Let’s have a little fun.
On Sunday, I reviewed Jeff Yeager’s new book, The Ultimate Cheapskate’s Guide to True Riches. Yeager has graciously offered to give away three copies to Get Rich Slowly readers. Rather than just do a random drawing, I thought it would be fun to share stories of extraordinary cheapness. It’s the Ultimate Cheapskate’s book contest!
Here’s how it works:
- By tomorrow night, leave a comment on this entry with a true story of extraordinary cheapness from your life (or the life of somebody you know).
- On Sunday, Yeager and I will select our three favorite stories. These commenters will receive a copy of his book.
Remember: this contest is meant to be fun. It’s a celebration of the lengths some people will go to save money. To give you an example of the sorts of stories I’m looking for, let me share some real-life examples from my own family.
First, my cousin Nick remembers two stories of his father’s cheapness:
- “My dad was so cheap that he once drilled a hole in a nickel so that he wouldn’t have to pay eight cents for a washer.”
- “My first memory of gas prices is driving home from my grandparents. We drove into a gas station, and pulled up to the pump. The guy came out and said, ‘Can I help you?’ My dad said, ’33 cents a gallon? No you can’t!’ We drove off. Five miles down the road, we ran out of gas. We had to pay a farmer 50 cent cents a gallon.”
In January 2006, my Aunt Virginia shared a couple stories of how cheap her husband is:
My husband likes quantity and sales.
For example, we just moved, and in the process I ran across an old receipt from Wal-Mart. It’s a receipt for 366 pair of panty hose. Yes, that’s right: 366 pair of panty hose. Also on the receipt are batteries, motor oil, and oil filters. After seven years, I still have enough new nylons left to last me until January 2007. They were purchased in July 1999.
More recently, Pop found a bargain at Wal-Mart the week after Christmas. Fruitcake regularly $2.99 was on sale for $1.00 a loaf. The more you buy, the more you save. Pop saved $106.00. He bought 53 fruitcakes, all that was left in the store. He spent $53.00.
For a longer example, check out Pop Buys Pop, in which my Uncle Stanley buys 70 two-liter bottles of Sierra Mist for $10.50.
Share your stories of extraordinary cheapness! You just might win a book.
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I had my husband “hack” my Swiffer WetJet refill bottle by drilling a hole in the bottom so I could refill it myself. Refill bottles are upwards of $4 and I hated spending money for soapy water every few weeks.
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Kind of relax & destreess better than massage
Price war :
Shop a : 10 foot reflexlogy free 1
Shop b: 10 fot refexlogy free 2
So surely we g for shop b
Annversary Cake house (Secret Receipt ..)
Buy one free one , we end up buy 10 , my frige end up load up with 20 cakes
All the best all for 2008,
Tracy ho
wisdomgettingloaded
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The cheapest thing I have ever seen was a manager for the company I worked for. He directed his outside salespeople to run the tollbooths without paying, figuring it was cheaper in the long run to pay the few tickets than to pay every toll!
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When my sister and I were traveling in Rome, we saved money on food by eating gelato for dinner nearly every day.
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My in-laws really overdo Christmas – dozens and dozens of presents for each person. Well, when you spend that kind of money on gifts, you have to be frugal somewhere. For several members of the family, there is no ripping into packages. They very carefully open each one and then fold up the paper to be reused the next year (and often for several years after that). My father-in-law even uses a knife to slice open the tape so that the paper doesn’t rip. I really can’t remember the last time my husbands grandmother used new wrapping paper for Christmas or Birthday. The same goes for boxes. There is a sort of joke every Christmas about “who got the oldest box”. I think last year there was a department store box that it was determined was from the 70′s sometime based on when that store closed. I believe it was finally retired.
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I have a dear old aunt. She has experienced Second World War and know how to be frugal. It is second nature to her.
At her latest birthday, she got a couple of boxes of chocolate.
A week later I visited her. She had a bowl of hazel nuts sitting on the kitchen table. I thought nothing of it at the time.
During my visit, we had a piece of chocolate. My aunt took one bite of the chocolate and took out the hazel nut inside and placed it in the bowl.
