In this paper, an economical cascadic multigrid method is proposed. Compared with the usual cascadic multigrid method developed by Bornemann and Deuflhard, the new one requires less iterations on each level, especially on the coarser grids. Many operations can be saved in the new cascadic multigrid algorithms. The main ingredient is the control of the iteration numbers on the each level to preserve the accuracy without over iterations. The theoretical justification is based on the observations that the error reduction rate of an iteration scheme in terms of the smoothing property is no longer accurate while the iteration number is big enough. A new formulae of the error reduction rate is employed in our new algorithm. Numerical experiments are reported to support our theory.