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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In September of the worst Winter in Illinois history in 100 years, my father got an electric bill for $200. This was more than double what the electric bill usually was including the usage needed for a small radiator shop he ran out of a garage in the backyard. He was so outraged, he refused to pay it. We went without electricity from September until May of the next year. My father rigged the basement furnace to use an open tank of fuel oil which he fed into the furnace by a copper tube and would light by hand. We used an old metal breadbox on the front porch for our freezer/refrigerator and lived by candle light for all of those months. My mother was in charge of paying the gas bill. The gas was still on so the stove could be used for cooking. That was the quietest the house ever was despite the fact there were 5 children living there. The electric company checked on us periodically to make sure we were not stealing electricity – we weren’t. Midwestern stubborness could have easily backfired and killed us, but we fortunately made it through without having the house burn down around our ears. In all of this madness there are many ironies: besides putting us in harm’s way due to his anger over the bill, my father was unable to run his business without electricity and lost his customer base; and, there was a custom Corvette Stingray in the backyard in perfect condition which he would not sell. Hmmmm. It was a very long winter.
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My Grandmother is so cheap, she will wait for a once a year sale on 12 packs of pop. The local chain grocery stores will have a sale, where it is 10 (12)packs of pop for $10. The problem is that they limit that to 10 (12) packs per person. She has found a way around that. She will enlist my mother, mothers of others she babysits for, and have them go to the chain store and buy 10 cases for her. Then she herself will go to all of the 20 stores in town, and buy the same deal. Last year she managed to purchase approx 500 cases of pop. That is 6000 pops, that she stores away in a whole room dedicated to her soda storage. I was recently over there for Christmas, and took a peek in there, and I think she still has quite a bit to go thru, but at 8 cents a pop for name brand, I guess thats a deal.
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It seems to me that children’s lack of income can encourage creative thinking. When I was young and wanted new clothes for my Barbie doll, I went to my sock drawer and pulled out all the kneesocks with holes in the toes and all the little lace ruffle trimmed socks that were too small. By simply cutting off the foot of the sock and two little arm holes in the sides, my doll had a fantastic new wardrobe.
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So lets talk quantity…
We live in Canada so it snows alot and we need to buy salt to melt the ice on the driveways and sidewalks. Walmart had a sale…
I come home one day to find 2 skids of salt.
2 SKIDS!!!
you are talking 500 bags of road salt!!
We had to to empty our tool shed to store all of it…it was craziness
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Back around 1999-2000, I ran a directory of free stuff that was available via the internet and free offers from .com companies drumming up business with their stupidly large marketing budgets.
As a result, I was pulling in a little less than $2,000 a month, which for a high school kid is like riches!
You’d think I would have taken my friends out every weekend or bought a car. Instead, I took my girlfriend for a weekend at the beach, and saved the rest.
All of it went toward college.
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As a poor college student I took a date to an Italian restaurant. We were seated next to two older couples who had been ordering dishes and sharing them. They had hardly touched their angel hair pasta and they were leaving. So after they left I flagged a waiter down and asked him to box up their leftovers for us. The waiter just stared at me as if it was some kid of joke, and I had to convince him it really was okay! He boxed it up and I had leftovers for two days!
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I already did a story about my Grandma but I came back to read other’s stories and it reminded me of two about my mother. When she was in college they were broke. She and her roommates got food by doing a neighborhood scavenger hunt. They’d knock on doors and say things like “we’re on a scavenger hunt and we need a carrot. Even a small, old one would do.” They’d get old veggies or other small items and then make soup.
One day they had a carrot and a potato and some ketchup packages from McDonalds. They had the packages on the table when the roommate’s mother called. Now, this mother was known for being exasperating and finally, the roommate yelled “Mother!” over something she said, and slammed her hand down on the table in frustration–right on the ketchup packets–which burst and spattered all over her. She started laughing so hard she hung up on her mother.