“I don’t like hazel nuts, but it would be a waste just to throw them out”
Realizing what she had just said, I got sick to my stomach, mainly because I had eaten from the bowl.
-Jens
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My father-in-law was a Depression-era toddler, and saw WWII rationing as a school child. He grew up with a single parent in a working-class poor neighborhood. That sort of thing imprints pretty deeply; he’s notorious for taking a slice of cheese to restaurants to avoid the 50 cent difference between a hamburger and cheeseburger. He also orders Diet Coke with lemon, and wraps the extra lemon in a napkin to bring home. It seems funny to us, but I remember him telling me he’d never tasted steak until they went out to celebrate their fifth anniversary – in his late twenties.
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My grandma is famous for being frugal. Here are a few things she has done:
seen that neighbors threw away the coupon section and grabbed it out of trash so she could have second set of a coupon or two she was planning on using.
gone to garage sales and taken things from the “free box” and then resold said items at her own garage sale the next month for .25 cents.
driven to three different grocery stores to take advantage of different coupons and sales (you know, bananas are on sale here, but potatos and soda are on sale there, so….)
I can’t buy that, I don’t have a coupon for it.
When playing white elephant food bingo at the senior center (when you bring in canned goods and such in a paper bag and then winner gets to chose a bag), she brought in something she had won in a previous bingo–not realizing until the person won it at our table that the box of coffee creamers she had brought had expired last month.
Clipping neighbor’s flowers and flowers along side of road–in order to have flowers to put on the family graves on Memorial Day. I have no idea if the neighbor’s mind the azaleas being trimmed each year by their 89 year old neighbor, but I’ve seen her do it.
I love my grandma, but her version of frugal can be a bit cheap! She has plenty of money, and will never be in financial trouble, but she remembers the Great Depression and tries to save money however she can.
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I sure wish I had a fun story like that. The best I can remember from my childhood was my dad pulling up to the McDonalds drive through window after a long car trip. (Three kids, 2 adults, 1 car). He ordered 20 cheeseburgers from because they were $1 each. This was quite a while ago, so surprising the teenager behind the window with an order of 20 cheeseburgers caused quite the panic. Even funnier was that he ordered ONE soda for all 5 of us to share!
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Let the games begin! And, hey, better bring your best game — you’re gonna need it. Remember who’s judging this Miser Death Match.
You might think you’re cheap because you save your Christmas wrapping paper, put it back on the roll, and use it again next year. Not the Ultimate Cheapskate. I save it, put it back on the roll, and return it to WalMart for a refund. (Nah, I don’t really do that, it would be wrong. But it might not be a bad act of civil disobedience if they bulldoze down the ball field and woodlot where the neighborhood kids have always played to build another WalMart, like they’ve been talking about.)
It’s time to strut your thrift-craft, and don’t be shy.
-Jeff Yeager
The Ultimate Cheapskate, the Titan of Tightwads, the Guru of Greenbacks, the Maestro of Misers, the Commander-in-Cheap….
http://www.UltimateCheapskate.com
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There was a music store in town offering free CD’s in exchange for 5 used CD’s.
Best Buy just happened to be selling all sorts of crap CD’s for $1.00 a piece.
I bought 15 of those and took them to the other store and got 3 brand new albums.
My friends called me Costansa.
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Well, we have a man here in Albuquerque who lives so simply that he’s become a local celebrity and guru of sorts. During the warmer months, this man wears nothing more than a loincloth. Now, should that loincloth happen to get a rip in it, this man doesn’t use a needle and thread – he uses a needle and DENTAL FLOSS! You see, dental floss is cheaper per yard than thread.
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Back in my single days, I was trying to get out of credit card debt. I had resolved to live only on cash and not use any credit (which wasn’t really a problem considering my credit cards were close to maxed anyways).
So I met this girl who was very cute and asked her out for two weeks later. I figured I could have enough in my bank account by then to treat her well to a night on the town. The same time, I had other bills come due, and on date night, I only had $26.00 in my bank account.
We met up at 8:00pm.
