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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My father is a black belt in frugality. He grew up in abject poverty during the depression, and though it drove me nuts growing up, I respect the hell out of it now. Below are a sample of “A.C.isms”
When I was sweeping the kitchen floor:
“Dustpan? When I was a boy, we couldn’t afford a dustpan, we would wet a newspaper and put it on the floor. And that was after everyone read it.”
When I tried to borrow twenty dollars to go to a school dance: “Ten dollars? What do you need five dollars for?”
When I asked for a puppy for my sixth birthday: “Puppy? Puppy!? When I was a boy, we did’nt have pets, we had jobs.”
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Lol, love the idea for the content – can’t wait to read the winners’ stories! Much prefer this to just commenting for a chance to win, it’s more entertaining, and the winners are going to feel like they earnt the prize too.
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A good friend of mine has a notoriously cheap father. A few years ago his refrigerator broke and he was forced to buy a new one. Instead of paying $50 in extra garbage stickers that it would take to have the old fridge hauled off, he borrowed a friend’s saw and cut up the giant appliance into garbage-bag-sized pieces. It took him nearly 2 months to completely dispose of the darn thing by putting out one piece at a time with his household trash.
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This is a story I heard from a YMOYLer.
A happy couple were at a Stationery store around Valentines Day. They were browsing through the preprinted cards, and on occasion would exchange their cards so the other could read. Then they would hug, and put the cards back. How sweet.
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During a period of time where both my wife and I were unemployed and our savings had run out we went to a grocery store together to pick up something cheap to eat. As we walked in the door we saw a shopping cart full of single-serving cereal boxes of a new kind of diet cereal. The cart had a poster board sign taped to it that said something to the effect of “Try our NEW flavor! 10 cents each.” The “10″ had been crossed out and replaced with “FREE.”
My wife, to my great embarrassment, grabbed the entire cart, wheeled it into the first checkout stand, and asked “Is there a limit on these?”
We left with the lot of them in about a dozen plastic bags. We didn’t pay a cent. The cereal was TERRIBLE. My wife ate most of it anyway.
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No frugal stories from me, but I’m enjoying the posts.
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I once worked in a J.C. Penney’s men’s department. One Sunday a man came to return a suit. The suit had already been altered (free with the purchase), and it stunk of curry. Apparently this man “bought” this suit to wear at a wedding and returned it the next day.
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Carl Pohlad, a billionaire from Minnesota and owner of the Twins, still brings a banana when eating out for breakfast because he can’t see paying the 75 cents at the restaurant.
Perhaps that explains a bit about the Twins!
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My area has a ‘no-tag day’ for garbage a few times a year where everyone can put out as much garbage as they want. We go to all the areas around our house on no-tag days and pick up things we can still use. My niece has gotten a number of toys and books this way and loves them!
These salvaged materials come in handy for us too! We got rid of cable and used a piece of a 2×4 (found on no-tag day), a cardboard box (grocery store), aluminum foil, coat hangers (no-tag day), old power cords, screws & washers (no-tag day) to create our own antenna in the attic. We still get a lot of channels, and now we get HD as well! Total cost for the antenna… ~ $0.60. We got the instructions for the antenna at this site: http://uhfhdtvantenna.blogspot.com/
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My mother’s friend (we will call her Sarah)is by far the CHEAPEST woman I know! She is the type that washed out her ziploc bags, saves aluminum foil, and forced her kids to wear hand-me-downs all through their childhood. It’s this last tactic of hers that leads to my story…
My sister and I grew up with Sarah’s two girls. We were three years apart, and they were two, which can lead to some lighthearted sibling rivalry. Well one day, we four got together to play board games, and we decided to play Aggravation. You know where this is going…One person would knock another persons marble off the board only to be punched in the arm, etc…Well, the game climaxed when Sarah’s youngest stopped my sister from almost winning. My sister gave Sarah’s youngest the biggest wedgie I have ever seen! The problem was, that the underwear were soooo old (hand-me-down) and sooo thin, that my sister ripped the underwear right off of Sarah’s youngest. Sarah promptly took the game away from us and banned us from playing it again. Apparently, she didn’t want to have to increase her clothing budget!
