Stop buying stuff. My wife grew up poor, probably poorer than I did, and she still buys tons of junk. If fucking Amazon is showing up to your house on a weekly basis, STOP, you are buying shit you don’t need.
Don’t buy something because it is on sale. If you don’t want it bad enough to buy it at full price, then you don’t need it. This does not mean ignore sales/discounts, but don’t let fear of missing a sale or discount force you to buy something.
Kohl’s is a fucking scam, stay the fuck away from them. All their shit is price jacked 60-80% so they can advertise 40% off, give you “Kohl’s Cash” and still make a profit. The number of times my partner has told me we have to shop for clothes because our $40 dollars of Kohls cash is expiring, and we walk out with $200 dollars of clothes and another 40 in Kohls Cash is way too damn fucking many times.
Apple is expensive junk. Avoid if you can. Fuck it, Windows/Microsoft is expensive junk too. I’m paying 150 a year for office, and I hardly use it. My partner “needs it” because they can’t write a document or use a spreadsheet in Google’s free office suite. The Surface is fucking terrible.
Just stop buying stuff. Try it for a week, don’t buy anything except groceries, and maybe gas if you drive. You’ll survive.
You can buy all kinds of necessities cheap on AliExpress for $1.99 or when they have sales every month for $1.79 this special section only available on there mobile app. Also most cities have food-banks or some churches giving out free food and clothing. There is also a Freecycle.org community kind of like craigslist but for free stuff.
Black beans and Tapatio will keep you full and is pretty tasty for less than a dollar a meal. Also you can eat it out of the can. That how I lived when I was homeless.
Nope, as per my username I live in a place where infrastructure was developed before the car.
Update: you don’t need to purchase groceries daily. That would be more expensive, you put the money aside for later. The trick is that you don’t spend money that should cover expenses next week, that way you can more closely monitor your spending.
I didn’t mean it as a critique of what you were saying, and certainly not as an insult to you, but rather as a disappointed critique of American city layouts.
I once met some hippie-like people who fed themselves exclusively by dumpster diving. Not sure where they got their stuff, but they had a lot of high-end foods (cheese wheels, expensive meats, not-so-fresh produce, etc). They lived in busses, vans, RVs and stuff like that. They didn’t have jobs; not sure how they got money for things like clothes; odd-jobs I guess.
Less extreme “hacks”: Goodwill, or Ross/Marshalls if you’re feeling fancy. Ebay/Craigslist/Offer-up (need to be careful about getting ripped-off, and Ebay isn’t as cheap as it used to be). Buy, cook, and eat mostly cheap staples (rice, beans, pasta, etc). If eating meat, you can use it sparingly by cooking recipes that comprise mostly of cheap staples. Budget Bytes has decent recipes. Unfortunately, most people’s biggest expense is housing, and there aren’t many “hacks” for that. Maybe, get a work-from-home job and move to Wyoming or something
I like the smell of the softener. Tbh I never even considered that fabric softener… Softened fabric… In my head fabric softener = good smelly conditioner.
One day my SO and I were bickering and I was asked what is the point of fabric softener. I said for it to smell good. And they said it was to soften the fabric. Oops.
Way healthier and cheaper to make your own roast beef. The recipe is simple as it gets.
Leave meat out until 60 degrees to the core. Rub with light virgin olive oil, then heavy on the salt and pepper until it’s coated with it. Bake uncovered 375°F, 20 minutes a pound.
Cover for 20 minutes when you first pull it out so all the juices settle in. Aluminum foil and a bath towel works well for this.
Cool off to room temperature before putting in the fridge.
You will have the best RB for sandwiches you ever had.
Only buy roasts when they are on sale.
I just bought a 10 pound roast for $3.99 pound, saving me $14 a pound over deli roast beef that has added water and nitrates.
I froze half of it already sliced in vacuum sealed bags so I have some when Roast Beef is not on sale.
I save a ton with my garden and chickens. If you got just a little land. I live in a small town but in the middle of it, but I got my yard used to its maximum potential. You would be surprised what you can fit if you do it right. You can go vertical if you need too. Where you save a so much money isn’t that “oh well, now I don’t have to buy a squash! I saved 3 dollars “ but if you let it dictate your meals it’s what you eat and then you spend 0 dollars on supper. I ate a lot of squash and bok Choy and rice and home baked bread this late summer and it was great every meal. Probably saved nearly $20,000 on groceries those two months. Give or take. (Don’t try squash if you don’t have the room. They are delicious but will straight up take over a given area with huge beautiful leaves and huge wonderful yellow flowers all summer)
How much time do you spend looking after your garden? In my area, I would need to water the garden occasionally (if there is not much rain), figure out a pest mitigation solution (I don’t want to eat squashes half eaten by rodents, weed the plant bed, etc.