Thankfully, my car tank was nearly half full (or half empty if you are one of those people). I looked in the paper and found a Greek Festival that included food and soda for $5/person. I took her there and paid my way inside. After being there for a while, she asked me to get us some beers. So I went and bought us two beers for $5. I drank mine, she drank hers, and she wanted another one. So I go and bought her one, and filled mine up with water so she wouldn’t think she was drinking alone.
As the night progressed, she decided she wanted us to go dancing, I told her I was getting tired and had to be at work in the morning pretty early. We said our good nights, and I dropped her off at her car at 10:00.
While we never went out again, it was actually through finally telling this story to her and some of her friends, that I met my wife. She has since always appreciated the fact that I’ll do just about anything for her, but appreciates it more that I don’t go in to debt in order to do it.
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Two stories from my ultra-cheap childhood (which has led me to a relatively frugal adulthood):
1. I grew up in the 1970s and begged my mom and dad for a pair of the very fashionable Dr. Scholl sandals with the wooden soles and the single leather strap. Rather than buying these shoes for me, my dad carved the shoes out of a 2X4, stapled tire tread onto the bottoms and used a salvaged piece of leather for the strap. Needless to say, those “Dr. Pops” didn’t get much wear, but he did save almost $10.
2. As you can already tell, my dad was CHEAP and when it came to heating our little house in Michigan, he was extra cheap. We had a “wood burning” stove on our back porch, but rather than buying cord wood we would burn rolled up newspapers and lumber salvaged from broken pallets. Many a summer day was spent rolling those newspapers into tight logs or pulling apart broken pallets that my dad would bring home by the van load. That back porch would get to almost 80 degrees, but the rest of the house stayed at 55 degrees from November until April.
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My Dad is so cheap… (how cheap is he?)
Well I’m not going to mention about how he doesn’t turn the air conditioning on until August and he lives in Phoenix.
No, I’m going to mention this instead.
One day I saw him rubbing something on his disposable razors. I asked him what he was doing and he showed me.
Apparently he had taken the striker portion of a matchbook and was using it to sharpen the blades on his Bic disposable razors. He told me he got an extra week of use out of them by resharpening them.
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My wife’s best friend (J) and her husband (D) were shopping at the grocery store for a party they were having. D picked out Helluva good dip for the generic chips they bought. While at the check out line J is watching the price of every item that is being scanned in and see’s the price of the Helluva good dip and proclaims “D we are in no position to be buying Helluva good dip” and promptly removes the item, goes and finds a nice generic dip to save $0.25. After hearing this story I decided to take an old coffee can, print out a picture of Helluva good dip with a note “Helluva Good Dip Fund”, cut a slot in the top of the plastic lid, and taped the sign to the coffee can. My wife proceeded to fill it with 25 pennies and we took the can to the party and placed it on the dining room table next to the generic dip. J should be nominated for the ultimate cheapskate because I could tell stories like this for hours.
On a nice side note.. since a comment above was about how Christmas wrapping paper didn’t count.. is that even if you received wrapping paper you know was from 10 years ago? My mom wrapped one of my presents this year in such wrapping paper. It is actually a sin in our family to destroy good wrapping paper, and boy was it entertaining trying to explain that to my 2 year old this year during Christmas.
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My friend Daniel and I were discussing what we were going to do on a Sat night, and he said he and his wife wanted to drink Margaritas. I asked if he had a blender, and he said “I will just go to Wal-Mart and pick one up, then we can return it tomorrow. I’ve done that like three times this year.”
Yikes.
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I went with a friend to a dinner his company was providing on a riverboat casino. After dinner we were on the deck and I asked for a soda while walking over to a bar. He immediately said “no, don’t get it there, they’re free inside”. And this was after he had won quite a bit of money. His fellow employees never let him live that down.
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Mind if I offer two somewhat macabre tales about my dear parents?
As an urban-dwelling, educated professional whose childhood home looks like a typical 1970s suburban split level, I can stop a conversation cold by revealing that I was raised on roadkill. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that my dad was a deer hunter — in the years that he got one, we’d pull the minivan out of the garage, hang up the deer, and the butcher who lived next door would come over and cut it up for us. Venison filled our freezer. However, not everyone realized that sometimes, that deer had come to us by way of a timely phone call from a friend or relative who had been traveling a dark country road. “Hey Ben! I just hit a buck on Route 20. Naw, I’m fine; truck’s a little dented. Want the animal? Come get it.” As long as it was a fresh carcass on a cold day, that deer ended up in our garage — some choice cuts reserved for the finder and butcher, but the rest of the meat (and the hide) was ours, free.