When my parents were first married they were still very poor. My dad got sent to the hospital and mom would go over and visit with him and watch him eat the hospital food and then when he was finished, casually ask if she could have some if he was done. She didn’t want to tell him that there was no food at home. She had bought some cat food for our siamese but had no food for herself. Couldn’t let the cat go hungry…
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About 3 years ago, I chanced upon a “Dollar a Bag” sale at our local thrift store and I’ve kept the list of what I got, because I was so amazed that I got all this for $12:
1. Black cotton jumper
2. Navy corduroy jumper
3. Floral dress
4. Jean shirt
5. Floral shorts/vest combo
6. Floral sleeveless top
7. Pink short sleeved cotton sweater
8. White short sleeved cotton sweater
9. Beige cotton GAP sweater
10. Gold cotton ramie sweater
11. White organza blouse
12. Cotton walking shorts
13. Two plaid flannel dress shirts
14. Cotton plaid dress shirt
15. Three mens boxers
16. Five mens underwear
17. Bugle Boy polo shirt
18. Mens sweater
19. Waffle style mens shirt
20. Two cotton dress shirts
21. Mens Umbro shorts
22. Mens plaid cotton walking shorts
23. Mens vest
24. Plaid lounger pants
25. Cowboy had
26. Two long sleeved jerseys
27. One dress for mama
28. Two new knee patches
29. Package of baby safety plug covers
30. One roll of curling ribbon
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@TheMightyQuinn. And you never saw your date again.
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We were recently cleaning out my granddads house as he was moving. After cleaning out the attic and the shed, we had about 50-75 containers ranging from cool whip containers to butter containers. He saved every drill bit, and we found literally hundreds of them, most were broken. He told us he was planning on sharpening/fixing them and reusing them.
When cleaning out the fridge, we found cream cheese from 1989, along with other way out of date items. He refused to throw it out, and said it was still fine to eat.
That man is the cheapeast man I’ve ever met, and will save/reuse anything that could possibly be done.
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I reuse file folders- just turn them around/inside out.
I reuse baggies. I won’t go so far as to wash them out, if the inside isn’t dry I trash them, but the dry ones I reuse until they get messy or worn out. I know they’re about $1 a box but I reuse anyway.
I wash and reuse plastic utensils on occasion, too.
I bought a used car with 140K miles on it back in 2002. I just replaced it (with another used car) because it was about to turn over 300,000 miles. My husband’s going to drive it now!
I have to force myself to get rid of “stuff” or I’ll be like my mother, who still has a closetful of work clothes though she’s been retired 20 years! So when I do buy something new (usually on sale) I get rid of something old, like that t-shirt in a shade of green I hated but it was really cheap when I bought it!
Still, I’ve worked with a couple of people who had me beat. Years ago I worked in a hospital where patients on isloation got their food in styrofoam containers with plastic utensils. One of the nurses would save the utensils in a bag and take them home to wash and reuse! Yuck!
Another person and I would stay at a suite hotel on a fairly regular basis when travelling on business. She not only took home the soap and shampoo, she took the coffee packets (for the little coffeemaker in the kitchen) with the creamer, sugar, etc; she took the one bag of microwave popcorn; the dish liquid in the sink; and the packet of detergent for the little dishwasher!
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My grandmother used to wash her aluminum foil, plastic wrap, and zip-loc bags for re-use. She’d use the same roll of foil for years. She also put a little water into what most of us would consider empty salad dressing bottles and swish a few times then pour on her salad to get the last bit of dressing out (she used the same technique for most bottled liquids – shampoo, ketchup, etc). She’s also been known to carry her own zip-loc bags to restaurants to take home any food she doesn’t eat at that sitting. It’s worked to her advantage…she’s quite wealthy – with more than enough money saved to take care of her through her old age, which includes round-the-clock sitters and an upscale assisted living center.
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I thought I came from a relatively “frugal” family, but after reading some of the previous comments, I’m not so sure anymore.
I grew up in a non-smoking home, so I fortunately never acquired that unhealthy and expensive habit. At one point though, I found out that my mom used to smoke but had given it up in college. Because it was unhealthy? Nope, because she found that too many people were bumming cigarettes off her and weren’t reciprocating. She was too cheap to continue smoking.
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I had a hard time determining whether or not this was a story of cheapness or wise budgeting, so I have decided to leave that decision up to you: My grandfather is notorious for living by the slogan, “waste not want not “, as his family had lost his entire fortune when he was a child and he was raised in extreme poverty. His favorite story is of when he spent any on a movie or going out to eat, he would fast for the next 3 days to make his money last!