I know all this because my father took up gardening as a retirement hobby and quit after a few years because he did not want another full time job.
It’s strange because it… isn’t really a joke, just wrong information? It’s not a high enough value to be obvious hyperbole (“I saved like a million on groceries”), so it looks like a typo that you didn’t realize you made and are now aggressively defending like you meant it as a joke. Not saying that’s the case, but that’s sure what it looks like.
Could you estimate how much it actually might have saved you? I think that’d be very good for the discussion.
Farmer’s markets are very expensive in my area. Like, almost double the price of my local grocery stores. I sometimes wonder if people just buy their goods from the grocery store and sell them at the market.
Decide on a monthly, weekly, or daily dudget and use cash only.
So back in the day, I had a 10$ daily budget. So every month I would withdrawal 310$, and take 10 every morning. All plastic cards stay at home. If I wanted to buy something for more than 10$, I would have to save up.
This way there are no surprises.
Also, it led me to DIY most of the non tech things in my life.
Better yet, get a credit card that earns rewards and treat it like a bill that must be paid each month. I have a Citi double cash card that’s 2% rewards for all purchases that I use to pay for almost everything. I also have a citi custom cash card that we use for food exclusively, which is like 5% rewards for the most spent category. I keep upping the limit of both at every opportunity to try and keep spending below 10% monthly. Combined they generate at least 2k a year and I have a near 800 credit score and it’s no different than using cash if you are responsible. Free money.
Buy expensive shoes. Well, let me rephrase that. Buy GOOD shoes. A good pair of QUALITY shoes will save you money in the long term as they will last a lot longer than buying many pairs of cheap shoes.
I would also argue that many pairs of shoes can also have the same effect. If you can rotate shoes, you’re not wearing out any one pair excessively. I have shoes that are in still good condition but are a discontinued Adidas line that’s not available anymore. Although I do have shoes I still haven’t worn so there’s definitely a point of having too many pairs lol
Realized the 80 dollar slip resistant work shoes I got at Shoe Carnival were like 20 bucks at target. Same shoes, just didn’t have a football player’s name on the tag.
Put em side by side they look identical and I wear them interchangably not even noticing a difference
A boomer I know once bragged about using fabric softeners a second time because they still had some use after the first. I’ve never even considering using the stuff.
Not a hack necessarily, but worth repeating; if you can’t afford to pay it off right away, don’t put purchases on your credit card. Don’t make the same mistakes I have in the past.
That said, if you can afford to pay it off, credit is probably a better choice than debit for most purchases. Build up your credit score and earn those reward points.
Thrift stores out of season. Look for your winter jacket in June, you’ll get the nicer brands, and most thrift stores will do some kind of rotating discount on certain colored tags. Most ‘dry clean only’ items can indeed be machine washed on gentle.
Preserved and frozen meats and fish can be made into fantastic recipes. We do salsa chicken straight from frozen in the instant pot, and I make a killer pasta with tinned sardines and breadcrumbs. The benefit of these is that you can buy them on sale and don’t have to worry about cooking them quickly to avoid spoiling.
Drugstore makeup can be just as good as expensive stuff. Aldi moisturizers are incredible and $4 a pot. I splash out on super expensive shampoo and conditioner, so I don’t have reccs there, but my husband swears by Aldi’s black and white bottle stuff.
And this tip is a little wild, but learning to forage can be immense. There is so much free edible food around you, from flowers and leaves that make delicious tea (passiflora flowers), weeds that can substitute salad greens (lambs quarters, kudzu, and wood sorrel), to absolutely delicious fruit that you couldn’t even buy if you wanted to (pawpaws!). Use the golden rules of having three different ways to identify it (three sources, don’t just use photo ID apps, learn the description, not just the visuals) and also know the sickly lookalikes, and never forage for carrots or parsley.
You can straight up live off oyster mushrooms for like 2-3 months in a cold season. And the mighty little “potato bean” Apios americana, grows in almost every slightly moist disturbed area and is much more nutritious than potatoes. (Louisiana)
Add comment