Book: Effortless Savings

I got an email asking me to take a look at a book that was available on Kindle and in print. I have no idea how they tracked me down to send the email, but they did send me a PDF of the book. For more information, generally, on this book check here: www.effortlesssavings.com

Money. We all need to save money. Unless you’re the President and the Congress, then you are the ones creating the need for the rest of us to save money.

The difficulty is that we are often maxed out on big-ticket savings plans. If you are like my family, you already deferred the new car purchase, bought the smaller TV, cut the cable, and minimized the driving as much as possible. Where are we going to trim any for the recent sales tax increase? How about the 3-fold hike my insurance rates are taking?

Richard Syrop claims that his book Effortless Savings: A Step-by-Step Guidebook to Saving Money without Sacrifice will help us out in these situations. There is an accompanying website, which fleshes out a few more ideas and is naturally more dynamic to changing costs than a book. The website is free, and the book could be if you are a Kindle owner and Prime subscriber from Amazon—you can check it out from the Kindle Prime Library.

Is is worth your time and money to check out this book?

Time? Yes. If you have free access, it’s absolutely worth a few hours to peruse the ideas present here. Syrop is straightforward with his suggestions. More than that, his ideas may spark your own thoughts of simple ways to save cash throughout the year.

Most of the ideas are quite simple, like making sure you tweak your thermostat to the changing times of the year and day. Syrop also suggests that a programmable thermostat is worth the investment—spend a little to save more. I personally agree with this suggestion, based on experience. We swapped for a digital programmable thermostat a few years ago and saw about 15% drop off our heating costs.

Other suggestions are less certain. There are reasons for high temperature settings on your water heater, for example, and you need to consider that rather than just automatically cutting it down. Consider all the factors.

A few of the ideas will seem obvious, and some silly, but the time invested will pay dividends as you look at your budgeting.

Is it worth your money? A qualified yes.

I think that you can find ten bucks worth of savings if you implement a few ideas here. You will likely do a little better to just hit the website and check a few of those ideas first, then go for the book.

Overall, some of the suggestions are a challenge. Syrop recommends negotiating with your current service providers, which may or may not benefit you. Also, you may not be the aggressive type for negotiations. Still, it’s worth a look, especially if you are not plugged into another saving/financial guidance tool.

Most positive thing here: The existing suggestions help spark thinking about other ways to save.

Negative: There’s a decent amount of repetition with other books on the same subject. You likely don’t need this if you already have a book in this vein.

I was contacted to do this review, and there it is. It profits me nothing, whether you like the review and the book or dislike them both.