Nowadays, my retired parents are graverobbers, but of the most benign sort. They go past or through the town cemetery on their daily walk, diligently noting who maintains the family graves and who doesn’t. A couple of years ago, they commented on the pretty geraniums that the cemetery caretakers had planted on each grave. The geraniums were removed in the Fall and my parents found them in a pile behind the maintenance shed. True to form, my dad snuck back at night and hauled the pile of discarded flowers home. He carefully repotted the geraniums and wintered them in the basement. Come Spring, he separated the survivors. He had more than twenty healthy, beautiful plants as a result… although the family makes jokes about their hardiness being the result of the unusual fertilizer they sucked up before they were pulled from the graveyard.
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When trying to save money one of my friends would buy the cheapest loaf of bread (usually the day old, half-price, store brand bread), then raid fast food places for ketchup, mustard, mayo, and on lucky days, barbecue sauce to make condiment sandwiches. Sure, they were cheap calories, but I don’t think i could ever do that.
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Dryer sheets! I cut mine in half for each load, and they work just as well. What, is there some kind of law that says dryer sheets need to be a certain size?
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Whenever I used to visit a friend of mine, he would go to an indian restaurant and take out buffet. He would pile his plate with just chicken or any other meat. He would bring home that and I would cook rice to eat that with. For US6 we get close to 8 drumsticks and some 5 naan bread. This will last both of us for 2 meals at least. That means we are paying close to US3 per meal for both of us. The irony is that we both can afford it but rather be cheapskates!
In the office where I work, there is always celebration one day or another and alot of pop is always available. I used to pile up the pop in my cabinet and take them home. You would be surprised how many you can collect in a month.
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My friend just gave me a good story yesterday! Her mom is the most frugal person I know. When my friend was in 4th grade, her mom used to make her wear plastic baggies over her shoes on rainy days, so her shoes would last longer.
(my friend says she took them off as soon as she was out of her mom’s sight)
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A past job and my current one both have a very large fridge in which they provide various soda’s, water, and snacks for their employees.
While telling everyone it was for the environment, I would grab people’s empty cans of their desks – and occasionally out of the trash -to be returned. I’d even volunteer to clean up meeting rooms so that I could get my hands on the empties.
Once a week I’d ride the subway home with a huge bag, annoying all the other folks on the train.
In reality it was to use the refund to create a laundry fund – not because I needed it, but because it was like doing your laundry for free.
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A few years ago my friend Jason found out that his girlfriend was pregnant with the couple’s first child. Being unwed twenty year olds, Jason felt the appropriate thing was to propose. He immediately left the home and went shopping, and felt compelled to call me after making his big purchase.
On the phone he relayed the following story, “Dude, I just got a great deal at Costco. I bought a box of granola bars and a ring for $900.” I mentioned that the “deal” didn’t seem like a great discount for any ring of substance. Jason shot back that the great deal was actually on the granola bars. “The ring was just an afterthought. I decided to get married as I browsed through the cereal aisle. I figured that she could help split the cost of my Costco membership.”
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My girlfriend loves to embarass me with this story of meal-preparing cheapness.
I was making dinner for us; eating in, of course! The plan involved taco seasoning, and I had 1/2 packet in the cupboard. (Use only half the spices to save money!)
It had a been a month since I opened the packet. A mealmoth maggot had wormed its way inside. Now, I could have run across the street to spend a buck on another packet. Or substituted other spices. But I figured “It’s OK, when it cooks, any grossness will be nullified, and who wants to waste fine spices?” So I plucked the maggot out and stirred to the spices in.
Of course, my girlfriend saw this, became immediately grossed out, and refused to eat it. I went ahead, cooked the meal, and ate dinner.
She married me.
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My dad has no qualms about looking like a kook in order to save money. This leads to some interesting sights for the neighbors.
