These two meals kept me more or less healthy as a student, even through “omg I have 10 eur to last me 2 weeks”.
Lentils and rice form complete proteins when eaten together. Lentils are a staple, and very cheap. They should be bought dry. Look for Indian recipes for daal for inspiration, or just cook with some broth and fry up some garlic and onion to throw in at the end.
Fill up a casserole with potatoes to boil, but leave some room on top, use a lid and don’t fill up water so it completely covers your taters. Mackerel wrapped in aluminium foil with some aromatics inside like bay leaves, lemon slices if you’re not a fan of fish. Place the fish on top of the potatoes when there’s 25 min left on them. This dish also consumes very little electricity, but most importantly it will provide you with plenty of omega 3, vitamin d and all macros you need. Super important for those who live places where you get little sunshine through the winter months!
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.
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
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.
Learn to cook. Learn how to use fresh and pantry ingredients.
I can easily get by on $75 a week at a bougie produce market in the city (pasture eggs, free range chicken, etc). Or, I could get food delivery twice and spend more than that.
My work made me get dress clothes, my solution was thrift shop bargain bin, just pick the clothes you like as long as they fit or are too big, and get them fitted.
It was cheeper then going to Walmart and getting worse clothes.
If you have any public drug coverage and you can’t afford food, you might be able to get your dr to “prescribe” food (stuff like Ensure, Resource, etc) and have it filled for free from public exceptional coverage.
Here’s the trick I used when I was young and poor. I worked for cash with an estate liquidator, and I saw the passion some of the customers had for their collectables. I decided to develop that flavor of passion for a collection of $20 bills.
For me, the hardest part of saving money (assuming it’s even a possibility) is avoiding the trap of saving to spend. The savings itself has to become a goal, and that can be really, really boring.
Another tactic I used was to always save double the value of a large planned purchase: if I started with $500 and I wanted a $200 item, I’d save until I had $900 before spending. That way my stack never felt like it was diminishing.
Add comment