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My grandmother, through years of penny pinching has become a rather wealthy woman. However, she has allowed her penny pinching ways to take over her life completely. For Christmas instead of “real” gifts (by real, I mean thoughtful purchases/handicrafts for the recipient as commonly accepted as a “Christmas gift”) she rummages through her house and gives us cheap and tacky ornaments from yard sales, old costume jewelry or even recycled knitted things she has made over the years. She presents them in recycled boxes that must have been new sometime in the 50’s, wrapped with the same ratty recycled paper we’ve seen on our gifts for the past three years. She proudly announces how little she paid for that item 5 years ago at a resale shop.
Our families value recycling and the environment and we are all cost-conscious, but you have to wonder if my grandmother has just gone too far in trying to save money. By giving us clearly recycled gifts that have no meaning just to conform with the Christmas spirit, she really kills the whole idea. Come on, Granny, loosen those purse strings already! How much does new yarn cost these days?
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1. My wife wraps all the Christmas Presents in brown packaging paper and ribbon to save money, I think it actually looks better than wrapping paper.
2. Once, while on a temporary assignment with the Air Force, I lived off bread and a jar of peanut butter for a week to pocket the $25 daily perdium.
3. Finally, a natural food wearhouse went out of business and cleared its inventory by selling big empty boxes for $40, whatever you could fit in the box you walked out with. I spent over $200 on enough non-perishable food to last a decade, went home and sold $200 worth on ebay and kept the rest. That was 2 years ago and I’m still not out of some of that stuff.
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My little brother is currently a poor college student, and he has chosen to save money by rarely buying food. His workaround is to accept the kindness of semi-strangers:
–He has a motherly co-worker who brings him a sack lunch every day.
–He has a classmate who brings extra eggrolls to class because he knows my brother likes them.
–He makes mac and cheese, but he doesn’t put butter or milk in it. He just leaves a little water in the pan and mixes in the cheese sauce.
–He was visiting us over New Years, and even though we have lots of real food in the house, he chose to eat a sandwich that consisted of bread, mayo, mustard, sliced cold hot dogs, cheese, and pepperoni. I think he has forgotten how to eat real food.
Oh, and he also once ate sushi from a vending machine.
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The van my parents had when I was a kid (four kids) had a hole in the floor (rusted through) just behind the sliding door–where you stepped to get into the middle back seat. Dad found some sheet metal to cover the hold, attached it, and we drove the van for another few years, until it really died.
His truck had the wheel wells completely rusted out, so he couldn’t haul anything small. He only gave up that truck when the water pump broke off and there was nothing to re-attach it to–everything was rusted off.
I don’t know if he’s every had a car that lasted less than 200,000 miles. I don’t know if he’s ever bought a vehicle with less than 50,000 miles.
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I grew up a military brat, my dad was in the army from the mid 70′s till around 98 / 99 when Clinton politely asked him to retire.
I can remember eating MRE’s for days when he would come home from exercises – we thought they were a treat at the time, but now I realize now they were free.
The best story I can remember my dad telling me was how the Army Quarter Master would take guys out of the ‘potato peelers union and bring them into his area. The QM’s were on a restrictive budget, and they would have guys split a two ply roll of toilet paper into two individual rolls.
I’m not sure it actually saved them any toilet paper, but it certainly is an exercise in frugality!
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I work in New York City where subway maps are free. They make great wrapping paper. One year I stopped by the token booth on the way to work every day and picked up a new map. By the time X-Mas came around I had no need to buy wrapping paper.
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My dad was the cheapest EVER. When we first moved to New York, we had no health insurance. One evening, my 12 year old brother slammed his shin into a metal post while running (playing hide and go seek). My dad put him up on the dining room table, and he and my uncle held him down and stitched it up with dental floss. Mind you, Dad was depression era and a Vietnam vet, so I’m sure he didn’t view this episode as abuse or neglect, but egads! There were 6 of us kids still at home at the time, and we all looked on in horror. Now dude, THAT is cheap- especially since he could have afforded the doctor bill, especially with that military pension rolling in in addition to his full time job!
