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Ignore the big price label you see on bread, coffee and other food items. Look for the small number in the corner that says €/kg. That’s the only number that really matters in the long run.
If you have only 15 € in your pocket, and you need to survive till the end of the month, this tip might not be very helpful, since you also need to be aware of the sum you pay at the checkout.
A bargain is still spending money.
That's a thought terminating cliche.
Frugal people know that sometimes an outlay of money in the short term leads to long-term savings.
Learn to cook from raw or whole ingredients.
The amount we pay for processed bullshit that makes us sick is mind-boggling, we're talking like a factor of 10 to 1 almost.
And before you come at me, I meticulously budget my food, I make everything from scratch
Just as one example, frozen pizza. The absolute cheapest, worst piece of shit you can get in my area would be about $6 on sale. Compare that to making homemade crusts, sauce, and topping it myself for around 75 cents per pizza.
Many people use the excuse that they don't have time. Funny how they have time to go to work for 2 hours and earn $40 that they can just pay to Skip the Dishes, but don't have half an hour to make some homemade spaghetti.
Home cooked meals are why I can afford to be a housewife!
My partner and I only bring in around 48k/yr and thanks to cooking from scratch for everything its totally a reasonable amount!
I make a loaf of multigrain sourdough every week for our breakfast egg, onion, jalapeno, sandwiches, egg prices included that's 12 a week for breakfast at the highest. Dinners we use whatever produce is in season, stews and casseroles are most common. We usually end up at around 40/week for dinners.
Add that to the fact that I'm a nerd who can selfhost out services (I run a jellyfin server with all of my physical media backed up to it, so its my Netflix and my Spotify, and idc about piracy so I rip stuff I get from the library too) and were also spending only electricity on media every month... Usually.
Edit: spelling
I use soap to clean myself. Every part of myself. Including my hair. Get a good, plain, unscented natural soap—and here I mean soap, not "beauty bar" or other such terminology used to disguise the actual composition—and you'll save oodles of money while avoiding the laurel sulfates that are so damaging to skin. You can even splurge a bit and get an Aleppo soap or any kind of castile soap that's ludicrously expensive for a soap and yet will be cheaper than having:
Then there's deodorant. The last deodorant I bought cost me 20 bucks. For a supply that's thus far lasted me five years and is about half-finished. This is because I use alum powder (ground-up alum crystal) as my deodorant. You'll need the extra cost of a spray bottle too, so add a buck or two for the first use. But then it's about 2-3 teaspoons in a 500ml spray bottle every couple of weeks, topped with water. It's 100% unscented, will actually neutralize scents if, say on a really hot day of hard work, your clothes start smelling gamy, and works better than any commercial deodorant I've ever used in my entire life.
(If you want the same product for orders of magnitude more money, you can look up brands like "Crystal Stick" or the like, but you won't be able to neutralize odours on your clothing with it.)
As a former soapmaker, I'll suggest looking for someone in your area making quality soap that you like. Find some great handmade soap and you'll never go back to the commercial crap.
I use nothing but handmade soaps. My main soap is Aleppo soap (from Syria) with a backup soap that's a goat milk soap (from Xinjiang). I occasionally splurge and get some "sugar soap" from Thailand.
Is alum powder what the deodorant rocks are? Or are they the same method of clogging sweat glands like aluminum anti perspirant deodorants?
Deodorant rocks are alum crystal. Alum powder is the same stuff ground down to a powder. It is a deodorant, not an anti perspirant. You do not stop sweating when you use alum. It just kills the bacteria that cause the odour (which is why you can use it to temporarily clear the gamy scent of clothing as well).
Track your spending. It's insane how obvious that might sound, but having all your outgoings over a month laid out in front of you can make it really clear where there might be savings to be made. I used to pick up a pack of biltong and an energy drink before work every weekday - it was only £3 every morning. However, that's £63 a month right there.
Other than that; see if you can change your routine or mindset in some way to allow savings. I've started waking up earlier so I can walk to work, and not being so anxious to get home early so I can enjoy the walk home a bit more - I'm lucky to live within three miles from my office, and to be able-bodied (and have the area be walkable etc.) but it saves me about £150 a month on train tickets, at the cost of walking about 2 hours a day.
Before you buy something, take a look at all the useless junk you've accumulated over the years and now need to get rid of. After that, ask yourself: did it ever give you what you were really looking for?
This is a big one, hedonic treadmill.
Track your spending and expenses. Even if you don’t plan to change your spending habits at first, I’d say it’s pretty hard not to once you see where all your money is actually going.
Beyond that - and while it’s not exactly a “saving” tip - I’d argue that investing is the biggest lever you can pull when it comes to growing your wealth. I’m a blue-collar worker, and while I do okay for myself, I’m by no means rich. But the money I’ve put aside from my wages and invested now pays me passive income each year that roughly equals two months’ worth of income. That’s money I don’t have to work for.
