Tweet
As a newspaper columnist in Detroit, Brian J. O'Connor didn't feel like he had much job security. "My paper had been sold, which automatically makes everybody nervous, and clearly Detroit was not doing well," O'Connor says of the bleak period in October 2009 when he launched his money-saving experiment.
That experiment involved cutting $1,000 a month from his budget, largely by focusing on recurring expenses. "Partly I wanted to fail as much as succeed because I wanted to illustrate how tough it can be if you really have to make big cuts in a family budget," O'Connor, 53, says. If parents went to work in the morning and came home unemployed, or suddenly lost overtime pay - as many workers did in Detroit during the recession - then they similarly needed to immediately transform their spending in order to stay afloat, he says.
His series of humorous columns on the experiment were so popular that he turned them into a book, The $1,000 Challenge - How One Family Slashed Its Budget Without Moving Under a Bridge or Living on Government Cheese," which will be released this week...
That experiment involved cutting $1,000 a month from his budget, largely by focusing on recurring expenses. "Partly I wanted to fail as much as succeed because I wanted to illustrate how tough it can be if you really have to make big cuts in a family budget," O'Connor, 53, says. If parents went to work in the morning and came home unemployed, or suddenly lost overtime pay - as many workers did in Detroit during the recession - then they similarly needed to immediately transform their spending in order to stay afloat, he says.
His series of humorous columns on the experiment were so popular that he turned them into a book, The $1,000 Challenge - How One Family Slashed Its Budget Without Moving Under a Bridge or Living on Government Cheese," which will be released this week...
