My grandfather did the same thing, except into quarters. My aunt told him, “Dad, you don’t need to do that! Napkins are cheap!”.
Guido looked at her and said, “That’s why I have money and you don’t!” Getting married and having an infant during the 30s, I can understand why he said that. But the thought of it is so hilarious, I wish I was there. 
And on second reading, I realize I should clarify I thought his response was hilarious, not being poor during the Depression.
That would be where the dead hookers were buried. 
My mother made this too! She called it Tuna on Toast.
My paternal grandfather was the cheapest person in the parish. As a young man, he was a cotton share-cropper but a very wet autumn forced him to get a job at the local prison. When he bought his own land, he had a graden plot and a kept chickens. He didn’t want to “waste money” on chicks from the feed store. He had a friend who raised fighting cocks. (As I understand it, there are still people in Louisiana who do this :mad: ) My granfather got the hens and culled roosters from his friend for free. Those were the meanest fucking chickens!! Being sent out to get eggs was like a death sentence. Also, in 1996 trash pick-up was offered in his area. He refused to put his trash out. By using the burn barrel out back, he could reuse the trash bags.
A penny saved is a penny earned - Ben Franklin
Firstly to answer the OP…I save soap slivers, nothing like knowing you can wash yourself when you stink…or just wanna be cleaner.
tsfr
now to reply to this…
do you understand the concept of…Walk kindly and leave no footprints???
just askin’
ThisSpaceForRent
Although I never thought of myself as poor (poor starving student, but not poor), for a while when I first moved in with my SO (now my husband) we really didn’t have much money. In that first month or so, we ate a LOT of peanut butter sandwiches, and pasta with frozen veggies and no name soup as a sauce was a very common meal for us. This was between finishing first year of univerisity and starting summer jobs (or, at least, having them begin to pay off!) Although my husband still had some pretty good savings from previous years, I was down to 50$ when I got that job that summer. Summer jobs after that paid progressively more, so things got better.
If things had gotten to the point where we couldn’t afford to eat, I know my parents or his dad would have no problems paying for us, but that was something neither one of us wanted to do, basically because of pride! We worked hard, saved our money, and got together the items we needed for everyday life. We bought a set of pots and pans from a going-out-of-business sale for 30$. They rusted immedately, but we used them for a year because it’s all we had! Up til that point, our “frying pan” was a pie pan. We burned ourselves repeatedly. Our food budget was about 60-75$ every two weeks, for two people, at a no name generic food store, for about a year and a half. Compared to some stories here, that might be a lot to some people, but compared to now, where we easily drop that on a casual night out, it wasn’t much!
Of course, after living 2 years in relative luxury, I’m currently not working and we are both looking for jobs in a new city (which we haven’t moved to yet), so the belt is being tightened…a little. We have some habits that need breaking (although we do have decent savings to last us a while and we are reasonably confident we will be able to get jobs in Montreal). Family packs of chicken breasts and no more tenderloin steaks in the grocery basket!
I’m the youngest of 9 kids, and my mom was widowed when I was 4. To say we were poor would be an understatement. I don’t even know how she kept it all together for us. I guess it was a good thing that potatoes were relatively cheap and very filling. And I can not remember a single time that she didn’t offer to let our friends eat at our house (many of them were poor too). If one or several of us had friends over, she’d do a quick head count before peeling potatoes. Lots of times, supper was a plate of mashed potatoes, or in the summer, a BIG pot of corn on the cob sat on the stove all afternoon until everyone had enough.
I’ve been exceedingly fortunate in my marriage to never be “hungry” poor. But in the tight times, I learned that homemade noodles will feed the hungry and cost very little to make (flour and an egg!). Throw in some sauteed onions and cabbage, and we were eatin’ like kings. When the boys were babies, I did cut the feet off a few of their sleepers to get a couple more weeks out of them until we had a few extra dollars.
I like meatless suppers.
When I was young my mom would load me and my 5 siblings in her car and we would hit 2 or 3 laundramats and tear out the cents off coupons from the magazines. This was back when stores would redeem the coupons without buying the product. Then she would hit the grocery store and do the shopping and pay for it all with the coupons. I also remember going with my mom to get “Army commodities”. This usually included flour, cheese, butter, mutton and other assorted items in green cans. My mom would go through once and bring everything to the car, change her clothes and put a scarf on her head and make another trip through the line for more stuff. Friday was bread baking day, I remember opening my sandwich at school and being embarrassed about having homemade bread.
When I went through a period of unemployment in the early 80’s, I did the collect cigarette butts to roll my own smokes. I would collect anything recyclable that could be sold for money. I would get jobs cleaning up folks yards and garages, instead of taking the stuff to the dump like they paid me to do, I would take it to a local garbage collection company and throw everything in the back of a garbage truck in the middle of the night. More than once I repaired shoes because I could not afford new ones. I would get cheese and butter from the USDA giveaways and hit food banks for food. There was an auto impound lot next to a crappy little car lot my father owned, I would sneak in under the fence and syphon gas for my car. I cut my own hair a few times, the results were always less than satisfactory. The one and only time I was desparate enough to try a dine and dash, the waitress called my bluff and asked me to pay my check before I got my food. I through a tizzy fit and walked out, complaining about the lousy service and lack of trust. I didn’t have a penny on me.
If we had cookies, they were always homemade. I would have killed for an Oreo in those days. Didn’t know what we had when we had it, did we? (My mom baked a lot of bread and buns, too.)
I used to do that with toothpaste. It is amazing how many days you can make it stretch. Once you get all the paste off the sides of the tube, there are substantial pockets in the cracks and up around the valve. I still did that out of habit when I got married, but my wife pretty much put an end to that.
Oh, that reminds me of another one. My daughter is five years older than my son. I always used to buy her boy’s clothes so he’d be able to have the hand-me-downs. She didn’t want a bunch of pink frilly stuff anyway.
I beleive it was Groucho Marx.
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My old boss was a german lady who was a tweenager during the bombings of Bremen. She went from very affluent to desperately poor in the span of one week when her father died shortly after hearing the news of his son being killed in the Army. I don’t know if she ever lost her house, but they had to sell off most of everything to feed themselves in the coming years. She came to American in 47 and missed the aftermath of poordom over there and sent home $ and clothes. Until her 70’s ( when I last knew her) she and her german sisters still swapped clothing back and forth, via mail.)
She was very freakin’ odd about handling money. We had accounts that owed us hundreds of thousands of dollars and she wouldn’t go after them for the money because she was afraid of losing their business ( ummm. Yeah.) but would stop the office dead in its tracks to interrogate all of us on which one of us stole the returnables out of the back room. ( It was me. It was always me. As there were at least two garbage bags worth of these things loose all over the place and ants were taking over. It was vile. And god forbid we spend money on an exterminator. I took the money and bought treats for the office and gave her the receipt.)
My mother’s Catalan. To translate that into terms most people in this board should understand, think Uncle Scrooge’s jewish-scottish cousin, then add 10% scrooginess.
But her reasoning to have me cut in half any soap bottles before throwing them away is not money. She claims it’s for ecological reasons - “for the fishies”, as she puts it. I’m quite convinced that the catfish in the local river are all mutants and would be just fine with a bit more soap in their daily mix, but hey, that’s just me.