Oi, Pikey!

So you’re a good MoneySaver?
You live in the UK and you’ve Bagged a Cheap Flight or Bartered for a Bargain Beach Trip; you’ve found the Cheapest Travel Insurance, worked out the Cheapest way to Spend Overseas; you’ve got your special Cheap Roaming Mobile ready.
Then you arrive at the airport and pants, you have nothing to read. So you go to the airport bookstore and what do you find? A copy of “Oi Pikey,” a pocket sized, self-styled guide to living on the cheap.

Despite the racist overtones of its title, the book is quite nicely designed, quite fun with its talk of recovering from a cheap holiday by taking sick days off from work, its occasional useful fact, like Skipton is the charity shop capital of the North, and its advice to always opt for the Buy One Get One Free (BOGOF) option at the supermarket, but at £9.99 (or less if you shop around) for a slim volume it contains more jokes than money saving tips.

And it is true that people in Britain today will go all out to get a bargain regardless of the effort involved. Values have changed. If you are wearing something by, say, Gucci, it is almost embarrassing now, whereas people love pointing at what they’re wearing and saying ‘Primark! £5.’ You talk it down rather than talk it up. It is a badge of honour to have paid less. If that is how you think, you would be better off subscribing to MartinsMoneyTips@moneysavingexpert.com, an email newsletter from journalist Martin Lewis. In the US, you would look at something like The Tightwad’s Gazette.

I had been planning to title this review “Steal This Book” but then I remembered that we are trying to cultivate a responsible image while we look for advertisers, and anyway, the authors still get the royalty if the book is stolen – so borrow it from a someone this Xmas, I am sure it will be a popular present but I’ll punch the lights out of anyone who gives it to me. As far as I’m concerned it’s the authors that can BOG OFF.