Crazy things you've done to save money

Me and my mate used to do this all the time at Uni. We were not even all that skint, but we were always trying to save a buck.

We used to go to a store and go to self checkout every day after class with two of the largest fillet stakes we could find, only the best of course. We used to put it on the weighing scales and say it was bananas.

We did this for a few weeks, not every day tho. Then one day while scanning other products the self checkout till malfunctioned. The clerk came over and called her manager. The manager came over and knew what we were doing, so made us take out everything we had packed away one item at a time and she checked it off against what we had on the till.

Busted.

She told us to be more careful, we hadn't paid for it, so we hadn't robbed that day, but she knew what we were up to. We didn't go back to the store for months.

Never did it again

I have a friend that works at a grocery store. One day mgmt announced that they'd be watching the self checkout more closely. They had figured that they were loosing about $500/day!

I moved to the Middle East for work: first Abu Dhabi and now Saudi Arabia. Gas is about 85% cheaper here and the economy is about as strong as the US is not...

The tax savings alone are huge too.

Went cold turkey on the birth control pills.

Please tell me your graduate studies weren't in English.

fdfdfdfdfd wrote:

Living in Spain on a tight budget in 2009-2010. On New Year's day 2010 at 7 AM after many drinks and being in a discoteca for a couple hours, i ran home 6.5 miles from town to my host family's house so i wouldnt have to pay 30 euro for a cab. i threw up and took a dump on the side of the road behind some bushes on the way. i remember thinking my body was just going to fail me at some point because i was so exhausted. at the same time, i was already looking forward to telling my friends about my epic new years.

i was shitting in some bushes on the side of the road and thinking "new year's 2010. f++k yeah."

You are on a running site and the "crazy" thing you did was run 6.5 miles.

competing currencies wrote:

great question. there is a big difference with saving dollars vs saving money. i saved my money by converting paper dollars into silver coins- something that will retain its value while the dollar index continues to fall. this will all make sense to you when your current $20 dollar bill with a purchasing power of 1.5 grocery bags drops to a purchasing power of .5 grocery bags in the not so distant future...

don't research the politicians. research money. then the right politician will make sense. RP FTW.

And one day, you can also convert the tinfoil in your had into money!

I posted this in the "anyone live on a boat?" thread:

I have had a unique situation for the last 4 months. In an effort to save money, I have lived in a 15x20 foot, climate controlled storage facility at $85 a month. I shower at work and have no cable, Internet, and utility expenses. I can watch Netflix and hulu through my iPad 2 and have found no drawbacks. Security is top notch, car stays parked in a gated space (this is not a sketchy storage facility). This is also an amazing conversation starter at the bar and sometimes women literally ask themselves over to my place just so they can see if it's real. I literally have no bills other than the $85 and my cell phone bill ($97). I have the data package and can tether my iPad2 to the iPhone to get wireless. I make $67k a year and will have contributed almost $45k of it to vanguard mutual funds and an IRA by years end.

The only negative is that there's no place to plug things in, so I read and move about under a traditional camping lantern.

Reading back to the first page, I'm not sure why the guy who got his medicine in sample form from his doctor was "not proud of it." I did the same thing and I was quite proud of it. The doctor had tons of the stuff and saved me hundreds of dollars.

My father's old stamp collection got semi-ruined by a flood in our garage. The glue's all done and some of them stick together, but I've been scotch-taping them to envelopes. Not very cost effective in terms of manpower time but...whatever.

This is pretty cool. I think you should get some kind of portable power source. You could plug it in to charge while you're at work and then have some electricity when you get to the storage unit. Not sure how much power those things have, but just an idea.

I heard of a few people that did this in LA. What's it like at night? I'd be paranoid of getting caught at night. Can you come and go as you please or do you pretty much have to lock yourself in for the night?

What do you do for food/water/toilet? I can't imagine you have indoor plumbing or a kitchen in your storage facility.

I moved from Utah to Washington a few years ago. Instead of renting a trailer, I bought an old Ford F-250 for $250, put my car on a tow dolly, stashed all my things wherever they would fit and sold the truck for $550 when I got to town. The truck wouldn't pass Utah emissions, but that doesn't matter in my area. The money I got for the truck paid for gas and the dolly and I broke nearly dead even on the move.

when i was a little high schooler i didn't eat lunch for a whole year. i saved my lunch money and bought an ipod. it was awesome.

To reply to you guys, I am by default locked in because the storage facility is gated with a keypad and on top of that, the climate controlled units are "indoors", as in you have to enter in another keypad to get the indoor access ... Very safe. I can come and go as I please, 24/7, so long as I have to code to the keypad.

I cannot cook at my place, however, I never cooked when I lived in a "normal" place. I get chicken salads from zaxbys, chick fil a, etc... For dinner. You may think eating out gets expensive but it's ~$6 for dinner every night. I NEVER get a combo because I cut out sodas back in February and have not had fries since then either.

Restrooms are even easier as there's a restroom in the "indoor" portion of the storage facility. I mostly make sure to drop the daily deuce at work though.

The room looks great though, I have a leather reclining chair, area rug, pictures/posters on the wall, full size bed, etc... The real kicker is that I'm an officer in the military and am slated to deploy in June of 2012 ... My shit's already in storage!

Push Alt F4 wrote:

Eat lots of peanut butter and oatmeal, high in calories and decent for you. I would eat more beans and rice but I don't like taking the time to cook them.

The secret is to to get a rice cooker. I live off beans and rice a couple times a week, I'll get back from a run, put the rice and some veggies in the rice cooker, stretch, take a shower, open a can of beans, toss it in the finished rice, and I'm ready to eat

I bought the $3 beer at Trader Joe's. DON'T DO IT. The $4 stuff is drinkable.

Don't tell anyone or I'll have to commit seppuku / harakiri but I replaced the clear 1157 stop/running light bulb on my 2000 Toyota Camry with 400,000 miles on it with a yellow 1157 bulb since that's all I had in the glove compartment. You can't tell the difference by looking but I feel so ashamed...

Without a doubt, this guy wins the thread. End of thread.

He saves real money in a logical and reasonable manner without giving too much up. (BTW, is your storage facility a chain? Also, just out of curiosity, what is the temperature that the box is set to? can you vary it?)

Unlike the idiots who saved $2 a month by not flushing the toilet. I mean, really, how much is your goddamn water bill? Retards.