OK, what do you HATE to spend money on, that you will go out of your way to save a buck or two. In particular the irrational stuff - the stuff you could “afford” but hate to pay for.
I cut my dryer sheets in half. Those things seem expensive to me, half a sheet works as well as a full sheet.
I steal blocks of cheddar cheese from the market!!
I’m not paying for that shit!!!
We love ice cream. Good ice cream–Homemade brand, Edy’s, and of course Ben & Jerry’s. But I flatly refuse to spend 6 bucks on a half-gallon of ice cream. If it’s on sale, I’ll stock up, but even when I have extra money, I just can’t make myself do it.
When it comes to lunch meat or cereal, I have a hard time ignoring the fact that a pound or two of shaved ham equals 10% of my grocery budget. It’s ridiculous. But when I do it, I REALLY do it–buy three or four different kinds of lunchmeat, then have subs for dinner.
And I don’t even USE dryer sheets. 
Occasionally I’ll use a bit of softener, or add a few drops of lavender eo to my dryer, but that’s it.
Of course, I’ll spend a small fortune on books or kids’ clothes…and heaven help me if Old Navy has a really good sale.
I walk. Almost everywhere. 5 miles roundtrip to the bank. 10 miles roundtrip to pick up grandma’s medecine. Why spend money on bus passes or even a car when I can get it for free?
I am the complete opposite of frugal. Never has the phrase ‘more money than sense’ been so aptly used as when applied to me. I make a point of buying the most expensive brand of something. I am a believer in the philosophy of ‘you get what you pay for’.
I loathe margarine. We don’t use it at Stately Doors Manor as I’ve banished its evil existence from my kitchen. We use real butter. It tastes better, and it comes from an actual cow, as opposed to a test tube.
I wait until it’s on sale and then buy several pounds of it at one time. I think I’ve got five pounds of it in my freezer. The advantage is that, if I want to bake something, it’s there and I don’t have to make a special trip for it. Baked goods made with margarine just suck.
Robin
I’m like Lobsang. Money just flows through my hands. But I do save every condiment packet and extra napkin from fast-food places. I just can’t see spending money on ketchup and napkins when you can get your supplies every time you hit the local Ptomaine-Trap for a burger.
That’s funny, I loathe butter! I’m looking at my margarine container now, and it is made from vegetable oils: palm, canola, cottonseed and soy. It also contains vitamins A and D3 and antioxidants.
I also have some butter here. 82.2% fat, compared to 65% and
54.2% saturated fat, compared to 29.3%.
Margarine doesn’t seem so bad to me!
I very rarely buy drinks when I’m out. I have no problem going out for lunch, but for some reason I have trouble justifying buying drinks. Don’t know why. I also buy generic brand flour, alfoil, basic things like that.
I absolutely can’t fathom paying $14 for a movie (any old movie) when it first comes out. It’s gonna be at the cheapy theatre in a few weeks, what’s the rush? (Especially when you add in the $4 cokes and $6 popcorn and it’s a $50 evening to see oh, I dunno, 2 fast 2 furious ) How can people part with that much cash for a movie and not have their stomach in sick knots?
Or maybe I’ve just been a student for too long now, and “careful with money” has turned to “cheapskate”. 
Uh, that would be the margarine not the container! :smack:
I’m with bodypoet on this one: ice cream. Love good ice cream. Won’t pay $6.00/gallon for it. I try justifying it like this: if we get 7 servings out of a carton of ice cream, it’s less than a buck per (large) serving; as much as you’d pay for a cone of soft serve crap at McD’s. Doesn’t help. Still won’t pay full price.
MissGretchen, I probably would agree with you about the movies, except there are no cheap seats around here. So, we go to the matinee ($12.00 for the two of us, not $14.00), and we take our own snacks, on which we spend, maybe $5.00, buy a $3.00 drink there. Total: about $20.00. Also, we don’t go to movies we feel luke-warm about. If we don’t really want to see it, we wait for it to come out on video.
I buy liquid starch, much cheaper and harder to use than spray starch.
I stock up on evaporated milk whenever it’s on sale. Good for nothing except hot cocoa.