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I am told by everyone that I am extremely frugal. Among the many frugal things I do, I cut coupons, brown bag my lunch and read discarded newspapers left on the train rather than buying one. But, my favorite frugal thing is to buy monogramed clothes (mostly $40 dress shirts) from a Lands’ End outlet then sit on my couch removing all of the thread with tiny scissors. It is not uncommon for me to by dress oxfords for $3.00. I have bought a down winter coat for $8.00!
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Ok, during one perticular year our family woke to find our house had been toiet papered,” MY HEAVENS what will we do” my mom said. With the speed of leopard my father grabed my brother and i, told us to roll the toiletpaper back on these rolls” as he handed us 2 empty rolls, yep, he was serious!
we spent 5 hours rolling toiletpaper,saving my father a whopping .99cents that week.
2 years ago i and my son woke to find our home toiletpapered,i did not have the heart to make my son roll it back on a roll, however he took it all off the trees and used it to pack his grandfathers bithday present. My father was so tickled when my son told him why he packed his gift with t.p
he got a tear in his eye (because he remembered what he made my brother and i do)
Adam handed him the toiletpaper and said “here grandpa its still good”!
Quite fitting don’t you think?
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I don’t have any great stories, but as I’m sitting here reading land laughing, I keep thinking “Wait, that’s a cheapskate move? But we’ve always done that. That’s just normal!” Some examples of this are:
Washing out ziploc bags (but only gallon sized ones)
Reusing paper bags
Reheating cold coffee (though only the day it’s made)
Saving take-out containers and other plastic containers
Cutting up old t-shirts for rags
I love that to me this is just normal and to others, this is extreme frugality.
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Hi, My Name is Scott and I am cheap. I re-use ziplock bags. I live by the philosophy of “If it’s yellow let it mellow. If it’s brown flush it down” (Well maybe not.)I have a solar charger for my blackberry (work pays for it, not me!). If I don’t have access to the sun I make sure and charge it at work and not to use our house energy. Those things all make me cheap but here is what I consider one of the cheapest things I have done. I work downtown and take the train into work everyday (work pays for our public transportation pass). One day I had a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day. I didn’t want to take the whole day off and I didn’t want to pay for parking. So I drove to a train station that was near work, parked the car at the free park-n-ride then got on the train and went into work. When it was time to go to the doctor’s I got back on the train. Rode it to my car. Drove to the doctor. Got white gloved. Got back in the car. Drove to the train station. Parked the car and then took the train back into work. Sure it took a little longer but I saved $15 in parking!
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I had no idea how frugal my grandmother was until she died in 1981. She lined her kitchen cupboards with old newspaper, drank from cleaned out jelly jars (all of which she got on sale or traded). I still use the cast iron cookware she coveted her entire adult life as well her cheese graters and vegetable peelers.
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I come by cheapness honestly. Growing up in a family of seven on one income, money was tight. Our meals routinely included watered down ketchup, salad dressings and juice. Yum. We also dined on fresh roadkill, one of the deer I personally hit!
Now as a stay-at-home mom of three children, my cheapest accomplishment would have to be my kids’ wardrobes. In the six years that I have had kids, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I have actually purchased clothes for them in a store. With the exception of some shoes, all of their clothes come from community garage sales, relatives and friends. Many of their toys have also been acquired through garage sales and consignment shops. It’s saved us hundreds of dollars, and my kids are too little to notice or even care!
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Transportation from Brooklyn to Queens: My coworker takes the subway instead of the Long Island Railroad to save $1. The subway on the weekend takes at least 2 hours and results in lots of headaches (delays, cancellations, reroutings, etc). The LIRR, on the other hand, is always right on schedule and takes 20 minutes. But, as she says, a dollar is worth something.
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My great-grandfather was a successful country doctor but notoriously cheap. He owned one of the few cars in his part of upstate New York. When he made house calls over the mountains, he would turn the engine off at the top of a mountain and coast to the bottom, rarely using his brakes so the car would build up a lot of momentum and let him get as far up the next mountain as possible before restarting the engine.
He also used to take his car to the gas station and ask for a nickel’s worth of gas. Since it was hard for the pump attendant to stop the pump after just a nickel’s worth, he would get a few pennies’ worth of free gas that way. He’d do this at every gas station he passed.
Last story is that he used to save every cigarette butt he found (no matter whose) and peel the remaining tobacco from them into a bowl, which he then used to roll his own cigarettes.
