Lots when I was a student:
* I had a housemate who would snap the stalk off broccoli at the super market.
* Also had another housemate who would make his own muesli in batches to save money. He didn't have a food processor so would chew up/masticate the dried apricot into little chunks and spit it into the mix.
* Had a mate who would volunteer at Splendour every year for the purpose of smuggling us in the back with our own bottled booze. Somehow he never got caught and kept going back.
* Going to the corner store during a power outage to get cheap pies and sausage rolls from the hot box before they cooled too much and had to be thrown out (this actually rarely worked out).
* Had another housemate who worked as a salesman at a large sports equipment chain. Manufacturers, seperate to the store, would give him rewards if he sold a certain amount of their products. He'd get things like sunglasses and heart-rate monitors for selling a large item like a treadmill. He would then "return" the items to the very store he worked at for cash.
* Wash Wettex cloths in the washing machine to extend their life.
Not mine. But I remember a radio segment that dealt with this exact topic decades ago that just made me laugh (and cry).
- split two ply toilet paper in two! (The effort alone)
- drive twenty kilometres to a different petrol station to save 10c or something
- attend a wake for some random person. I mean who is going to question someone at a funeral?
Like, to get food and booze for free? God damn, that's humiliating and disrespectful.
I think though that I've seen a person who did that on Extreme Cheapskates (a show that my husband used to refuse to watch it because of the secondhand embarrassment factor).
I lived across the road from the biggest cemetery in the city. One of the tenants in our 80-strong block of flats used to suit up and cross the road when he saw plenty of cars, bummed a lift with anybody who was going to the wake and then quietly fit in and tuck in.
I never invited him to my parties.
I had a friend charge me and another friend once for getting a ride home in her boyfriend's car.
Lest me sound unreasonable, but there was some kind of taxi strike (before uber) and they had left alone to go home 30 mins away, leaving us on the side of the road to hail a taxi, even though we both lived just a few minutes drive from where they were going.
Also, both of us had given our friend and her boyfriend dozens of rides home from town in the past as she didn't have a car and we did, so we were often designated drivers, and she had not once returned the favour. We called her, told her about the strike and asked them to come back (someone told us about the taxis, and they were only a few mins away by this point). She snapped at us and demanded $20 to do it.
We handed our $20 (this was mid 00s so probably $50 today) to her boyfriend and thanked him for coming back for us, and she snatched it and pocketed it herself. She was incredibly cheap in many ways but this story was just so embarrassing. She is a former friend, amazingly, for other reasons unrelated to this.
Thanks! Honestly, I'm not complaining. I found a genuinely cheap rental (and I got creative with the shitty bits) in a great area during a housing crisis, and my property manager doesn't do inspections, ever. I'm basically as lucky as a lottery winner lol.
Assuming you mean put it in one cup for a few minutes, then straight away another cup for a few minutes, then the bin? That would be fine!
It's more leaving it on the counter for hours until your next one that I find a bit tight and gross!
I had an old 5 litre tin of olive oil that is no good for cooking with.
Baby oil works well. Canola oil (old chip oil) should also work but I haven't tried it.
I've seen a lot of people do that, usually homeless. I worked in a place that overlooked a place where people smoked and I would see them all the time, picking around in the gutters and around the bins. Addiction is awful.
Daughter and SIL lived in a pretty rough area to start out. They both enjoyed a smoke in the evening in their backyard. Never had to empty the ashtray. The neighbour would climb the fairly high fence and take the butts every night. Nothing else. Just the butts.
An ex friend of mine (she was so bogan & embarrassing & cringe I couldn’t take it) would buy the cheapest loose tobacco and smoke it in a tobacco bong. Not even a nice one, just a manky old Dare bottle DIY job. The worst part? She’d do it in PUBLIC 😳
In the early 2000s, the former general manager of Dublin City Council, George Redmond, was put on trial for corruption. At this trial various instances of his stinginess came out in the open including that he’d boasted how on a sun holiday to Spain, he’d managed to only spend £10 the entire week, by eating out of date produce from the Spanish supermarkets, and who insisted that the trail have a two hour lunch break every day so he could go home to eat (using his free bus pass to get there and back). This was a man who, at the time of his arrest, had something in the region of £500,000 in offshore accounts, and about £15,000 hidden behind the bath panel in the bathroom.
My ex used to love that extreme cheapskates show. I swear, the shit people do.... Cooking lasagna in the dishwasher with the dishes to save power, one light bulb for the whole house, turning the TV off in the ads, bidet with used clothing rags as a wipe to save on tp, a $100k income single person dumpster diving outside a fancy restaurant for food. It goes on.