I’d seriously struggle to save that much each year through budgeting alone - especially since I’ve already picked all the low-hanging fruit when it comes to frugal living.
I got a twist for the fellas! Look at women's clothes at the thrift. There's far more variety than in the men's section and it's stupid cheap. Also, if you're non-fat, women's tops tend to cut in subtly at the waist, trés chic. Imagine, clothes that don't look like they used a whiskey barrel for a mannequin.
A good chunk of my shoes are from the female section. Got several jackets and other winter tops that look dead sexy. Used to pay way too much for white linen to wear at the beach or river. Here's the top I wore yesterday. (Boat's too small for 4, even though we're all tiny. Kids took turns getting towed.) Pulled two white tops at the thrift and my wife was shaking her head, "No! Those are for girls!" Yesterday she thought I looked hot and tried to give me told-you-so that the tops would look great on me. Whatever.
Here's one of those tops with a woman's vest, $4 for both. Just noticed, that's a woman's watch, $2 plus a new battery. Wish I had more pics handy, but you get the idea.
CAVEAT: The buttons and zippers are ass backwards.
Nice! Slick info, and suave looking dude! Thanks man!
A lot of people avoid credit cards, but if you get one that has good "cash back" rewards and only use it for stuff you're already buying anyway then you basically get a discount on everything.
I have a PayPal card that is like 1.5%-3% back on everything so I just do all my normal purchases on there, even insurance payments and stuff, then pay it all off as soon as I'm "allowed" to. I basically get a few hundred dollars a year back from stuff I'd be buying no matter what.
Just be careful of your cards maximum... I literally just learned this the hard way this week... I did all my normal shopping/payments like I always do, but I also rebuilt my computer so I ended up using 50% of my available credit and lost 20 fucking points off my credit score for it!!! Such a scam system lol
Cue all the whining.
Credit cards are an amazing tool, and one of the best things that people don't realize is almost every single credit card gives you 90 days loss damage theft protection, and an extra year warranty on top of whatever the manufacturer gives you.
This has literally saved me tens of thousands of dollars over the last three decades.
I got two brand new laptops because they both died around the 2 to 3 year point, and the extra year of CC warranty carried the coverage over. With no replacement parts available, they were required to give brand new laptops with new warranty. That's just one example of many. My brother smashed a TV when we were setting it up... Invoked the 90 dat damage protection and got a "free" TV.
Oh my god this is the first I've heard of this and I could have saved fucking THOUSANDS with the amount of shit I've bought that's broken over the last 5 years. Where is this info??? Is it only certain CCs?
A lot of cards have other fringe perks like insurance on rental cars, for example. Absolutely worth flipping through your benefits package sometime.
That system only exists because it's profitable for PayPal. Enough people can't manage paying it off fast enough. And the spying on purchase habits but that's unavoidable with any card. Just be honest with yourself before you start trying to farm credit card perks.
It is because credit card companies charge a fee to vendors. It is sizeable enough that credit card companies will offer 1% back so they can make money on the other 2%-4%.
I'm kind of obsessed with money because I got traumatized from a time where having 30€ more could mean eating for another week
In my country you have to pay an annual fee if your bank account exceeds a certain limit (5000€)
That's insane!
I use tinder to get free meals and grindr for a free place to sleep.
Keep in mind you pay extra for convenience in many situations. It was said here before, but home cooking is the prime example.
Speaking of which, buy the stuff you use a lot off cheap, buy the expensive stuff only if you use it in small amounts. Example: I'm really into curry, so I use a lot of carrots and potatoes, the cheapest veggies here, but that alone is a bit bland. So i use moderate portions of whatever hearty veggies are in season (sweet potato, zucchini, pumpkin, eggplant). There's also this really good curry paste I like, and I didn't even bother comparing its price since I know I will need to buy a new one in half a year at the earliest.
As a consequence of that rule, skip on meat. Too expensive and too big portions. Even if you still want to celebrate the end of a week/month with it, you really need to learn some veggie recipes for the work week.
I find rice to be the perfect balance between work-intensive potatoes and pricey -in- comparison pasta. So I of course use literal 10s of kilos of it and don't buy the minute rice (again, surcharge for convenience), but from the local Asia mart for cheap.
As a consequence of that rule, skip on meat. Too expensive and too big portions.
Or learn to use meat the way human being used meat before wannabe nobles deciding to ape their betters normalized a meal with over 50% of the plate being some kind of meat.
Asian cuisine (Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.) has, to me, the best balance of meat/eggs/whatever to vegetables. Proper home-cooked meals have maybe 10% of calories coming from meats. Indian cuisine is also pretty good at the meat/other balance. Europeans start going way too meat-heavy, and North Americans view vegetables as that little bit of colourful stuff around the rim of the plate that's there for colour, not consumption (or so it seems to my eyes).