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Whenever I go to the airport I always collect as many of those red “luggage carts” as possible and return them to the station for the $0.25 refund. I have been known to embarass my friends and family pushing 7-10 of those carts as we say our goodbyes.
I’ve also been known to compete in cheapskate’s contests to avoid paying $10.36 for book.
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After reading many of these posts, I realize I didn’t bring my A-game to this Miser Death Match. Earlier this morning, I highlighted a man who lives here in my town, a man who lives so cheaply and so simply that he has actually become a local celebrity and guru of sorts. I talked about how this man uses dental floss to mend his loincloth instead of thread, as floss is cheaper … but now I want everyone to picture something else: Imagine this naked man foraging his meals from a cemetery peach tree. Oh, and his beverage of choice to wash those peaches down? HIS OWN FREAKIN’ URINE!! This sounds made-up, I know. Luckily for me, J.D. knows I’m telling the truth.
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I don’t know if this was done before but my mom leaves buckets in the shower that my parents use. Water is saved in buckets. She uses it to flush her toilet and to water the plants.
I just recently discovered this and thought it was weird. Then, I figured that’s pretty smart but cheap. Is she recycling water??
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A co-worker of mine (T) was not going to be here on Monday so he gave another co-worker of mine (A) money to get breakfast for the rest of us as a nice gesture over the holidays. So “A” goes and gets some cheap breakfast and everyone thanks her for it because it was a nice little treat. She takes full credit for it and had some money left over. Well she owed for the present we got for our boss so she used the extra money from breakfast and gave it to us for the present.
So in the end, she took credit for a breakfast she didn’t buy and paid for a gift for someone with money that wasn’t hers.
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A friend of mine was going on several business trips and got a per diem for a hotel, breakfast and dinner. He saved money by camping (in England in the rain), taking excess buffet lunch for his dinner, and going without breakfast.
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One of my ‘cheaper’ moments was during college. My friends and I would go to taco bell occasionally to treat ourselves, but even that was hard to afford. In order to save money on drinks, we would always swing by the publix next to taco bell and do a little ‘dumpster diving’ for sodas in the back. Seems we could always find a 6 pack of code red that had expired.
Ahh, college days.
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I needed new shoes, and I wanted a specific pair of New Balances. I went to the mall, where all of the shoe stores were having a “Buy two for $80″ sale on shoes. For one single pair of shoes, it was over $65, and I didn’t feel like buying two pair of shoes.
As I stood there debating, I heard a mother exclaim to her young son “I am NOT paying $65 for shoes! You can find a pair that’s $40 or less” I approached her, “I hope this isn’t strange, but I’m looking for shoes also. If we buy them together, we can both them them for $40.” She took in shock for a second, and then enthusiastically agreed. Thankfully I had $50 in cash in my pocket, so she put the shoes on her card and I paid her in cash.
While it’s not the most absurd cheapness, I was rather proud of how I kept my eyes open and found a way to get the best deal without spending more than I had intended.
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I’m a bookworm who’s also a broke college grad, so the fall before last I joined the book-trading website BookMooch.com. Around the same time I was working an unpaid internship at a children’s book publisher, where one of my duties in the warehouse was removing scuffed dustjackets from returned books and fitting them with clean covers. It seemed like a huge waste to throw away all those dustjackets, especially the colorful, minimally damaged picture-book covers, so I started taking them home in piles instead.
A book jacket turned inside out makes great sturdy package wrap for mailing Bookmooch books! I’ve even used covers from Christmas-themed books as giftwrap. I’ll pad the mail-packaged books with plastic grocery bags, and the only money I spend is on books (cheap at used bookstores, library sales, and giveaway piles), tape (bought on sale at Big Lots), and postage (bargained down to library rate with sympathetic postal clerks). A year and many mooches later, my dustjacket pile has dwindled; while I’ve scrounged much more “trash” to wrap packages in, I’m still almost tempted to ask my old internship publisher if they need help in the warehouse again.
(BONUS: I’m typing this indoors wearing fuzzy gloves, three layers of clothes, and a hoodie with the hood up (and last night slept under six layers of blanket/sheet) because it seems my roommate & I are trying to see how long we can go without a gas bill before we or the hamster freeze to death. But now I’m going to the library, which has free books and free heat!)
