The most extreme thing you have done to save money?

moneysavingstudent97

Hi!

I am a design student currently working on a project regarding the subculture of extreme money savers.

I'd be interested to know the most extreme things you have done to save money, no matter how small or funny it may be.

Anything you can share will help me tremendously!

Thank you.:j

BananaRepublic

When I was a student there were days when I'd eat very little apart from pancakes which were cheap to make. That was because I had no money. I suspect you really mean not spending in order to put money aside. And yes I was thin as a rake.

Lomcevak

I got a load of topsoil from a gravedigger once :A

One of my housemates at university pretty much lived of a meal from the local chippie which was a bag of 'scraps' (10p a bag - this was mid-90s) and 'scrapings' (free - none of us knew what 'scrapings' were, other than it looked pretty much like congealed chip fat), this was then covered in ketchup, butter, and brown sauce (all free for customers) and microwaved once he got it home. Looked revolting, but didn't seem to do him too much harm and was probably the cheapest meal in terms of calories per penny ever devised.

Primrose

When we were much younger and my husband had been made redundant I spoke to our canteen manager and asked him for the bones of joints used for canteen meals so that I could make stock with them as I was a home made soup fanatic. He would often give them to me with generous quantities of beef or gammon left on them, so that meat was scraped off adn often fed us for a couple of days. I then made stock from the bones and the soup from that fed us for a couple more days.

pafpcg

January 1973: A few months after leaving college, my partner and I were living in a tiny two-room flat heated only by a gas heater on a coin-in-the-slot meter. My partner had at last got a job and a house near where she'd be working. We'd moved all our worldly possessions in a hired van that day and were spending the last night in the old flat huddled in front of the gas fire; then the gas meter ran out and I was too mean to put another 10p in the meter because we wouldn't use up the whole 10p of gas despite the freezing cold. We went shivering to bed fully-clothed. We got out of the cold flat as soon as possible early the next morning, but it was thick fog as we rode my motorcycle to our new home so I couldn't use goggles or visor to be able to see where we were going; as we crossed the Staffordhire/Shopshire border, I discovered it was also freezing fog as ice prevented my eyelids from closing - I've never been so terrified. We were both then on £1,000pa salaries with hundreds in bank & building society accounts, so 10p even then wasn't that much to us. If only I'd overcome the reluctance of a lifetime of being "careful", we'd have had a comfortable night and a later departure for a safer journey.

Primrose

Gosh, I remember those coin in the meter hard up bed sitter days.
Looking back though, they never did us any harm, did they and certain acted as a lesson in learning to live economically. These days we can afford the heating bills but I still walk around indoors with extra thick sweaters or body warmers before mindlessly switching the central heating back on early on those extra chilly days!

TBC15

Saving money is easy when you don’t have it.

I pushed a baggage trolley ½ mile to get home from the airport, rather than pay for a taxi.

Still got the trolley somewhere.

Reaper

On MSE:
13 Extreme MoneySavers... take it to the max

You could also take a look at the Old Style MoneySaving Board for plenty of hints on using vinegar instead of kettle descaler etc

Ray_Singh-Blue

Not me, but a guy I know used to have a 4 slice toaster. It was an all or nothing type toaster. He hated wasting electricity by running it with any empty slots. So he would toast 4 slices of bread in the morning, eat 2 hot for breakfast, and 2 cold for lunch.

pantaiema

Ray_Singh-Blue wrote: »

Not me, but a guy I know used to have a 4 slice toaster. It was an all or nothing type toaster. He hated wasting electricity by running it with any empty slots. So he would toast 4 slices of bread in the morning, eat 2 hot for breakfast, and 2 cold for lunch.

AFAIK as I know many electric toasters with four slots in it will allow you to toast either two slices of bread or four slices of bread so you do not need to waste energy if you just want to toast two of them.

Alexland

I volunteered on Sundays in a charity bookshop for a few years and used to have customers complain they were not willing to pay 50p for a second hand book because the original retail price 20 years previous was 25p. I had to explain the concept of inflation and that this really was a charity and running a shop has overheads that needed to be recovered.