The Minimalist Budget

A Practical Guide on How to Save Money, Spend Less and Live More with a Minimalist Lifestyle

By: Simeon Lindstrom

Narrated by: John Malone

Length: 2 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

What's the first thing you think of when you hear the word budget? It's a meager little word, one that all too often comes after tight. Maybe you think of this word as an adjective, something to describe a cheap and substandard car or hotel. Budget brings to mind rationing, a kind of money diet. If you're like many people, budgeting is something you do with a kind of deflated spirit: budgeting means bargain bin quality and the sad sense that what you want is going to be just out of reach.

This book will try an altogether different approach to budgeting. It's a pity that the idea of living within one's means should be experienced as such a deficit. This book will try to show that when you apply the principles of minimalism to budgeting, you are neither in a state of self-denial nor trying to survive a financial scrape. In fact a minimalist budget is a particular approach to abundance and fulfillment that may seem counterintuitive to most.

Undoubtedly, what came into your mind when you heard the word budget was simple: money. Money is a thing to be feared, to be saved, to be celebrated when it's there and mourned when it isn't. Budgeting, we are told, is necessary. When you live in a world where there is always one more thing to buy, being cognizant of the fact that you don't have endless resources is just the practical thing to do.

However, budgeting can be much more than this. To put it simply, money is only one of the resources that we should be managing in our lives and possibly not even the most important one.

As humans it is our lot to deal with being finite beings: We have only so much time to spend on this earth, only so much time that we are allotted each day, only so much energy that we can give away before we run into a deficit.

©2014 Simeon Lindstrom (P)2016 Simeon Lindstrom

great book

i loved this book. it was very knowledgeable. it was short but worth every bit.

This would be better in print

There are a lot of excellent tips in here for saving money and time, and assessing value in a different way than usual. I'd like to have a copy that I could write notes in or highlight ideas I'd like to use.

At the end, I sensed the book was wrapping up. But there were 29 minutes left! About 3 minutes were spent in an epilogue, listing recommended reading. The rest were summaries of other books this author has written. The summaries are so long that I'm tempted to call them abridged versions of the books. I ended up fast forwarding through all that. This left me with a negative feeling, ok, irritation, at the end of an otherwise very balanced and useful book.

This was a very good performance by John Malone!

Awesome information!!!

You won't be sorry that you spent time in this book. It is very motivational and inspirational. Just great overall information and well read.

Very helpful

I’ve listen to this book a couple of times, very good information I don’t want to forget

Nothing new, serves little purpose, poor content

Would you try another book from Simeon Lindstrom and/or John Malone?

No.

Any additional comments?

This book offers no new advice, just the same things you have heard over and over literally listed. He makes several claims such as "This has been proven to work/not to work" without siting sources. Many of which are completely wrong and just a parrot of the same general myths people have been uttering for years because they heard them from another unreliable person.