You haggle with the little old ladies in the Thrift Store.
Paper plate? Lots of junk mail comes on paper that’s just as good and lasts just as long. (Of course for a fancy dinner I’ll go all out and use half a paper towel per guest.)
Yeah, but do you know how long it took me to clean out my truck and look under the sofa cushions to find $4.95? Why, I coulda bought enough Ramen noodles to last a month for that price! It’s an outrage how they gouge us I tell ya! An outrage!
And, that was funny Snooooopy.
My family uses Burger King coupons at McDonald’s… and they get accepted.
We used to sneak microwaveable popcorn into movie theatres.
When I went to movies with my parents they bought me child tickets, making sure that they were behind the adult tickets when they handed them to the ticket ripper person. They finally upgraded me to student when I was 17 or so.
My mom would take cups and utensils from in-flight dinner trays.
You plan your wedding reception for a Friday afternoon at your local watering hole because there are free hot wings at Happy Hour and you can get a $1.00 off the drinks at the cash bar.
I can figure out how you got the popcorn in, but who got stuck hiding the microwave?
If it weren’t for the Thrift Store and other people’s closets, I’d be naked!
You see the beef flavoured noodles at Tesco for 8p a pack and think “Damn, that sounds good!”
Wasn’t that a Seinfeld episode?
You tell your family to vote on which way to splurge; take a drive in the country, or buy a magazine.
Two words: Tang wipes
You suck the all the chocolate off chocolate covered nuts then offer the nuts as snacks to visitors.
So you saw that on Oprah, too, eh?
You tie your dental floss in a loop so you don’t waste any wrapping it around your fingers, then soak it in rubbing alcohol and reuse it the next day. And the next, and the next.
(I swear to God, I saw this in a newspaper article a few years back about cheapskates. They were having a contest to see who went to those most ridiculous extremes to save the least money. This guy won, hands down, as he saved something like 50 cents a year doing this.)
You enjoy a “smell only” sandwich - I also read this in an article about insane cheapskates. This old guy buttered two pieces of bread, carefully laid salami slices on them, then wrapped the sandwich up and put it in the fridge. The next day he’d peel off the salami, add that to newly buttered bread and eat the bread and butter that was merely imparted with the spicy garlicy salami aroma. He’d do this all week, until the big day on sunday when he ate the whole thing, bread, butter and salami.
Sounds delicious!
You save the plastic bags that bread comes in to avoid buying sandwich bags.
And bring your lunch to work. In the plastic bag that yesterday’s newspaper came in.
Tupperware? Feh. Peanut butter jars. (Hint: these are NOT microwave safe. Trust your old uncle Shodan on this one.)
Send away for free t-shirts over the Internet. I have about twenty.
I used diluted dish-washing detergent to wash my hair when I was a student. It actually works pretty well. Vaseline is not, however, a particularly good shaving cream, even when mixed with soap.
Prescription medication is about a third cheaper if you can get them from veterinary supply catalogs. Same drugs, same FDA - less lawsuits from cattle. That’s the only difference.
I actually got into this a bit too much when I was a student and for a while thereafter. The “dented cans” section of my grocery store was my gold mine. Goodwill provided most of my clothing (I owned a lot of bowling shirts). It became sort of a game to see how cheap I could live. My wife earned about twice what I did when we first met, but I had about five times as much in savings as she did.
Generic rules.
Regards,
Shodan
This isn’t a particularly novel item, but the source is interesting. Was reading an article on (I think) cnn.com yesterday about the founder of Ikea, and they quoted him defending himself against being excessively cheap by saying “I don’t wash and reuse disposable plastic cups much anymore.” And this from a man worth somewhere between 30 and 50 billion. I laughed.
You even USE a plate? Why don’t you use your hands. It’s free! Anyway, all my junk mail is used for my bed. I nick clothes, sew them into a mattress, and stuff junk mail in it.
This woman wrote to Heloise, bragging how much she saved in marinade by reusing it. After she left the meat to thaw out on the kitchen counter all day. Heloise pointed out that the quarter she saves was overshadowed by the cost of treating food poisoning.
Robin
I recently scored for a whopping $2 at a garage sale all the books the new owner of a house wanted to get rid of left by the previous owner. All but one book were schlock books of the 50’s.
I am using the rest to start fires in my fireplace.
I also save all the larger cardboard containers ( cereal, oatmeal) for fire starters.
This saves loads of room in the garbage bag.
Then after the fire is out for a couple of days and assuredly dead, I shop-vac it up and put the ashes in my compost heap. It’s a win-win situation.