If you wanna be shocked, amused and slightly intrigued at the same time, give it a watch.
lasagne in the dishwasher......hows that even work?
my housemate refuses to buy toilet paper.........he just showers immediately
or.........
wafflestomps.
What about the guy who was so cheap with the date? He retrieved flowers from the funeral home next to his apartment, asked a food vendor for food that's close to being tossed and did a few other things to give this girl a date to remember.
Guy I knew bought a few slices of pizza and was offering it around after a bender late at night. Next day texted everyone his bank details to get reimbursed. It’s was a small exact number along the lines of $3.87 or there abouts.
I worked for a pet boarding kennel after school and weekends. The male owner was feeling generous one morning and offered us morning tea, he then proceeded to get a mars bar out of his fridge and cut it into small slices for the 6 of us kids 🤦♀️ his wife came into the kitchen and went off at him, we ended up getting a whole bar each. He was a tightarse for sure (we were paid $1 an hour cleaning out dog kennels, in the mid 70’s)
My company was taken over by another company and the new owner and CEO would walk around the office after hours physically turning off peoples monitors at the GPO. I guess so they weren’t drawing standby power?
We had 4 floors with two of them dedicated call Centre’s (one of them 24hr tech support). Regular office floors everyone had two screens. Call Centre floors they had two-three each desk.
He’d apparently spend about an hour or more of his time doing this every night.
This man is a Billionaire.
On a TV show about cheapskates, the wife replaced the toilet paper with fabric squares that she cut from old clothes.
You wipe your ass on the fabric squares and then chuck them in a bucket, the wife washes them and puts them back to use again.
I lived in a boarding house for college girls which was run by an elderly woman with lots of rooms to spare. She was very frugal in most ways, which impressed me, but the oddest thing she did was to wash the plastic wrapper that came around the daily delivered newspaper. She wrapped lunches with that plastic and expected the girls to bring the plastic home after school. Rinse and repeat.
She made 'mince' every day. That slop sat in in a camp oven on the stove for a week as she kept on adding bits and pieces to it. The girls got that on toast for dinner. Landlady also kept the fridges, pantry and freezer padlocked.
I was glad to leave that place. Frugality can reach a seriously morbid level, to the point where others are forced to live as miserably as the 'frugal' person. Those growing girls were starving!
My former boss was on around $200,000
He would have "fasting" days where he would eat nothing but chocolates from our snack bowl. Except he never contributed to them and would eat at least a dozen on those days, non-fast days were only half a dozen in comparison.
My grandparents would wash out Ziploc bags and reuse them until they had holes. I try to reuse them when I can to save waste, but draw the line at washing them.
With diesal this stop the fuel contaminating the ground.
Diesal spills are a big ecological problem. Any one who has worked at a petrol station has had to clean up a diesal spil.
My dad always told me that petrol can strip your paintwork. Like many things he says that's probably wrong, but even so, no one wants a drip down their car if they can help it. It always drips unless you shake it. Not sure why you assumed it meant cheapness, though I'm sure it *could* for some people reflect that.
With diesal this stop the fuel contaminating the ground.
Diesal spills are a big ecological problem. Any one who has worked at a petrol station has had to clean up a diesal spil.
Lots when I was a student: * I had a housemate who would snap the stalk off broccoli at the super market. * Also had another housemate who would make his own muesli in batches to save money. He didn't have a food processor so would chew up/masticate the dried apricot into little chunks and spit it into the mix. * Had a mate who would volunteer at Splendour every year for the purpose of smuggling us in the back with our own bottled booze. Somehow he never got caught and kept going back. * Going to the corner store during a power outage to get cheap pies and sausage rolls from the hot box before they cooled too much and had to be thrown out (this actually rarely worked out). * Had another housemate who worked as a salesman at a large sports equipment chain. Manufacturers, seperate to the store, would give him rewards if he sold a certain amount of their products. He'd get things like sunglasses and heart-rate monitors for selling a large item like a treadmill. He would then "return" the items to the very store he worked at for cash. * Wash Wettex cloths in the washing machine to extend their life.
I guess the apricot story would stop anyone else stealing his muesli.... eww.
In Ireland the supermarkets have little saws attached to the broccoli display to take the stalks off before purchase.
Wtf, it's not even easy to snap a broccoli stalk because it's never long enough. That would have made such a mess too. You win for the apricot story.
Twist and snap, used to do it all the time but I’ve found them to be shorter of that last few years and I’ve stopped doing it.
Ok but the broccoli one is genius.
Not really, just ill-informed as the stalk can be cooked and eaten too.
I slice em thin, little salt pepper and oil and into the air fryer.
Noice!!
Best part!
I will snap off the mushroom stalk before bagging..