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A few examples of my grandmother’s extreme frugalness:
1. She goes to other people’s garage sales and buys things for the sole purpose of selling them at her own garage sale for a profit.
2. When my dad was a kid, he was given hand-me-down shoes from his older sister and a black marker to cover up all the pink.
3. When she receives cards in the mail (Christmas, birthday, etc.), if the backside of the front of the card where the picture is wasn’t written on, she cuts off the front of the card and re-uses it.
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In the checkout queue at the supermarket (your normal supermarket, not Wal-Mart or Costco or any of the bulk-buying places) one day, I was standing behind a man who had the most bizarre collection of items in his shopping cart. I’m talking eight or ten boxes of cake mix, twelve boxes of cereal, and other huge quantities of assorted foods that really bore no resemblance to any sane person’s shopping list, even for a large family. No milk, no eggs or produce, just the packaged foods. The clerk dutifully checked out all the items, and the total came out to somewhere in the realm of $300.
And then the man pulled out a wad — almost a double handful — of coupons.
Several minutes later, after the increasingly baffled clerk had finished scanning all of the coupons and double rebate discounts, the man’s final total was something like $35. He had collected all of those coupons and waited until everything on those coupons went on sale before going on a single massive shopping spree and knocking more than two-thirds of the cost off his total bill. I have never seen anyone coupon-clip on that scale before, and I doubt I ever will again.
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I remember when I was a kid, and we went to Vegas as a family, the casinos would give you free rolls of nickels to play the slots. Well, my mom would get her roll, and then she’d have my father get a roll, and that’s what we used to pay for dinner in the buffet line!
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I used to work with a guy that we’ll call Mike, because that was his name. He logged coupons in a spreadsheet that was sorted by date, to make sure he didn’t accidentally miss out on an opportunity to save a buck. He would invite you to lunch by saying he had a buy one get one free coupon for Big Macs, or whatever. The assumption a normal person makes is that you and Mike will split the cost evenly of two Big Macs, thus both saving a little money. That is not how Mike worked. His expectation was that you would buy lunch at full price so he could use his coupon for a freebie. This worked exactly once on each person in the office. After that, you learned to control the transaction at the register to make sure you got the benefit of Mike’s coupon obsession at lunch.
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When my Dad was first driving he used to to stop off at gas stations after they were closed and drain the gas hoses. It was hardly much gas at all, but done regularly at a few stations was enough to keep him driving.
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My friend “J” would always make it a point to not turn down the cup by a cash register with a “take a penny leave a penny offer”. He would simply reach in and say thank you I will and pocket the penny as he walked out.
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My grandmother was a true child of the Depression. Thanks to her, I didn’t realize the Depression was over until the 1990s.
My grandma’s favorite store was called the Bargaineer. They sold salvage lots of odd items for a steep discount. She trawled the store on a biweekly basis.
Once when my sisters were in high school, my mom stopped at grandma’s to say hello, but said she couldn’t stay for long. She had to go to the store to buy a badmitton set for a backyard barbeque my sister was hosting. My grandma told my mother to wait just a minute. She shuffled to the basement. (Grandma had leg trouble which limited her mobility for years.) She shuffled back with not one, not two, but THREE unopened badmitton sets she’d bought just because they were a good value.
And then there was the time my sister had a cough. Grandma gave her a CASE of cough drops she’d picked up at Bargaineer.
About a year after Grandma died, the Bargaineer closed down.
My grandma’s thriftiness was not limited to the Bargaineer. She once found a knitted blanket in the dumpster of the apartment building next to her house. It had a hole in it, but otherwise was in good shape. She washed it, unraveled it, and used it to knit a new blanket. (This weekend I’m using the last bits of that yarn to crochet a border on another knitted blanket for my grandpa’s 90th birthday. I think Grandma would enjoy that.)
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I have totally enjoyed reading these entries. I come from a very frugal family. My father would fix things rather then replace them. He fixed our kitchen blender motor and it worked after that but only on one speed, low. When the blender pitcher fell to the floor and broke he glued it back together using the silicone we had purchased to reseal the aquarium. It was ugly but lasted a couple more years.
