West Coast tightwad thriftily thrives

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This article was published 31/01/2026 (229 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Steve Burgess, originally from Brandon, is a Vancouver-based freelance writer who’s resided in a comfy apartment near Stanley Park for over three decades.

He owns no real estate and has no car. His income is modest and variable — and not variable in a positive way. He repeatedly underlines that over the years his rent has more than tripled while his income has flatlined.

Cheapskate in Lotusland is part memoir, part marketplace primer and a lot of acute reflection on everything from food waste, rampant consumerism and the importance of buying local to the Trumpian bully our southern neighbour has become.

It’s also informed, opinionated and funny — sometimes snarkily funny.

Despite its title, it’s not a how-to guide to living on the cheap, though there are elements of that here. Nor is it didactic, in the sense of offering a preachy transformative program to achieve off-the-grid frugality.

Rather, it’s an elastic take on its title’s and subtitle’s ostensible subject matter. Burgess’s research and ruminations aren’t confined to economics — personal, micro or macro — though money is always there in the background.

Early on, he admits his lifestyle choice is born of necessity.

“It has been my own feeling that thrift, far from signalling greed, is the required virtue of those who do not spend their lives chasing money,” Burgess writes. “Frugality is a defining trait of the artistic and creative, because when you follow your passions rather than profit, economy becomes a necessity.”

His express and implicit message: You can spend less and enjoy life more.

Burgess has an omnivorous intellect. He canvasses disparate ideas, everything from the cost of coffins and pet care to Beatles’ song lyrics and George Orwell’s seminal account of the life of European working poor in the 1930s, Down and Out in Paris and London. Yet he has a knack for nicely congregating them under broader themes of money and lack of same.

He challenges conventional Western consumer habits and is an ardent advocate of repairing and repurposing items, cooking at home, forgoing restaurant dining and reducing waste and spoilage. Yet for all that, Burgess comes across not as hectoring or lecturing, but as a warmhearted guide to living on less.

While he’s an affable narrator, there’s sometimes a tincture of sadness in his personal disclosures.

He lives alone — no wife, no girlfriend, no kids. He allows as to how he’s happy in his life’s lot, but elegiac moments sometimes quietly surface.

In Canadian circles, Vancouver has long worn the titular nickname Lotusland, with its connotations of West Coast indolence and self-indulgence. It’s a lift from Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus and his crew discover a magical land of happily narcotized lotus-eaters. Some of his sailors eat the delicious lotus, abandon their duties and plead to stay forever in “Lotusland.”

The dreamy unreality of a Lotusland is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. Ditto re: Burgess’s rich yet greatly constrained existence.

Still, his analysis is singular, and often entertaining. This is a tough-to-pigeonhole, bright, insightful and irreverent book about money — and, even more so, its absence.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.