Shampoos and shower gels are scams imo. I order a 10 litre container of the cheap pink soap you get when using public restrooms. It cleans just as well and is significantly cheaper. I use an empty bottle with a pump on top and refill it with the container every other month or so.
Edit: If you got sensitive skin that needs special care then this isn’t for you, though.
Just buy blocks of basic hard soap. Better for your skin and your plumbing. I don’t know if it’s cheaper compared to your 10L bottle, but it’s definitely cheaper compared to normal liquid soap bottles.
If you don’t have hard water, maybe. Not here. Soap scum on the tub, soap doesn’t remove dirt, just sort of locks it on. Which does not matter as much on skin but is disastrous for hair. I have known a couple people who had to cut their hair off after trying to wash it with soap.
If I was to the point where I could only afford one, I’d get shampoo. If that was impossible for awhile, water only is the way I would go. It works ok, most stuff rinses off.
Even then, a basic soap like Dr Bronners or your favorite “hand soap” does well for most of your body. People ask my wife how her hair is so amazing, she just washes it every couple days instead of every day and sometimes has some light argan oil or something to reduce frizz. Washing hair (especially long hair) every day damages it no matter what you’re doing. The most important thing is to scrub your scalp really good.
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)
Decide how much you will spend each week and spend a little less than that, slowly over 3 months you will reduce your expenses. Buy clothes and wash them after 2-3 uses unless you live in super dirty/dusty/warm area. This will prolong clothes life significantly and added advantage is they come back in fashion after a while. I have a shorts which I use still after 10 years.
I stopped washing my t-shirts after a single use (unless visibly dirty, smelly, etc) and the lifespan difference is immense. Also drying clothes in a drying rack instead of in the machine makes a massive difference in durability.
Yes. They often get smelly after one day depending on what you do. Sure blue jeans or an outer jacket can be good for a few casual wears but basically everything else is daily washed so coworkers don’t need to suffer the smell
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.
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.
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.
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.
Get a 2nd hand multicooker off eBay. They slow cook, do rice/lentils/soups and lots of other things. I got one that was a bit bashed about but worked perfectly for £20.
Grow herbs either inside or outside. Rosemary, Thyme, Bay and garlic and a few others will grow fine. For the rest, get dry. Herbs add instant flavour to rice, lentils etc.
A small chicken (about £4) equals 4 meals. When the carcass is stripped, put it in your multicooker, just cover with cold water, add a whole carrot, a whole onion, both halved, some peppercorns, 3 or 4 bay leaves and 2 teaspoons salt. Slow cook on a very low heat for 6 hours. Get rid of all the solids and you now have chicken stock.
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
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.
Our PT system (Melbourne Australia) is privately owned and costs $5 each way. Consider not paying and paying a fine if caught - it often works out cheaper. Fines are $200, and I’ve only had my ticket checked maybe 4 times in 6 years. Odds are good!
This kiosk at my work doesn’t have anyone working on it. There’s cameras but I doubt anybody checks those. I don’t steal much, but I make sure to grab an extra item to buy to make it more convincing.
Friend, if there’s cameras, there’s a record, and that means that if someone notices they’ll have video proof of theft. That would cost your job.
And if you’re working for a small business, please don’t steal from the owner. Small businesses are not big faceless money-extraction machines like corporations are.
That’s a weird argument. Most people don’t want to spend their whole lives in prison. If you’d ever been in one, maybe you’d realize incarceration is not an experience most people enjoy… at all. It’s sort of the point. Suicide is even cheaper, should we recommend that?
It’s not an argument for going to prison, it’s a commentary on the deplorable state of American society.
Suicide is even cheaper, should we recommend that?
You think people haven’t considered and even exercised that option for that very reason?
incarceration is not an experience most people enjoy…
If the point of prison is to remove joy, then why not just have convicts play No Man’s Sky?
But seriously, should that even be the point? Isn’t the point of having a justice system a bit more nuanced than that? Shouldn’t our aim be to create a better society in general? Not simply through mere incarceration, but also education and mental health care?
Don’t we owe it to the members of society who have been failed by society to lift them up when possible to a place where they no longer need to subvert and disrupt society’s rules for the sake of their own survival? Don’t we owe it to the rest of society to provide a path to a productive life for so of its citizens, regardless of our previous unwillingness or inability to do so?
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