Sure, Jeff Yeager holds the official designation of “The Ultimate Cheapskate,” bestowed on him by no less an authority than “The Today Show.” But it’s a title he’s happy to share, and quite frankly he thinks the world would be a better place if it had a few more cheapskates anyway. That’s why he’s followed up his first book, “The Ultimate Cheapskate’s Road Map to True Riches,” by introducing us to “The Cheapskate Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americans Living Happily Below Their Means.”

Actually, it wasn’t really a book that he wanted to write. “I’m lazy!” he protested by phone from his (long paid off) Maryland home. “It took me 47 years to write the first book, and I only had 18 months to write the next one.” But, he writes, “the day ‘Road Map’ hit the shelves, the cheapskates started coming out of the back aisles of the dollar store. They put down the how-to books they were reading at the public library. They rose up from the fifty-cent piles at their favorite local thrift stores. Cheapskates from across the country began writing, emailing and even phoning me — on their own dime! — to unite under the banner of the Cheap Pride movement...” Clearly, there was more to be said.

So he set off on his bike for his first book tour (yes, bike — as in 3,000 miles on a bicycle. You wouldn’t trust a cheapskate who flew first class, would you?), planning to save on lodging by making arrangements with like-minded folks through CouchSurfing.com. And as he met cheapskates across the country, he found that what surprised him most of all was how different they all were. “That was more surprising than the commonalities,” he commented. “Urban, rural, big families, no families, young people, old people. Often when I speak in a public setting, you get people who lived through the Depression who know what I’m talking about, but I was surprised by the number of young people. And that was very encouraging.” So while “Road Map” was chock full of Yeager’s own story and experiences, he was suddenly presented with the opportunity to tell the stories of plenty of people who made the same choices in different ways, while simultaneously responding to his critics who attributed his success as a cheapskate to personal idiosyncrasies like enjoying meat usually classified as “offal” and choices like being child-free.

Cheap has gone chic in the worldwide recession, of course, and Yeager could not have been in a better place at a better time: after a long career in nonprofit management — an education in dollar-stretching if there ever was one — he settled down to spend four years writing “Road Map,” releasing it just months before the markets crashed in 2008. (He hastened to clarify that it wasn’t the stunning success of his “buy less” philosophy that tanked the Dow.)

“I finished it while the economy was still going gangbusters. One of the interesting stories — I pontificate on a wide range of things in it, and when I finished writing it and it sent it to publishers, they said, ‘We love the book, except for the part on housing.’ I’ve always been really conservative about this, believing in buying less house than you can afford and paying it off; I’m as radical as what our grandparents are on that. At that time, apparently everybody was getting rich on real estate and (the publishers) thought I was going to look foolish. Fortunately, I stuck to my guns, and now I’m like a prophet on real estate.”

There’s a bite of sarcasm in that last phrase, but Yeager’s voice quickly sobers up. “And it is sort of prophetic — my advice has always been to ignore the pundits who say ‘don’t pay that off early.’ Pay it off as quickly as you can, get out of debt and be happy. That was viewed as advice that will make you look foolish.” He gave a laugh that could be fairly described as diabolical if it wasn’t so warm. “I guess the cheapskate wins again!”

“By the time (the book) came out,” he continued, “all of a sudden people started taking frugality more seriously. I can remember when I first started writing full-time, there were just a handful of us that had blogs about this stuff, and now there are literally thousands of blogs about frugality and thrift and who’s cheapest. But 99% of that is about, ‘Give us some tips on how to save on the stuff we’ve always bought.’ That’s really misdirected. I do some of that, but I think the golden epiphany is not, ‘How can we get more stuff for less?’ but, ‘Do we really need the stuff at all?’ There’s really no proof that more money and more stuff makes us any happier.”

“It’s not a personal finance book about how to get rich. It’s a personal finance book about how to get happy. And that seems to me to be vastly different than most personal finance books. I’m sure there are some happy rich people, but I’ve known a lot of rich people, and they don’t strike me as much happier than those of us on the other end of the teeter-totter. What’s ‘enough’ for you? It’s going to be different for everybody, (and the members of the cheaphood seem to make that bar pretty low), but it seems like everybody ought to have that answer. I call it ‘slaying the enoughasaurus.’”

I don’t know what image that conjures up for you, but I had a sudden flash of the monstrous pile out in my garage waiting for the rummage sale, morphed into a T-rex-shaped behemoth splitting at the seams with not-quite-right skirts and ill-considered kitchen appliances, towering over me as I bravely waved a shiny rapier at it. It made me laugh, and thereby accomplished the second part of Yeager’s mission.

“I’ve always tried to use humor to get the message out there. There’s a lot of good information out there, but good Lord! It’s so dry it makes me want to take my own life! So I started telling some jokes, and the ‘cheapskate’ moniker engages people in what’s otherwise a very serious conversation about quality of life, social justice, environmentalism. I’m saying most Americans would be happier if they would only spend less and conserve more. That’s serious stuff! I need a laugh track for that, some off-color jokes to get somebody to listen to me!”

I didn’t find any off-color jokes in the book, although the story about the guy who gets busted poaching a still-warm pizza from the table next to him in a restaurant as a lesson in conservation for his kids is not to be missed. The pages are jammed with such anecdotes, alongside specific tips and websites and probably the best money-saving advice in the country, coming as it does from true and lifelong devotees of their craft. It covers everything from the afterlife of bread to the decision to reproduce, presenting profiles of his “Miser Advisers” that cover not only their laundering habits and insurance purchases, but also the basic philosophies that knit together these decisions.

“Some of those commonalities struck me as surprising and newsworthy, like the high percentage of cheapskates who don’t have a household budget or a designated emergency fund. So there was quite a bit of counter-intuitive stuff. But the biggest and most rewarding one was that the vast majority of people who participated, they at least claimed that their primary motivation isn’t ultimately about money at all; it’s about some higher quality, or at least some quality that’s not attached to money. A lot of people are very religious — there’s a definite conservative Christian wing to the cheaphood — but the other half were almost the opposite, with no religious beliefs but were environmentalists or believers in social justice or just having a belief that quality of life is more than a pile of stuff.

“All I wanted to do was to say, ‘There’s some little population of people who probably have a lifestyle like you have, or like you want. And they’re able to do it in the way they want.”

You can hear Jeff Yeager tell stories about "The Cheapskate Next Door" at 7 p.m. on June 16 at the downtown Borders.

Leah DuMouchel is a free-lance writer who covers books for AnnArbor.com.