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I once cut the end off a full vacuum cleaner bag, dumped out the filth, stapled it together, and reused it so that I wouldn’t have to buy new bags. (That only works a couple of times until the bag gets so short that it fills too quickly.)
Also, in an effort to get through Christ-mas as cheaply as possible, my sister once painted light bulbs in a Holstein cow pattern, glued hooks to the tops, and gave them away as Christ-mas tree ornaments.
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I have the cheapest parents in the world. We are from central america, and all our family is pretty poor, so when we were living in Germany and my aunt and cousin had the chance to visit (in the winter!), my parents went all out trying to impress them.
We went to Luxembourg/France/Switzerland on a roadtrip, but instead of paying for a hotel (there were 6 of us) my dad thought it would be a good idea to go camping. Well, the first night camping we had a blizzard and found ourselves sleeping in ice water. No kidding. The next morning, since the weather didn’t improve, we figured it’d be best to head back home. But first we had to drive for 2 hours in switzerland to find a good postcard so that my aunt could have bragging rights when she went home. Was it worth it? Probably not.
My dad has also made seat covers for the car out of old bedsheets, and made a computer desk out of a wooden door.
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My uncle, quite the cheapskate, was at a softball game when he found a broken pair of very nice Oakley sunglasses on the bleachers. Instinctively, he picked them up. After realizing that they were broken and unwearable, he remembered that Oakley at the time would replace a broken pair of sunglasses for free, as long as the original receipt was provided. Of course, because he’d just found them, he had no receipt.
Resourceful as he is, my uncle devised a solution to this quandary. He went to a sunglass store and purchased a brand new pair of Oakleys that was identical to the model that he found at the softball game. He then sent the broken sunglasses along with the receipt for the new sunglasses to Oakley. The company sent him a brand new pair of identical sunglasses for free. Then he returned the purchased sunglasses to the store for a full refund. All in all, my uncle got a brand new pair of $300 sunglasses for free.
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These are pretty funny, but I do have to say, buying crap just because it’s cheap isn’t frugal, it’s still a waste of money. That being said I:
Wash out ziplock baggies
Ride my bike 8 miles each way with one big uphill to work so I don’t have to pay for parking
keep the thermostat at 55
Sewed holes in my boots back together by hand
I look at this as being “green”
Tehe best is my uncle who every year gives money to his neices and nephew for christmas, collects the cards back (they only say “from uncle peter” on the inside), mixes them up and puts them in an envelope with each neice/nephew’s name on it. I think some of the cards have been in use for over 10 years.
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I can second Dave’s smoking cessation story! My mom, dad, and all four grandparents gave up cigarettes when my dad left the army and could no longer get them dirt cheap.
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Regarding bucket in the shower. Our shower is so far from the hot water heater that at least a gallon goes down the drain before it is hot enough to step into. I have a plastic bucket in the shower because of drought conditions, and the fact that it is environmentally negative to pump so much treated water into the Bay. Instead, I use it to water plants in the garden where it can seep into the ground and be evaporated.
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Not really “cheap”, but with paying off debt from school loans, it’s one of the few ways I have found to save consistently: The pennies earned from interest/dividends from my credit union accounts are promptly moved into a savings account I can’t get into. Not much at a time, but it lets me put a few cents away and eventually will lead to riches
This also allows me to not absorb this small amount into my spending! I am also hoping that with slow progress I will have enough to soon open a ING or other high yield account 
Also…there is someone I work with that is one of the cheapest people I have ever met (I try my best, but I have nothing on these):
-He eats other people’s left overs in the fridge at work
-He uses his neighbors garbage cans (unbeknowst to them) to avoid paying for garbage service
-He never drives when we have company functions out of town, yet will “use” the mileage from several people who did drive as a deduction for his taxes, while carpooling with them, and not offering to help fill up the tank.
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I rinse and reuse coffee filters. I buy the cheap flat ones (100 for 99 cents) versus the cone shaped (40 for $2). My coffee maker calls for the cone shaped but the flat ones conform just fine. I get about 3-4 days use out of one filter. So a whole year of fresh brewing for less than a buck.
i buy my beans at Big Lots when they have them (3 lbs for $3).
I gots plenty more, but that should tell you something about my frugality.
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Kay’s stories about her parents reminded me of something that happened at my parents house.
