The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

A tweak here, a twiddle there; every strategy in The Art Of Frugal Hedonism has been designed to help you target the most important habits of mind and action needed for living frugally but hedonistically. Apply a couple, and you’ll definitely have a few extra dollars in your pocket and enjoy more sunsets. Apply the lot, and you’ll wake up one day and realise that you’re happier, wealthier, fitter, and more in lust with life than you’d ever thought possible.

Never has such a compelling case been made for putting your wallet away and looking around at every other form of pleasure with freshly attentive eyes.

Annie and Adam are lifelong cheapskates who operate on the principle that enjoying life is a lot more likely to happen if you learn how to do it on little or no money. Decades of this approach saw them realise they also had more free time, savings, and flexibility than many of their more fiscally-oriented peers. Not to mention smaller ecological footprints, and blissful immunity to a raft of common modern ills, from social isolation to obesity.

The Art of Frugal Hedonism reveals their core strategies for lowering your consumption while raising your quality of life. Whether you are already challenging cultural consumption assumptions (but would love a little backup), or are looking for a real kickstart to help you revise your current relationship with spending, there is something in here for you.

Annie Raser-Rowland is a horticulturalist and artist, and works at CERES nursery in Melbourne, giving people advice on how to grow lots of tomatoes. She is the co-author (with Adam Grubb) of The Weed Forager’s Handbook: A Guide to Edible and Medicinal Weeds in Australia (Hyland House, 2012), which has sold over 15,000 copies. Their weekly spending, on everything except housing, is less than a quarter of the Australian average.

Adam Grubb runs an urban permaculture design and education business called Very Edible Gardens, co-hosts RRR radio’s Greening the Apocalypse, and also co-founded EnergyBulletin.net (now Resilience.org) and the Permablitz movement. He is the co-author (with Annie Raser-Rowland) of The Weed Forager’s Handbook: A Guide to Edible and Medicinal Weeds in Australia (Hyland House, 2012).