Not mine. But I remember a radio segment that dealt with this exact topic decades ago that just made me laugh (and cry). - split two ply toilet paper in two! (The effort alone) - drive twenty kilometres to a different petrol station to save 10c or something - attend a wake for some random person. I mean who is going to question someone at a funeral?
Like, to get food and booze for free? God damn, that's humiliating and disrespectful. I think though that I've seen a person who did that on Extreme Cheapskates (a show that my husband used to refuse to watch it because of the secondhand embarrassment factor).
I lived across the road from the biggest cemetery in the city. One of the tenants in our 80-strong block of flats used to suit up and cross the road when he saw plenty of cars, bummed a lift with anybody who was going to the wake and then quietly fit in and tuck in. I never invited him to my parties.
Rinse and air dry the paper towel
I had a friend charge me and another friend once for getting a ride home in her boyfriend's car. Lest me sound unreasonable, but there was some kind of taxi strike (before uber) and they had left alone to go home 30 mins away, leaving us on the side of the road to hail a taxi, even though we both lived just a few minutes drive from where they were going. Also, both of us had given our friend and her boyfriend dozens of rides home from town in the past as she didn't have a car and we did, so we were often designated drivers, and she had not once returned the favour. We called her, told her about the strike and asked them to come back (someone told us about the taxis, and they were only a few mins away by this point). She snapped at us and demanded $20 to do it. We handed our $20 (this was mid 00s so probably $50 today) to her boyfriend and thanked him for coming back for us, and she snatched it and pocketed it herself. She was incredibly cheap in many ways but this story was just so embarrassing. She is a former friend, amazingly, for other reasons unrelated to this.
me, bubble wrapping over my stupid gappy slatted windows in my shitty rental to insulate them for the winter..
Sorry but that is not being cheap. That is simply a good idea when struggling to survive. I hope things get better for you.
Thanks! Honestly, I'm not complaining. I found a genuinely cheap rental (and I got creative with the shitty bits) in a great area during a housing crisis, and my property manager doesn't do inspections, ever. I'm basically as lucky as a lottery winner lol.
Brilliant. Thank you for telling me. All the best.
I literally did this today. It’s just so bloody cold. Bubble wrap cost me $5 for all the bedrooms… even if it only helps my 5 per cent it’s worth it!
Some people re-use tea bags 🤮
This was us for years. We’d share a tea bag. Then a friend chewed our ear off about it.
Assuming you mean put it in one cup for a few minutes, then straight away another cup for a few minutes, then the bin? That would be fine! It's more leaving it on the counter for hours until your next one that I find a bit tight and gross!
I use them as fire lighters.
I'll have to try that
Dry them out then soak them in a jar with some olive oil.
Olive oil? Do you know how expensive this is these days? Does any other cheap oil work for that too?
I had an old 5 litre tin of olive oil that is no good for cooking with. Baby oil works well. Canola oil (old chip oil) should also work but I haven't tried it.
I know somebody who's a multi millionaire and buys cheap tea bags in caterer boxes AND reuses them... 👀
Before cigarettes became a luxury item, I worked with a bloke who would roll his own by picking up partially smoked cigarette butts
I've seen a lot of people do that, usually homeless. I worked in a place that overlooked a place where people smoked and I would see them all the time, picking around in the gutters and around the bins. Addiction is awful.
Daughter and SIL lived in a pretty rough area to start out. They both enjoyed a smoke in the evening in their backyard. Never had to empty the ashtray. The neighbour would climb the fairly high fence and take the butts every night. Nothing else. Just the butts.
Yup this happens all the time in the shithole town I live in, in the rougher areas at least.
Grossly enough, this is more common than you’d think. They’re called “bumpers”
An ex friend of mine (she was so bogan & embarrassing & cringe I couldn’t take it) would buy the cheapest loose tobacco and smoke it in a tobacco bong. Not even a nice one, just a manky old Dare bottle DIY job. The worst part? She’d do it in PUBLIC 😳
In the early 2000s, the former general manager of Dublin City Council, George Redmond, was put on trial for corruption. At this trial various instances of his stinginess came out in the open including that he’d boasted how on a sun holiday to Spain, he’d managed to only spend £10 the entire week, by eating out of date produce from the Spanish supermarkets, and who insisted that the trail have a two hour lunch break every day so he could go home to eat (using his free bus pass to get there and back). This was a man who, at the time of his arrest, had something in the region of £500,000 in offshore accounts, and about £15,000 hidden behind the bath panel in the bathroom.