My mother enjoys gardening, and their house is surrounded by a split-rail fence covered in meticulously kept climbing roses.
My dad grumbled about the cost of bug sprays, and he refused to even consider those pricey bug bags on stakes. So, each year her roses got chewed up when the Japanese beetles started to feed. Then one year, suddenly, the roses looked immaculate.
I was wondering how they had accomplished this, until one Sunday afternoon when I dropped by unannounced. My dad was in the yard with a 500-foot extension cord and his wet/dry shop vac, vaccuuming the beetles off the roses.
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My grandfather haunts auctions — he claims that’s the best place to find deals. One of the best deals he ever found was on church pews. He got an entire church’s worth of solid oak church pews for just a bit more than the cost of hauling them off.
He proceeded to very carefully take each pew apart and stored the wood. Since then, he’s built oak desks and other furniture from scratch for family members, making sure that the family doesn’t have to go out and purchase furniture.
Even better, my grandmother bought rolls and rolls of a patterned fabric sometime in the late 80s. All of their kids’ and grandkids’ furniture, curtains and bedspreads match, because she’s made all of them by hand (including the cushions on my grandfather’s oak furniture). She’s down to the last roll, though, and we’re all scared to think if we’ll have to try to match a new pattern now.
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i don’t know if this is more funny or sad:
my father grew up in post-WWII Soviet Union, which turned him into an extreme miser/pack rat. one of his famous traits over the years has been never throwing out food, no matter what condition it’s in.
with a big family, you have a lot of leftovers, not all of which are finished up in time. so, every-so-often, he would go through the fridge, pull out the leftovers in various stages of decay, dump them in a frying pan (frying makes anything taste better), then dump that into a huge pot, along with whatever vegetables, fresh or not, were available. after cooking the funny-smelling concoction for several hours, he would then serve that at dinner, topping each bowl off with various bread, cereal and/or potato chips crumbs.
we lovingly refer to this as “dad-soup-surprise,” and gag a little, every time we think about it.
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A few brief cheapo anecdotes, most related to my mother but one related to my wife, and another to my father. I’d encourage you to read the below as a body of work committed by my lunatic family.
My father used to look for combs in parking lots, and would pick them up, wash and use them when he found one. I mean he would constantly be on the lookout for a freaking comb.
My mother
- washed plastic bread bags for reuse
- “waterproofed” her kids’ snow boots with said plastic bread bags (foot in bag, bag in boot)
- bought shoes for her kids two sizes too big and rolled socks up in the toe to make them fit
- instead of buying proper tea, made tea from the dried leaves of various random plants
My wife not only uses half a paper towel at a time, but also washes them for reuse.
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My old boss, Brad, was so cheap, he would search through all the newspaper ads to find a furniture or car sale where they gave a way free hot dogs so he could take his family out to lunch there.
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My grandfather haunts auctions — he claims that’s the best place to find deals. One of the best deals he ever found was on church pews. He got an entire church’s worth of solid oak church pews for just a bit more than the cost of hauling them off.
He proceeded to very carefully take each pew apart and stored the wood. Since then, he’s built oak desks and other furniture from scratch for family members, making sure that the family doesn’t have to go out and purchase furniture.
Even better, my grandmother bought rolls and rolls of a patterned fabric sometime in the late 80s. All of their kids’ and grandkids’ furniture, curtains and bedspreads match, because she’s made all of them by hand (including the cushions on my grandfather’s oak furniture). She’s down to the last roll, though, and we’re all scared to think if we’ll have to try to match a new pattern now.
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It’s interesting that this contest came along. I just blogged about one of the “cheap” things my father did back when I was a kid. Here’s a summary of the story, with a link to my blog entry (which is probably much more entertaining.)
When I was a kid, we were very poor. When I joined Cub Scouts, my parents bought my uniform at the thrift store, but there was no official, shiny metal Cub Scout slide at the thrift store, so I was told I would have to make do by tying my neckerchief or figuring something else out.
I was devastated. Once again, I was going to stand out as the poor kid of the pack, all because my parents couldn’t afford to buy me a shiny metal Cub Scout slide.
