collecting, On Beauty, On Entertaining, On Travel), Making It, Money Talks, Bargain Basement, My Best Buy.
If the features sound a little frothy to you, that’s because they are. Let’s look at climbing the Walls. I turn there and see a wall with portraits up the ying-yang looking gaudy. The article starts: “Blank isn’t beautiful. In fact few things are more depressing than staring at bare painted plaster. But don’t get hung up on scoring a pricey original or, worse, winding up settling for some cheesy copy. (Pleases keep that college era Matisse poster in mothballs!)”
Then I see more pictures. One is a bunch of white flowers over a bed. Another is a bunch of yogurt cups on a shelf (This is better than an art poster?). Then I see rows and rows of posters. I see another room with clotheslines and clothespins on the wall with papers stuck to them. Somehow I don’t consider the MasterCard bill hanging from an indoor clothesline beautiful. Finally I see a kitchen with wall to wall magazine pictures with no space in between. I’d turn into a non-cook if I ever did that to my kitchen.
So what’s wrong with getting a nice museum print or replica of a beautiful painting? These are reasonably priced and you can sometimes get some unusual ones dirt cheap on ebay. You can then wait for one of the framing stores to a sale on custom framing (they have them all the time). You get a good custom frame–maybe splurge a little because you’re saving with the coupon–and you have something worth hanging on your wall.
This is the kind of tip that most of us would appreciate more.
The section “Kitchen Aid” showed this kitchen with all kinds of jarring orange walls, floors, and ceiling. It didn’t cost much, but then . . .
The travel page told me that if I wanted to go to Denmark, but couldn’t afford it, I could go to Solvang, a commercial Danish village in Central California. I could eat Danish and look at cheap trinkets in gift shops. For joy.
The Goods on Gadgets did show a few interesting tools, but I know you can get toolboxes at the local warehouse store for a good price.
The budget advice from Clark Howard and Tyler Matheson was solid, but that was only four pages of the magazine. The “Your Two Cents” section had a few tips from readers had a few good ideas, such as searching Google for coupon codes. That’s more the type of information I would look for in a magazine on budget living.
Slightly more useful are the budget boards the magazine runs at its website (www.budgetliving.net) Here you will see one feature article and teasers on the other articles to get you to subscribe. You will also find the budget boards where readers ask questions and give tips. These are real people, not Budget Living trixies writing, so sometimes there are some solid ideas.
Look at the website for yourself to see if this magazine is for you, but from my point of view it’s pure froth. The focus seems to be too much on substituting gaudy decorating for taste and weird projects like making a swinging lamp out of a colander. If you’re into that kind of decorating, Budget Living may be for you. If you’re more interested in solid ideas on how to live a good life on the cheap, there are better resources out there.
And, if I may put in a plug, you may want to check out the website I write for which is www.betterbudgeting.com where I write a column as the Black Belt Shopper.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
mrlarry
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Member: Larry Wiener
Location: Alhambra CA
Reviews written: 64
Trusted by: 14 members
About Me:
II'm a black-belt bargain hunter. Check on my e-book at www.betterbudgeting.com/
blackbeltshoppersguide.htm
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