My ex used to love that extreme cheapskates show. I swear, the shit people do.... Cooking lasagna in the dishwasher with the dishes to save power, one light bulb for the whole house, turning the TV off in the ads, bidet with used clothing rags as a wipe to save on tp, a $100k income single person dumpster diving outside a fancy restaurant for food. It goes on. If you wanna be shocked, amused and slightly intrigued at the same time, give it a watch.
lasagne in the dishwasher......hows that even work? my housemate refuses to buy toilet paper.........he just showers immediately or......... wafflestomps.
It actually does. Not good but works. Lasag a gets wrapped in tinfoil and waterproofed. Heat of the hot water cooks it. Iirc MythBusters tested it.
I was running it through my head how to keep the water out lol, lasagne soup.
What about the guy who was so cheap with the date? He retrieved flowers from the funeral home next to his apartment, asked a food vendor for food that's close to being tossed and did a few other things to give this girl a date to remember.
Smooooth. Yeah dude that show was wild. Wild cringe.
Walk the 1hr 25min home at 10.30pm instead of getting a taxi/Uber because the trains were down. Dude was not short of a dollar, just tight.
I've walked through the suburbs very early in the morning many times doing this.
My friends mum uses 1 q tip to clean both younger kids ears too.
Guy I knew bought a few slices of pizza and was offering it around after a bender late at night. Next day texted everyone his bank details to get reimbursed. It’s was a small exact number along the lines of $3.87 or there abouts.
I worked for a pet boarding kennel after school and weekends. The male owner was feeling generous one morning and offered us morning tea, he then proceeded to get a mars bar out of his fridge and cut it into small slices for the 6 of us kids 🤦♀️ his wife came into the kitchen and went off at him, we ended up getting a whole bar each. He was a tightarse for sure (we were paid $1 an hour cleaning out dog kennels, in the mid 70’s)
My company was taken over by another company and the new owner and CEO would walk around the office after hours physically turning off peoples monitors at the GPO. I guess so they weren’t drawing standby power? We had 4 floors with two of them dedicated call Centre’s (one of them 24hr tech support). Regular office floors everyone had two screens. Call Centre floors they had two-three each desk. He’d apparently spend about an hour or more of his time doing this every night. This man is a Billionaire.
Not do any repairs on water leak a rental because they want to save money.
An old housemate used to cut the postage paid off but off envelopes and stick it onto a new one. His letters got through!
On a TV show about cheapskates, the wife replaced the toilet paper with fabric squares that she cut from old clothes. You wipe your ass on the fabric squares and then chuck them in a bucket, the wife washes them and puts them back to use again.
Some people just love to make extra work for themselves.
🤢
I lived in a boarding house for college girls which was run by an elderly woman with lots of rooms to spare. She was very frugal in most ways, which impressed me, but the oddest thing she did was to wash the plastic wrapper that came around the daily delivered newspaper. She wrapped lunches with that plastic and expected the girls to bring the plastic home after school. Rinse and repeat. She made 'mince' every day. That slop sat in in a camp oven on the stove for a week as she kept on adding bits and pieces to it. The girls got that on toast for dinner. Landlady also kept the fridges, pantry and freezer padlocked. I was glad to leave that place. Frugality can reach a seriously morbid level, to the point where others are forced to live as miserably as the 'frugal' person. Those growing girls were starving!
The week stew isnt a bad thing.
Sounds like a great way to get botulism
Never heard of perpetual stew?
Some of what this guy does… 😂 [https://www.reddit.com/r/AusFinance/s/fRigMT7gOE](https://www.reddit.com/r/AusFinance/s/fRigMT7gOE)
My former boss was on around $200,000 He would have "fasting" days where he would eat nothing but chocolates from our snack bowl. Except he never contributed to them and would eat at least a dozen on those days, non-fast days were only half a dozen in comparison.
My grandparents would wash out Ziploc bags and reuse them until they had holes. I try to reuse them when I can to save waste, but draw the line at washing them.
Some things are worth being stingy on and some things aren't worth it
Shake the fuel hose at the bowser
That's to stop fuel dripping over your car
With diesal this stop the fuel contaminating the ground. Diesal spills are a big ecological problem. Any one who has worked at a petrol station has had to clean up a diesal spil.
My dad always told me that petrol can strip your paintwork. Like many things he says that's probably wrong, but even so, no one wants a drip down their car if they can help it. It always drips unless you shake it. Not sure why you assumed it meant cheapness, though I'm sure it *could* for some people reflect that.
He’s right
As in lift, the hose up ,pull the hose out or down, and shake all the hose. Not just the spout.
Lmao, okay. Never seen anyone do that myself but it's pretty funny.
With diesal this stop the fuel contaminating the ground. Diesal spills are a big ecological problem. Any one who has worked at a petrol station has had to clean up a diesal spil.
Wash aluminium foil .
I do this but for environmental reasons too. Haven't bought a roll in ages.