Savings tips offer new career for two jobless Germans

By Karin Ridegh-Hamburg Oct 6, 2011, 3:06 GMT

Berlin - Kurt Meier, 57, and Uwe Glinka, 56, have been inundated with post since they turned bargain shopping and cooking from a necessity into a profession.

After publishing their guide for living on the cheap, the two men from the small town of Luneburg in western Germany have made about 30 television appearances. Their sixth guidebook, called Spar dir das Fleisch (Save Yourself the Meat), has just gone on sale in Germany.

The pair has sold more than 100,000 copies of their guidebooks, which are aimed at people who want to cut back on shopping expenses. 'There's a growing number of people who cannot cover all their costs with the income they have. That no longer only includes people on welfare,' says Meier.

Meier and Glinka are a communication technician and car salesman, respectively, by profession. After losing their jobs, they were not prepared to live the lives of struggling social welfare recipients.

They met at a job centre training course and made a virtue out of a necessity. Their aim was to show that it was possible to cook well on the small amount of welfare they received every month.

Meier and Glinka collected recipes for cheap meals in their first brochure. They spent months visiting Germany's biggest discount chain stores, noting the prices of the ingredients they needed.

'The unique thing about our cookbooks is that the reader always knows what a menu is going to cost,' says Glinka.

Their breakthrough came when they were invited to appear on one of Germany's biggest talk shows, Stern TV. 'We didn't have any money at the time to print the brochure so we published it on Stern TV's homepage,' says Meier.

The guide with 30 recipes for nutritionally balanced meals was downloaded 1.5 million times. That success spurred the authors on and they borrowed the money to print the guide.

The two have expanded their research efforts to cover other areas of daily life. They recently published a guide to shopping cheaply for pharmaceutical products, and are planning a book of advice on how to save money in the home.