I live in Michigan, grew up in the country. One year, during the winter, a deer was hit by a car and lay dead at the edge of our front lawn, out by the road. It lay in pretty deep snow for two or three days, and then a man came by and asked if he could take it away for meat! My stepdad let him take it (we had no use for it), and while logically, it seemed okay to eat (cold corpse, just like refrigerated meat), just the idea of it made me feel a little sick. Maybe since the body had been laying out there for days…
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In the process of setting up my business, I realized I need some shelving to store spare parts, back up systems, etc. I mentioned this in passing to my father and he immediately chimed in that someone at his work just threw away a whole shelving system and a desk to go along with it. He and I loaded in my truck and headed over to the company’s dumpster.
It turns out that the shelving wasn’t the last thing thrown away and there was a lot of fast food junk from the office’s lunches thrown on top. But these were metal shelves, so I threw caution to the wind, dove in, and claimed my reward. As fate would have it, not only get I get way more shelving than I needed, I also found large quantities of copper wiring that were discarded. So now I not only have shelves, I also have a little pocket change from turning in that copper for recycling!
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I’ll skip right over the 12 large bottles of ketchup which eventually got sold to friends and family (here, wanna buy some ketchup, I’ll give you a discount, thanks much) and talk about the time I bought two amps for my hifi system. During the time, I was living in a city with nice public transport systems, but there was just no way I was going to spend 75 cents when I could easily walk the 5 miles to the hifi store. I also got the amps I had had my eye on. However, even though have just spend close to $1000 on amplifiers, there was no way I was going to pay 75 cents for a bus ticket if it could be avoided even if the amps turned out to be a bit heavier than I had anticipated. I weighed them when I got home: 61 pounds in total which barely fit into the two sports bags I had brought. I walked about 100 yards interrupted by a 1 minute break all the 5 miles back home and it took more than 2 hours. Being empirically stupid, I repeated the same stunt later on with two speakers. My biceps were sore for a couple of days after that. Not the one to be discouraged, I found a couple of door buster microwaves (after getting up at 5am) with a total weight of 85 lbs. I figured I could bear hug carry them home since it was only two miles. This showed me my limit though. I only managed to carry them out of the mall until I had to admit defeat and have my girl friend come and get me (by foot of course) so we would have a coin (I didn’t have any change on me) to release a shopping cart and push them home.
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My (now)ex-girlfriend and I went shopping for groceries at wal-mart. She has always been focused on having only name-brand clothing and my cheapness has embarrassed her on several occasions. Tonight she would be furious with me. All I needed was a few cans of tomato soup while I waited for it to go down to 50 cents a can so I could buy bulk again. There was a display that had Campbell’s soup for 60 cents per can. When I brought a few cans to the register only two cans rang up correctly and the others rang up at 64 cents. I tried to tell the cashier that the price was wrong, but she told me that the display must have been for a different kind of soup. After arguing with her for a moment she finally agreed to give me the soup for 60 cents. But, I finally remembered that Bashas had tomato soup for 55 cents per can that week. Of course wal-mart has a price-matching policy and as I was about to say something my ex-girlfriend decided that we had already spent far to much time in there.
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I’m a second generation tightwad and I learned from the best. One of our favorite family stories is about the time our family went to Disneyland. My father owned a swimming pool and spa business. He was shipped a defective spa that needed to be returned to the manufacturer, who happened to be located in LA. The manufacturer would pay for the return shipping, but my father decided to return the spa himself, that way he could take the tax deduction for our family vacation to Disneyland. He loaded the spa onto an open trailer, loaded all 8 of us kids and both of his parents into our 15 person surplus military van and drove us 3 states away to LA. Needless to say we were quite a sight and people stared at us the whole drive. He wasn’t totally cheap, he did actually pay for us to go on the rides at Disneyland.
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When I was 30 I quit my job to care for my mother who was severely disabled by a brain aneurysm. Between me being unemployed and her medical expenses the budget was tight. When my then boyfriend’s (now spouse) birthday was approaching I knew there was no money available to purchase a gift. As luck would have it I was walking near a college campus one day and saw several tables set up promoting various credit cards. After filling out various applications I was able to present my beloved with 3 different T-shirts on his special day.