My Dad saw my disappointment, and being the handyman he is, fashioned a Cub Scout slide for me out of a block of wood he had laying around. He drilled a hole through the center, sanded it down, wrapped it with a leather thong and glued the ends down. Finally, he colored the wood with a dark blue magic marker to match the color of my uniform.
When he called me out to the shed to give it to me, I was even more devastated. In my shallow mindset, it was even worse to have a “fake” slide than not to have one at all.
Now, of course, I cherish that slide and the work my father did to make it. It was unique, and it was a great example to me of how “making do” is sometimes better than the accepted norm.
Here’s the link to the full post (complete with picture of me as a Cub Scout wearing the slide):
Of Laptops and Cub Scout Slides
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Back around 2000 (the days of free stuff on the internet) I was an intern in an IT department. My 3 co-workers and I decided to hold a contest to see who could put together the best free-stuff date. The object was to use as little of our own money as possible to finance a complete PG date (dinner and entertainment) within 3 months. We came up with a point system based on our savings and the value. We received bonus points for accessories, and other free items. The winner received a $20. We weren’t allowed to use our positions as Government employees to get discounts or free items; we could ask for discounts but couldn’t refer to the contest, we couldn’t use pre-existing rewards points, tips weren’t counted and had to be 15% or more.
I ended up winning, I used 2 free movie tickets, I got a 50% off a coffee coupon in the newspaper which I used to buy my date coffee after the movie, I asked to sample one of their teas and since bags only come in one size I got a free cup of the tea. I got a free watch from Cisco, a free hat from Redhat and a Microsoft t-shirt (my date just loved how I dressed). I purchased gift cards for dinner cutting costs by using AAA to buy the gift cards and at a restaurant that I had a buy one get one half off. We went to dinner at 6:00 so the restaurant would be busy. When I spoke with the hostess I asked if I ordered take out (my initial plan) would they through in a free appetizer or dessert. She talked with the manager and I walked out with 2 meals and a free appetizer for about $12 (the value was around $35). We went to the local park and ate on a blanket I received for completing a survey online. I think in total I spent $15 on a value that was around $55.
My folks have to pay per trashcan the put out on trash day. At $3 a can my father decided years ago that an extra can on Christmas was to much. So a few days after Christmas he went out and purchased the cheapest Christmas fabric money can buy and made my mother sew draw string bags. To this day all the gifts my folks give me come in fabric bags. To prevent buying wrapping paper I occasionally receive birthday gifts in Christmas bags.
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Coming out of college I was broke and heavily in debt. Now I’m 30 and doing fairly well for myself. However I am proud to say that I have never bought a condiment in my life!! To this day whenever I am in fastfood restuaraunts, gas stations etc… I make sure to fill my pockets with all the free condiments I can fit. My refrigerator looks like the counter at McDonald’s.
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My wife’s grandfather was known for doing anything he could to save money. My favorite story is that he bought a book that demonstrated how to do dentistry at home on his five kids. His wife, who is a very quiet, old-fashioned woman, put a loud stop to that immediately. I guess you have to draw the line at amateur dentistry on your children.
My wife’s father picked up a lot of his father’s traits as well. When the Tylenol runs out, he refills the bottle with generic brand and doesn’t tell my wife’s mother; she claims that the generic Tylenol don’t work as well (which is ridiculous of course).
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Well, my father was so cheap that he continued to drive our station wagon for over a year after a hole developed in the passenger-side floor. Before he finally traded it in, the hole was about 4″x 8″ – large enough that a neighbor’s kid dropped a shoe out the hole “just to see what would happen”.
But my dad thought he wasn’t being too cheap, because HE had a friend who had kept a car for so long that when he jumped over the seat to deal with a misbehaving child, he found himself standing in the street…
My parents not only collected soda cans for the deposit, but they also saved up all our glass (could be reused) and cans (flattened and sold as scrap). Coffee cans would be reused as pans for my mom to bake special loaves of bread. Even plastic juice bottles (a luxury!) would get reused over and over as a container for lemonade or juice made from frozen concentrate.