Or learn to use meat the way human being used meat before wannabe nobles deciding to ape their betters normalized a meal with over 50% of the plate being some kind of meat.
Dayum! Meat culture summed up in one sentence.
I remember 50% vegetables, 30% carbs, 15% protein, 5% other from somewhere.
Another place (especially USA) we're falling down is snacking foods, like prepackaged chips. They're designed to make you consume more while not providing anything of value to our diets. And not so surprising, the wanting to snack constantly goes away when I'm able to cook and consume food made with real whole ingredients. Even jarred sauces or canned vegetables are lacking /something/ vital.
Frozen veg and a bag of potatoes has become a cornerstone of my cooking.
Certain produce like tomatoes I try to buy the multicolored heritage versions. Even produce is suffering from enshitification with the modern versions losing flavor and nutrition in favor of appearance, shelf life, ship ability, etc.
Anyway, I went on a high rambling rant. Sorry, I'll go hit my pipe again before i start some aluminum origami
I have had a crackpot theory since my 20s that the grand obesity epidemic of the Americas was caused by industrial food production, even of the supposed "fresh" foods. My mother has always been a gardener. When we lived in a nice bungalow in Edmonton she grew vegetables and flowers. When we lived in a short row house in Inuvik, she would garden in the very short summer and then take everything indoors using grow lamps and humidifiers to keep as much alive as she could. When we lived in an apartment block in Germany she'd purchased a bunch of planter boxes that hung on both sides of the railing to continue.
I lived my life with fresh, homegrown veg, in short. Until I left home and bought groceries from a grocery store.
What struck me most were the tomatoes. My mother's tomatoes were smaller than grocery store "fresh" produce, but were a deep, blood red. The red continued to the inside where the grocery store ones were more yellow/orange on the interior. My mother's tasted rich and flavourful. We'd cut them almost paper-thin to put on sandwiches and burgers, for example. The grocery store ones had almost no flavour at all. A bit sweet. A bit starchy. A hint of tartness. And that was it. To get even a ghost of the same impact my mother's thinly-sliced ones had on things, I needed huge slices, 5mm or more thick. It was crazy.
And that's when I got my crackpot theory that the techniques used to make large, even-looking, produce in huge quantities leached flavours out of things. The raw caloric content was roughly the same, but all the flavours were dilute. And since we evolved to desire required micronutrients by flavour, colour, aroma, etc. (lacking the ability to measure them in our bodies) the lost flavour, et al makes us eat more to get the same feeling of satisfaction.
And what happens when you eat more…?
(Now note: I identify this as a "crackpot theory". As in I'm not saying it's the truth simply because I lack the scientific evidence to support it and lack the time or energy to find said. I'm sticking with actual fresh, not factory fresh, produce and other foods because they taste better. I just think the issue might be a lot deeper than taste.)
I've watched documentaries where they touched on it. I don't think it's a crackpot theory at all.
I used to have a friend that gardened (tbh it was weed) and he did a lot with mixing nutrients for his babies, commercial fertilizer doesn't put nutrition back into the soil or the plants in ways we can benefit. They're only designed to benefit the plants in ways that are profitable for them.
The most satisfying food I've had came from my relatives gardens that had healthy compost piles. On our own, my parents used chemical fertilizers and the results were lacking.
Make lists and use them to think twice before purchasing anything.
I started making lists of stuff I wanted to buy instead of, well, buying it whenever I thought about it and and it worked great to teach me to differentiate between what I need and what I waaaaant ;)
Put bread in the fridge. It lasts much longer. You can also freeze bread and cheeses for even longer storage.
Expiration dates on most foods don’t mean much. Your salt isn’t bad just because you owned it for a year. Just pay more attention to the food after the date.
Salt expiration is what I find most funny, it has been for million of years buried, and when is extracted and packed, then suddenly it expires 😊
Extending this tip further: a lot of things turn out fairly decent when frozen and then unfrozen. Cooked rice, raw homemade pasta, diced vegs (onions, peppers, carrots), citrus juice, cooked beans, stews and pilafs in general. So if you have the available freezer space it's worth to hide some leftovers there, for an "I got no money and no time but I need to eat!" sort of meal.
Just don't freeze potatoes. They get spongy.
Freezing diced veggies was a game-changer for me. Sometimes I just want to get it all done at once so I don't have to pull out the board and wash everything every time.
It's like I'm a sous chef for future me.
I freeze mine. I live alone so it would just go mouldy anyway, but this way my breads always fredh
Write down every single thing you buy before you buy it. Name and price. It gets your rational mind to engage and many times, I change my mind because I realize I don't need the thing and maybe don't even want it.
I'll focus on food money saving tips. Don't follow them blindly, check if they apply or not to where you live (it varies quite a bit). It all boils down "buy cheaper, when cheaper, and use it well".