But I buy ‘Marie’s’ butter, 2 to 4 times as much as Land O’Lakes
norinew , that sucks that theres’s no cheap spots near you. We have a cheap theatre that’s $3 on tuesdays - and even the concession stand is way cheaper that the insanely priced mega chains. For the $14 that the other theatre wants, we can get a movie , a pop or snack and dinner at a nearby Vietnamese place. Sweet!
Dry cleaning. It seems absolutely insane to pay someone else to clean my clothes. I’ve been known to throw clothes out (or donate them) rather than dry-cleaning them. I will often wash them in cold on delicate and hang to dry and it’s usually just fine. Mostly I buy fabrics that don’t require special care.
StG
I’ve never owned a car. We have a great bus system here. Why not take advantage of it and save on gas, insurance and pollution? Yes, sometimes it would be nice to get from point A to point B quickly, but overall, the bus isn’t a bad way to go.
I tear paper towels in thirds or halves, depending on how little a mess I have to clean up.
I’ve also been know to water down my shampoo and dish soap. It still works the same, so why not?
I don’t use dryer sheets at all. Our driers have an hour long cycle but even my jeans only take 40 minutes to dry, so I take them out before static has a chance to build up during that extra 20 minutes.
I also don’t buy canned pop unless it’s a really good deal. There’s only a few ounces difference between a six-pack and a 2 liter bottle, yet 2 liters are much, much cheaper.
Buzz.
Tikki and St Germain lose; they are not irrational.
I’ve got socks and underwear that are old enough to vote. I have to position the holes in my socks so I won’t cut the circulation off to my toes. I guess since no one sees it I don’t really care. On the other hand, I buy books like a lunatic. Every time I go into a place that sells books from a grocery store to a used book store I have to buy a book, even if I can’t really find one I know I’ll like.
I have a lot of trouble buying clothing. I can’t justify paying fifty dollars for a pair of jeans; it just seems to high for me. Consequently, I also have a problem throwing away clothes, even if they haven’t fit me in years and I know that there is no way that they will ever fit me again.
Oddly enough, I’ll spend money on other things, things that I don’t need at all, like nobody’s business. I have so many random trinkets piled up in my room that it’s no longer funny.
I feel an urge to be the nutrition-police. The reason margarine is generally so low in saturated fats is because it has trans-fats, basically unsaturated fats that have been hydrogenated (pumped full of hydrogen so that they’ll stay solid at room temp.) and turned into the equivalents of saturated fats. The problem is, saturated fats are still different, chemically speaking, so trans fats are excluded from that part of the labelling, despite the fact that they will clog your arteries in the same way. When it comes to differentiating between margarine and butter, your best bet is to use what you like best and use it in moderation.
-Mosquito
I am possibly the world’s third biggest cheapskate. Number two would be my husband, and number one my mother-in-law. Birds of a feather …
Our joint cheapskatesqueness ranges from the rational (secondhand clothes, books, car, furniture, everything) to the decidedly nitpicky. Example of the latter include:
[ul]
[li]I always recycle large envelopes and padded bags … even though the cost of the bag is generally only a small fraction of the cost of whatever I’m posting - not to mention the postage itself which, bizarrely, I don’t worry about at all. My dad does this too, so the same envelope can wing its way backwards and forwards between Melbourne and Aberdeen half a dozen times[/li][li]On a similar note, for years MIL instructed my husband not to change his address with a company he owns shares in, so that when they sent quarterly reports she could slip little notes inside the envelope before redirecting them, thus saving 40c on a stamp. The coming of the internet has changed all that…[/li][li]I would never buy vacuum cleaner bags, but instead would pull the accumulated dust out of them and dump it straight in the rubbish bin. I have recently broken myself of this habit[/li][li]We compulsively comparison-shop, spending about twice as long at the supermarket as we might, because we’re working out what all the different brands of whatever cost-per-100 grammes (that’s fun though. What can I say - we’re maths geeks. It’s amazing how often it’s cheaper to get two of the little sizes…)[/li][/ul]
[QUOTE=Aspidistra]
[li]We compulsively comparison-shop, spending about twice as long at the supermarket as we might, because we’re working out what all the different brands of whatever cost-per-100 grammes (that’s fun though. What can I say - we’re maths geeks. It’s amazing how often it’s cheaper to get two of the little sizes…)[/li][/QUOTE]
You should move Stateside. WalMart does that for you.