When my sister and I were in college she used to bring her own tea bag to the cafeteria and buy a cup of hot water for 3 cents to make hot tea. A friend of ours used to make “tomato soup” with a ketcup packet from a fast food restaurant and hot water. The same friend would take all the toilet paper from the fast food restaurants for home use because she couldn’t afford to buy toilet paper.
Later when I had graduated college one of my work mates would keep the salad plate from the salad bar at Carl’s Junior and go back for more day after day, he also kept his soda cup and refilled that too.
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Hmmm … It appears that my blog has stopped responding, as has the control panel app for my web host. I hope it’s not because of the link I posted earlier.
If so, I guess that’s what I get for being a cheapskate and going with a low-price hosting company.
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Jeff Brown ran a frugality suggestion contest in the Philadelphia Inquirer a few years back. The winner had the following tip: when you floss your teeth, save the floss and rinse it in rubbing alcohol to sterilize it. Reuse!
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i used to think i was a pretty frugal guy, but reading these stories has really inspired me to really stretch my pennies during this next year.
i have a few stories i would like to add to the mix though.
i purchased getting things done by david allen. after paying full price for the book (yeah, i know i could have got it for a few bucks but i like to support the publishers and authors of media that i consider worthwhile), i decided that i would recoup that money by saving on the instruments i’ld need to implement the system. i permanent markered out the names on obsolete folders from my work, fixed a broken labeler i got on the free section of craigslist, and made an inbox out of cardboard and duct tape. the inbox actually ended up looking pretty cool, but my girlfriend was somewhat unimpressed by my handiwork during the construction process at midnight-thirty.
i decorated my new home with the help of a high school art teacher who asked for donations for me from his more gifted students.
i saved money of an unproductive fishing trip by cooking up the frozen calamari we were using as bait instead of buying a lunch.
AND finally,
after reading a story about dumpster diving in an english lit class, i decided to give it a try. i went out with a friend behind the best buy and in less then 15 minutes pulled out a projector that had a broken bulb. the replacement cost of the bulb was about $300, but the projector was worth much more. and it scored me major cool points when i returned to the dorm (and the guys who had laughed at me when i left) with a $1500 projector to replace our tv with.
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One summer in grad school I chose to live in the one dorm that didn’t require a food contract so that I could save money. The day I moved in, I asked where the kitchen was. The answer was, “Well, some people cook in the laundry room.”
It was just a normal laundry room. So could you boil pasta in the washer on the hot cycle? Pop popcorn in the dryer? Fry an egg on an iron? I don’t think so.
Microwaves and toaster ovens (and candles) were not allowed in the dorm. So I cooked everything in a hot pot which was a small container with a heating element inside intended for boiling water. You could only cook half a box of macaroni and cheese in one of these or half a packet of ramen noodles, and then you’d have to scrub a while to clean off the food that had stuck to the heating element. I also had a lot of cereal and sandwiches.
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I’ve been forced to do some pretty cheap things in my life, like grift off rail transportation systems (ride for free and jump off at the next stop if I suspected someone official was checking tickets), or use sour milk as a sour cream substitute in recipes (you cannot really tell the difference when old milk gets really bad).
But the cheapest experience came from a non-profit company I worked for. Us employees were given not just donated but left-over frozen Thanksgiving turkeys as our Christmas bonus.
The turkeys were initially intended to be given to the mentally-challenged volunteers. We must have had extras, so our CEO figured this was a great way to save money while rewarding our hard work. It gets a little worse …
You had to have a ticket to claim your Christmas bonus. I had lost my ticket, and when I tried to claim my bonus anyway, my turkey was withheld.
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I’ve always had this theory, If you wait long enough you’ll get it for free. This has worked over and over again for entertainment, clothing, food and even big items. Two that come to mind, I really wanted a carpet shampooer, but didn’t want to spend the $. My in-laws built a house with all hard wood floors. I got their carpet shampooer. Woohoo! Best one, we were driving down a neighborhood street and saw a car that said “Free”. We stopped to ask. Sure enough, my son got a ’62 oldsmobile with title. It sure needs a lot of work. Even if it only results in talks, dreams and hopes of a running car, it was worth the effort. Maybe it will get me your book for free.
