A Bloke's Guide to Saving Money: How to Be Skint, Stingy and Strangely Satisfied
By Owen Croft - the same cantankerous, twice-divorced, sofa-duct-tape enthusiast who wrote The Blokes Cook BookListen up, you glorious tight-fisted heathen.This isn't some shiny-suited, latte-sipping finance prick telling you to cancel Netflix and invest in avocado futures. This is a proper, no-bullshit survival bible for the common man who considers £2.60 a "big night out" and measures wealth in how many days he can go without turning the heating on.
Owen Croft - a man who's been skint since the day he was born, proudly wears jeans older than most TikTok influencers, and once tried to return a half-eaten kebab because "it didn't taste of hope" - has distilled four decades of professional poverty into one glorious, sweary masterpiece.
Inside these sacred pages you'll learn:
- How to terrorise the supermarket into giving you food for pennies (yellow-sticker warfare tactics that border on performance art)
- Why designer clothes are the biggest con since your ex said "it's not you, it's me"
- The ancient art of turning a £12 Tesco wardrobe into a lifestyle that says "I've given up, but I look oddly confident about it"
- How to date, drink, and occasionally wash without accidentally acquiring a bank loan
- The joy of eating beans so often you start to feel emotionally attached to the tin
- Why "treat yourself" is the battle cry of the financially damned
- And most importantly: how to be absolutely brassic, completely unashamed, and weirdly bloody content about it
This book won't make you rich. It'll make you the kind of broke that comes with dignity, a full belly of reduced chicken, and the smug satisfaction of knowing you've outlived every flash bastard who laughed at your £16 trainers.
Perfect for:
- Blokes who check the price of milk like it's the bloody stock market
- Lads whose idea of interior design is "wherever the duct tape looks least obvious"
- Anyone who's ever cried in a car park clutching a 19p cauliflower like it's their newborn child
Warning: May cause uncontrollable nodding, involuntary cackling, and an overwhelming urge to cancel your gym membership because "walking saves petrol".A Bloke's Guide to Saving Money - because being skint never felt so bloody triumphant. Now sod off and start saving, you beautiful, miserly legend.
Autorentext
ABOUT OWEN CROFT
Born in the middle of 1970 in a damp, pokey back-to-back stone terrace house in Mossley, Greater Manchester ? the sort of house where the toilet was outside, the wallpaper peeled itself in protest, and the front door opened straight onto a cobbled hill steep enough to give a mountain goat vertigo.
While other lads were doing detention, Owen was at home hammering out stories on a battered Imperial 66 typewriter he'd nicked off his uncle for a fiver and a packet of Jammie Dodgers. Poetry, filthy limericks, half-arsed sci-fi, shopping lists that turned into novellas ? anything and everything got written down. He's still got boxes of the stuff mouldering in his attic: spiral notebooks full of teenage smut, margins packed with doodles of tits and monsters, and one epic 398-page fantasy novel written entirely in green biro when he was fifteen.
Life got in the way for a few decades ? factory shifts, dead-end jobs, hiking the Pennine hills in all weathers just to stare at sheep and clear his head, the usual northern rite of passage. But he never stopped writing. The notepads piled up like unpaid bills. Typewriters gave way to knackered laptops that smelled of lager and joss sticks, yet the words kept coming.
Now, finally, in his mid-fifties and with the patience of a man who's watched too many sunrises over Saddleworth Moor, he's dragging the best (and filthiest) of those decades-old manuscripts out of the cupboard, dusting off the sheep shit and the sarcasm, and actually publishing the bastards.
First came the notorious BUMBLECOCK books ? the ones your mum pretends she hasn't read in the bath. More are stacked up behind them like planes over Heathrow.
Just a lifetime of stories, a typewriter that still works if you hit it hard enough, and an industrial-grade contempt for taking anything too seriously ? especially himself.
Welcome to the mad bastard's library.
Mind the language. It bites.