Living Well Spending Less: 12 Secrets of the Good Life {Book Review}
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Ruth Soukup may be one of the most successful bloggers I know.
She’s grown her blog Living Well Spending Less from a personal experiment in financial accountability to a profitable business receiving over 3.4 million page views per month. She’s written the Amazon.com #1 Bestseller How To Blog For Profit: Without Selling Your Soul
Tomorrow, she releases her latest project, a new book entitled Living Well, Spending Less: 12 Secrets of the Good Life.
I had the privilege of reading an advance copy in exchange for my honest thoughts, which I am excited to share with you today.
– About the Book –
Ruth shares her journey of pursuing the good life, full and worth the living, in the lessons she’s learned through personal struggle and success. The twelve secrets she shares in her book touch on everything from budgeting and household management, to living through failure and finding contentment, to the value of setting goals and passionately pursuing your dreams. Each chapter is filled with practical and Biblical advice, offering the reader tangible next steps to embrace the lesson learned for themselves.
– What I loved –
Ruth’s Honesty
It is true that Ruth has achieved a measure of success, but it has been won through her absolute determination to grow through her own seasons of stress, disappointment, and extreme personal challenge. There were several times I realized she did not have to share so personally about her own failures in order to make a certain point in the book, but she chose to anyway. I have the highest respect for her level of honesty and transparency. Her story is one of the most inspiring pieces to the entire book.
Secret #2: Contentment is a Choice
In Secret #2 Ruth talks about choosing to be content with the life that we’ve been given. This is something I’ve been working on personally for the last six years. I cannot begin to count how many times I’ve begun a thought with “If only we had . . .“, “If only we could . . .“, or “If only we made . . .“, when really, I have so much to be grateful for.
The end of this chapter was especially meaningful to me, where Ruth shares seven things that nearly anyone in this country can identify with in thanksgiving; our ability to read, food to eat, a car to drive, a place to sleep. She punctuates this list with the stats and statistics that demonstrate just how wide the gap is between living with our most basic needs met here, and the primal need to just survive that a large majority of the world deals with on a daily basis.
Secret #4: Written Goals Can Change Your Life &
Secret #5: We All Get the Same 24 Hours
In Secret #4 & 5 Ruth shares a story about Lou Holtz, who in 1966, while broke, unemployed and with his third child on the way, decided to write a list of 107 goals that he wanted to achieve in his lifetime. Instead of just listing things like “get a job,” or “put my kids through college,” he very audaciously dreamed some gutsy dreams like meeting the President and appearing on the Tonight Show.
Spoiler alert: 102 of those 107 items have been crossed off his list!
I finished those two chapters immeasurably inspired to dream bigger. Big dreams are scary – because sometimes they spell big failure – but I have been so challenged to believe for more from my life.
Living Well, Spending Less is a great book to start the New Year with
This is the time of year that everyone is looking for inspiration to be better, do better, live better moving forward. For me, this book has been a tool to inspire me towards those goals in 2015.
– About Ruth –
Ruth Soukup is a writer, speaker, photographer, and entrepreneur. Her popular lifestyle blog LivingWellSpendingLess.com follows her adventure of finding the “Good Life”–a life rich with family, friends, faith, and creativity–on a budget. She lives in SW Florida with her husband and two daughters.
Ruth appears regularly on WINK News as a money saving expert to provide household tips and frugal living advice. She is also a feature columnist and photographer for Harbor Style Magazine and has been a contributing writer for Proctor & Gamble’s Home Made Simple and P&G Everyday websites.