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My dad bought a used Toyota 4×4 when I was 6.
I am now 31 – he still drives it!
He’s had to replace the seat with one he found in a junk yard because the towels he would put over the hole he wore through eventually couldn’t make up for the drop. He once got in an accident (not his fault) and he pounded out the smashed front end from the inside with a hammer and replaced the front headlight with a junk yard find so he could pocket the insurance money. He also has a lovely tape player that he installed on the dashboard with duct tape. Also I believe pulled from a junk car.
But – I buy used Toyotas whenever I can now! That thing has got to have like 300,000 miles on it at least!
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My father’s friend bought a brand-new, beautiful 17′ aluminum canoe for about $1200. He didn’t have any room to store it indoors, so he locked it to a tree. Well, someone got jealous and tried to steal the canoe, only to be foiled by the lock. They came back and punched four giant holes (about 1′ diameter each) out of the bottom of the canoe with a Dremel tool.
My father bought the canoe from his friend for $20 and patched it up with scrap metal and spare plumbers’ putty. We had to keep a repurposed mop bucket in the canoe to bail it out, and I remember putting a lot of bubble gum over the putty seams. We took it out every temperate weekend for about three straight years, and for many vacations after that. We must’ve gotten at least 200 hours of use out of that $20 canoe.
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Awesome!
There are some great ideas / stories on here!
I come from a pretty frugal family–for years we had only one car and my father and I and my two sisters all rode bicycles (my mom worked the farthest away–about 30 miles, so she got the car–but my dad worked about 15 miles away some days and school was about 4 miles away)that my dad had put together from random spare parts of our neighbors and from the local dump. Someone at my dad’s workplace gave him a car and he kept it for about a year and a half before it needed a repair he couldn’t do himself (it was a 12 or 13 year old ford)and then he donated it to a local church group, who sold it for parts i think, and went back to bicycling. We never threw out any tinfoil and always washed out our plastic bags. There were always coffee can tomato plants and chiles on our screened in porch or in our living room too–even when the weather was bad my parents were growing some of their own food.
My sister and I have a standing date once a year for “big trash week” in our city–its the week where you can put anything out on the curb and the trashmen will take it–unless we get to it first! most of my furniture has come from this great event–last year I even got a very nice oak wine rack for all of my $3.99 and below discount wine finds!
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October 2006-January 2007 I lived on a friend’s couch. He charged $300/month rent + half of utilities, but the rent was paid for by a different friend who bet that I wouldn’t actually do it. This is an area where one bedrooms are typcially 1200/month and 2 bedrooms are 1400+.
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My cheapness or my dad’s? In the fall when everyone in the neighborhood would put bags of leaves out for the garbage, my dad would pay me 10 cents a bag to carry them home. Once shredded, they were great compost for his garden. I walked 3/4 mile home from school and so some of those bags were carried quite a distance. I’m still not sure why I participated in this scheme – 10 cents in the 80s was not a lot of money and even with quantity, didn’t add up very quickly.
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I buy cheap diapers. In the beginning I figured they’d be uncomfortable for my 2-year-old and make him want to use the toilet. No good. He still poops his pants and now it sometimes smears all down his leg too. Even still, I can’t bring myself to spend the extra 27 cents a pop on Huggies.
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So I’m about 17 and my Dad and I are driving to pick up my grandmother for a long-distance trip to visit some other relatives.
On the way, we decide to grab breakfast at a fast food place. My grandmother forcefully tells my Dad to ask for her “senior citizen’s discount”. My Dad not wanting to confuse an already large order over a 10 cent discount disregards her request.
While we’re still at the drive though speaker, my grandmother leans over (right beside my Dad’s ear) and lets loose a sonic boom of “WE’LL NEED A SENIOR CITIZENS DISCOUNT!”. Seeing my Dad’s eyes as his eardrums were nearly burst was priceless. It was dang loud from the back of the car…I can’t imagine getting that blast right in the ear.
Needless to say, my grandmother was the most frugal person I’ve ever encountered (often violently so)…I learned alot from her.
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These are all true stories about my mother:
1) We used to wash every single ziploc bag that came into our house and reuse it. The same goes for all aluminum foil. We also reused our brown paper lunch bags.