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I grew up fairly poor – and bless my parents – they have worked incredibly hard to get our family to a better place. But the first ‘toy’ I remember was my first slide. We were driving home one evening, and all of a sudden, my dad swerves to the shoulder of a pretty big highway, slams the brakes, and jumps out. He runs around the truck, picks up a piece of sheet metal on the side of the road, and throws it in the truck. When we got home, he nailed the sheet to the side of the house, picked me up, and helped me slide right down. I still have pictures of him holding me on top of my first “slide”.
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Back in undergrad, I studied abroad in
Wales for a semester. Four of my fellow study-abroad students planned to backpack through Europe the month after the semester ended, and spent the last few weeks *practicing not eating* so they wouldn’t have to spend as much money on food.
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Ha! These stories are great!
In my family, you NEVER get a new car. Ever.
When I was in college I was driving an old Geo Storm. They have huge, long doors for some reason. Well, one day the latch on the drivers side started not to catch so well. It would fling open every time I went around a right hand turn! And I don’t just mean pop open – fling open all the way and I had to reach out over the road to close it!
So I happened to tell my dad about this right before my mom and I were headed to the mall for the afternoon. I should have known better. When I got back I found my car problem fixed! My dad had drilled a hole in the side of my door and in my middle console with a bungee cord hooking the two together.
Try explaining that one to your friends.
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While I don’t remember of this story taking place my parents and Grandparents enjoy telling it once a year. When I was young my grandparents would take me to the store with my cousin of the same age to purchase toys or anything else that struck our fancy. Once in the store we were given our money and let loose like a Barbarian hoard and we would meet up with our grandparents at the checkout after they had completed their shopping. At which time we were to place our items on the check out and purchase our toys. Well due to my intense love of money or just being cheep I would sneak my item into my grandparent’s pile of items and wait for the checker to scan it. At which time I would grab my toy and head to the car with it, a pocket full of money, and a large smile. I guess this a common occurrence.
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I interviewed for a job last year and was determined to do it as cheaply as I possibly could. Here were a few of my cheapskate methods for traveling to the interviews across the country:
1) Used couchsurfing.com and stayed on kind strangers’ couches. I would show up at night, leave in the morning, and never see the stranger again. Some people say that neighborliness is a thing of the past, but if you try couchsurfing I think you’ll find a world of neighbors out there willing to take you in for free.
2) Pricelined a hotel for $23 a night, then for dinner to avoid eating out, I cooked a package of ramen noodles in the complimentary coffee maker pot. Ramen only needs to get hot to cook, it doesn’t need to actually boil.
3) At the pre-interview dinner, I’d ask the other applicants and employees “are you going to eat the rest of that?” if the answer was no, I’d gather up a stack of take-home boxes and bring all the leftovers with me. Note: do not try to keep leftovers at room temp in a hotel room overnight. The smell when you wake up will be enough to make you ill.
4) Surreptitiously snuck back to where free breakfasts and lunches had been offered at the interviews so I could sneak old croissants and bagels into my bag. Not only that, I took the empty cans and took them back to my home state for the refund (even though they were bought in a state with no can refund). Mwahaha!
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My mom is very cheap. We are first generation here from Mexico so she feels it’s wasteful to spend on frivolous things. For one she always has her heater set at 58 degrees in the winter…and never turns it on in the summer unless its over 90 degrees. She buys her clothes with her store discount and sales no matter what conditon as long as its cheap. She sews up old jeans, blankets, etc. to prolong their life. she use to reuse the grease from hamburger meat to use cooking something else when i was living with her.
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I’m pretty frugal, but not nearly as much as my father.
Growing up, my sister and I would sort through aluminum cans and plastic bottles he brought home from work. He raided all the trash cans in his office building to bring these home. When I was younger, we would bring in about $20 a week through this.
Now he works at a tech company where the soda is free and everyone provides him with their bottles at the end of the day. He even set up a deal with the building manager so that he could be the official recycling point for the entire facility! The machines only provided plastic bottles, so very little sorting was necessary, and each one was worth a nickel. Soon enough he was bringing home two big bags of bottles a night and we were making trips to the recycling center every few days.