The car I owned at the time was 7 or 8 years old and rather dinged up. One evening some intoxicated individual decided to jump on the roof – denting it in rather significantly. I reported the incident to my insurance company but decided to keep the money for my own use. One of my friends used brute force to pound out most of the roof – at least to the point where a normal sized person could sit upright in the seats. Unfortunately, there was a minute gap between the windshield and the roof – almost imperceptible except when it was raining at a certain angle and then the drops would hit you in the face while driving. Despite this minor inconvenience, I continued driving the car until it was 11 years old – had over 100,000 miles – and I was able to purchase a different vehicle with cash.
One more story…during a rather bleak period in my life I was somewhat destitute and a kind individual decided to “gift” me a used mattress so I would have something soft to sleep on. I kept the mattress for many years – long after I obtained a decent job and other possessions. When at last I decided to purchase a new mattress & box springs I contacted Good Will to donate my used mattress. I left it outside my apartment as they requested, but when I returned home there was a note on it stating it was “too used” and in such poor condition they couldn’t accept it for their agency.
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I have a great story that my friend told me in the past.
During the holidays seasons, his Grandma would love to bake cookies. Instead of giving you a plate of cookies, she would take old tissue boxes and put the cookies in there and proceed to wrap them with plastic wrap. I found it to be very amusing and VERY cheap.
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Wow excellent stories!
My vote goes for number 6 and 40 and 45
Growing up my Dad always drove by the Sunoco gas station that my neighbours would go to and went to the no name station. I always thought we were poor becuase we couldn’t afford the good gas!
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We were planning our frugal wedding and were catering it ourselves. One challenge was buying enough soda for 200+ people. Lucky for us, a grocery store in our area was offering 2 liter bottles for $0.25 each, but there was a limit of 4 per customer. I would go in with a couple family members and we would each buy 4, and then we would go home and stash them in the basement. We did this daily and sometimes twice a day. We went a little overboard and we still had enough soda to last us a year after the wedding! The funniest part was all the work that we did carrying them down and back up the stairs and all the trips we made to the store (luckily it was a short trip!)
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Waste Not, Want Not–A philosophy I live by.
My husband and I are both grad students, and are trying to work as little as possible without going into debt. Over the last few months there have been some incidents that have prompted him to nickname me “The Depression-Era Wife”.
It all started with some bookcases we were getting rid of. I had been getting annoyed with my wire shelves in my pantry because we eat a lot of rice and beans to save money. When the rice or beans leak out of their containers they fall onto the floor and create a mess. So when we were getting rid of those bookshelves, I thought for a few minutes about how I could possibly reuse the shelves that were perfectly good. I found that they fit perfectly into my pantry and make great shelf liners! I haven’t had a problem with supplies dropping on the floor since.
Then my husband found me reorganizing my closets and throwing things out because we live in such a small, cluttered apartment. We have just recently started using only natural products for house and body. But I had a bunch of lotions, shampoo/conditioner, and household cleaning supplies left to use up. Rather than throw any of these out, I organized it in order of which is least full and have started finishing off all of these products. Only when it is all gone will I go buy the new supplies. This amounts to a bag full of lotion that I haven’t finished in over 2 years…likewise with chap sticks! I only like Burt’s Bees now, but I have 12 other chap sticks that I am determined to finish before I go buy a new one!
And for my most notable depression-era wifism? Well I learned that stinky armpits comes from bacteria on your skin. So instead of using deoderant and antipersperant (which can also cause breast cancer), we have switched to rubbing alcohol 1 or 2 times each day, which works very well and is MUCH cheaper since rubbing alcohol is less than $1 per bottle and is easy to apply with a spray bottle.
Waste not, want not!
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My grandparents take the extra condiment (ketchup, mayonaise,mustard etc.) packets they get from fast food restaurants and squeeze them into there own bottles. They haven’t had to buy a bottle of ketchup in years!
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My uncle had an old pickup truck that he drove into the ground. For years he carried a screwdriver to start it. When he finally broke down and purchased a new car a couple of years ago (because the floorboards and rear window were gone, plus the lights stopped working) he kept telling us about the amazing new features they had on cars now, like rear window defrost.
Even he, however, is not as cheap as the woman I knew in college who worked in a store that received boxes packed with the new recyclable peanuts made from cornstarch instead of the old styrofoam peanuts. She determined that cornstarch is technically food, brought in a bottle of soy sauce, and claimed she ate packing peanuts with soy sauce for most of her meals.
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