2) She saves every container that anything comes in (butter, sour cream, take out) so that she doesn’t have to buy Tupperware
3) She has 2 giant boxes under her bed full of nothing buy pantyhose that she bought on sale…most of them are tan in color
4) She has returned my bras to the store b/c they did not last long enough and was given new ones at no cost. Same goes for shoes.
5) She returns light bulbs b/c they burnt out too quickly
6) She heats up the remaining coffee in the coffeepot in the microwave and will not throw any of it out.
7) She orders drinks with no ice so that she gets more drink for her nickel.
8 ) She has made my younger brother wear my hand me downs. (I am a woman)
9) T-shirts and old underwear are never thrown away. They disappear into the “rag bag” and are used for cleaning.
10) I have had to open individual packets of ketchup and squeeze them into a large ketchup bottle. (was this worth my time??)
11) Washes and reuses plastic forks and plates
12) Each year we had to pick each individual strand of tinsel off of the Christmas tree so that we could use it the next year. (savings…$.25)
13) Only shops the 75% off racks
14) Before there were Altoid tins we had to save all Sucrets tins and film canisters so that we could carry small items in our purse/backpack.
15) We went to business and state fairs so that we could get free pens, pencils, & rulers so that she didn’t have to buy school supplies
16) She will take anything that is free. I think we still have a sun/tanning lamp from the late 70′s that she was given at a yard sale. Mind you…most of the things she takes do not work.
17) we grew a lot of our own food which I am actually very proud of
18) we made our own pickels, jams, & relishes
I’m sure I could continue but now my childhood is hurting my brain
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I had a coworker that refused to eat anything but the cheapest frozen burritos for lunch. He hated them but could not get himself to pay more that 30 cents for lunch.
We live in North Dakota so during the winter time he would hang a grocery bag in his garage to hold his groceries and unplug his fridge.
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My mother was wellknown for her cheapness – - heck, she raised nine kids on a shoestring. A few years ago, I visited my mom and dad while they were renting a resort condo in Florida. My mother was eyeing me one day while I was cleaning up the lunch dishes. She waited until I was done and out of the kitchen to dig a potato chip bag out of the garbage. She washed and dried it and turned it inside out to use as foil for our leftovers at dinnertime.
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My dad is obsessed with wood and other building materials, and he generally refuses to pay for any. Growing up, he refused to buy charcoal for the grill, so he would have us rip apart pallets by van load to burn in the grill. He also used the crappy pallet wood to build stuff.
Since my mom lost her tolerance for my dad’s scrap wood pile, his tastes have changed. Now, he collects hardwood leftover from his neighbor’s remodeling projects and uses it to make beautiful scroll saw masterpieces.
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I like to lead a pretty luxurious lifestyle… I just don’t like paying for it. What kind of car do I drive? A Mercedes… a beautiful 1988 300SE with 240,000 miles on it. This is actually my third Mercedes, all of which I’ve purchased on Ebay in great condition, never paying more than $1,700. I estimate this car has cost me $190/month to drive (including the purchase price and insurance coverage), and I look forward to seeing that number drop each month as I drive it for at least another two years.
I also enjoy eating out frequently. I wait until Restaurant.com has an end-of-month promotion, then buy $25 restaurant gift certificates for $3 each, and only redeem that at restaurants with low minimum expenditure requirements. An evening at my favorite neighborhood pizza joint will usually run me $18 out of pocket for cheese bread, two beers each, and the super large gourmet pizza (always with lunch leftovers!).
Now that I work full-time it’s hard to find the time for a side business (I’m with a demanding consulting firm), but I still take a day off in May when the dorms close at my alma mater 50 miles away. Students ‘throw away’ all of the area rugs, microwaves, mini fridges, lamps, desk chairs, and even TVs that won’t fit in their cars for the drive home! I rent a Uhaul for the day, pack it as tightly as possible, and then store the stuff in my garage through the summer, when I sell it back to the students in the fall! Anything left over goes into a garage sale to benefit the United Way. Last year I netted almost $3,500 from this
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Great contest- I’m enjoying the stories!
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These are fabulous stories!
What a great idea!