Each of us could redeem up to $25 worth of bottles at any one point. He would regularly have us go into the recycling center in different groups and wearing different hooded sweatshirts or coats to disguise the fact that we were getting more than our daily allotment of redemption. I stopped him short of taping a fake mustache onto my face.
He’s still redeeming cans and bottles to this day and bringing in at least $75/week to the family through his efforts.
To add to this, he will input the codes under the caps on all the different sodas to their respective websites. After several years of this, I own more than my share of branded clothing, towels, blankets, duffel bags, video games, sports equipment, magazine subscriptions, video game systems and, this Christmas, wireless headphones.
The money I earned through my work with those recyclables throughout my childhood paid for a significant chunk of my college education, saving me from the dreaded student loans.
I’ve asked him if he would stop like he does on the street to pick up a bottle if it were a nickel instead, but without all the work. He says it’s worth much more because he gets more satisfaction out of the work and environmental impact involved in picking up that bottle, but that he would definitely stop for a nickel as well.
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For me, all cheapskate stories begin and end with my Grandmother. Like many mentioned above, she was a Depression-era child, raised dirt poor on a farm in Illinois. She’s never given up the mentality and saves money every chance she gets. This mindset manifests itself most memorably in the “gifts” she has given us grandchildren over the years. She never really understood the idea of buying things for others, so typically she gives things like free food collected from senior support groups or trinkets given away by local politicians during election campaigns. However, she topped herself the Christmas she gave my sister a tiny jewelry box containing a present she’d saved for 40+ years…all my mother’s baby teeth.
We’ve never forgotten the look on my sister’s face that year!
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The home that I grew up in was near the bottom of a long hill and had a full basement which was prone to flooding. Our sump pump would run constantly during heavy rains. One day the switch that activated the sump pump stopped working which resulted in a couple of inches of water in the basement.
My grandfather took the switch apart and ‘fixed’ it instead of spending a couple of bucks for a new one. It worked for a few months, then failed again with a couple of inches of water in the basement.
The switch was repaired two more times before being replaced.
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My friend’s sister is so cheap that when her father died she insisted that the whole family work on his house to remodel it, even though most of them have full time jobs which pay more than contractors make. She insisted that painter’s tape was too expensive and now the walls look crazy. It’s been almost 2 years since they started and the house isn’t done and it’s dropped 25% in value and they’ve lost the 2k a month it was worth in rent. My friend’s relationship with her sister has deteriorated over this.
I got rid of two bathrobes because they were so big that they took up a whole load at the laundry mat. My mom said she’d like them so I gave them to her. We were going to a wedding and I found out last minute that she was planning on giving them as wedding gifts. She was so shocked when I told her that was completely inappropriate.
My friend lives with her mom and when she threw out a stretched out tank top (in the bottom of her trash can!) she found her mom wearing it next week.
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Let me tell you my story, which happened to me just a second ago. I was sitting and reading some blogs through Google Reader, and saw a contest – “Ultimate Cheapskate’s book contest!”. I read further and saw a great price too. So I figured – I will write about my cheapness: I would never buy that book, because I’m very frugal, and I would rather try to win it here.
I like everyone else’s stories very much. But I found mine is the youngest one;)
Look! I’m about to save $10.36 on that great deal. I’m not even counting price of shipping:)
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One Saturday, when I was in my high school days, Dave an acquaintance of mine, invited me and a mutual friend to go for a car ride with him to a used record store. We didn’t really want any records but Dave talked us into going with him.
He picked the two of us up at my friend’s house, drove to a gas station to top off, then headed over to the store. After about an hour only Dave bought any records.
We then left and headed back to the same gas station and topped off again. The gas attendant had a priceless look on his face when the nozzle clicked so soon after putting it in the tank. Dave asked the attendant to make sure the tank was topped off as much as possible. The cost was about 75 cents, which Dave insisted we split three ways. It was then clear to us that he only wanted people along to split the cost of gas.
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Here’s the cheapest thing I do and I even get weird looks from my super-frugal boyfriend…
When I get a run in my nylons in one leg, I just cut that leg off and then when I get a run in another pair I do the same and then wear both good sides.
Just avoid getting dressed in the dark if you have different colors/styles of nylons. You’ll end up getting weird looks from everyone:-)
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