My favorite story about Grandma Julie [depression era young mother] was when we [adult grandchildren] had brought takeout chinese food over for a treat.
She tapped me and said ‘Please pass the darkness!’
Um, huh?
Apparently Grandma hated to see all those packets go to waste from the chinese restaurants [they never ordered - but we brought it over on occassion since we knew how much they liked it - and of course we knew to get her tons of chinese tea and a calendar if they were there!]
She would empty ALL the packets into a reused butter tub. Not just the soy sauce – the mustard, the duck sauce – all of it. It was disgusting in there! She couldn’t remember the name of ‘soy sauce’ ever though so she called it ‘the darkness’
Sigh – I miss her! She was adorable.
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My friend picked a dollar out of a trough-style urinal at a bar.
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When I moved into my new home I got a lot of coupons for local businesses, mostly the standard “welcome to the neighborhood” type of thing. One of them was a $10 off coupon for a local grocery store, $10 minimum purchase. I used self checkout for about $11 worth of groceries, use self check-out, keep the coupon and go back the next day and use it. Unethical, yes, cheap, very.
I’ve also gone to the post office for the “I’m moving” packet, which is crammed full of mostly not-so-needed coupons, but there is a hidden gem. A pre-paid postcard was included for Home Depot, fill it out, drop it in a mailbox and in 3-6 weeks a $10 gift card appears. I think I “moved” about a dozen times in the first 3 months of buying my home. Again, unethical but cheap.
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These are great!
I’m definately not as bad as some of these stories… yet! I have, however, been known to:
1. Save the funny papers to wrap presents in.
2. Look in garbage cans at work for soda caps with point codes. I save up to get free video rentals.
3. Get board games from local Thrift Store for $0.35 – $0.75. Planning to resell at yard sale for $2 – $3.
4. Get movies, books and magazines from library. Cancelled magazine and movie subsriptions.
5. Force family to eat left-overs in chronological order so stuff won’t go bad.
6. Always split food at restaurants with wife.
I have a feeling that my family could recall some even worse offences.
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This might not seem that cheap to any of my buddies since we all just graduated from college a little less than a year ago, but everyone else I know says it is extremely frugal and riduculous.
Every time I see a movie at the AMC movie theatres by our house (probably at least 2 or 3 times per month), I can’t help to get a large soda which costs $4.50, but comes with one free refill. I wised up a couple years ago and realized that there are tons of people who don’t capitalize on their free refill, thus throwing away their initial large soda cup. Since they use a completely different large refill cup which states that it is a refill cup, I started fishing in the garbage to find any initial large soda cup. I then bring it up to the concession stand and enjoy a free large diet coke.
As you can imagine this has amounted to quite a savings and has become a source of pride in my movie going ventures. My wife is extremely embarassed so we get our seats and then I go and find a trash with an eligible large soda.
It is perfect, quite delicious and pretty frugal.
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when i was younger, I would go with my parents to visit my grandparent in West Palm Beach and we would go out to eat. My grandparents would want to go a restaurant known for its early bird specials. you had to be seated by 4:30p to get the specials. One time, on our way there, it was raining. I remember some old ladies hitting the maitre d’ with their umbrellas demanding to be seated.
i started joking with my grandma that i was going to get her a big wax-lined purse so she could just dump the basket of rolls and bread into it without having to wrap them in napkins first.
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I am famously cheap. In graduate school, I was so broke I did anything to get by. I volunteered in a food pantry and was thrilled because we got to take home the leftover donated baked goods the homeless people didn’t want. Even though my husband and I are now professionals, I work hard to live way below our means. I buy all of my clothes, and my son’s, at goodwill. I once bought 38 rolls of paper towels at goodwill because they were so cheap. They were sent there from Target loose after their packaging was detroyed. My husband was disgusted until I pointed out, how do you know the ones still in packaging weren’t dropped on the factory floor? My coworkers bring in the extra vegetables from their gardens for me, and I always take them and find a way to use them. And now even my husband’s co-workers know I’ll take any offer of free food. He works for a big company and his department got tons of gift baskets for Christmas, so they salvaged all of the uneaten fruit, cake, and cheese for me.
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