Doing one hit bowls actually puts a lot of unburned weed into the water. It's not the water soluble thc, it's ingesting raw weed.

My first car was a 70 mustang.  It had a Flintstone floorboard on the passenger side.

If I had thought of using a road sign for the floorboards, I would have.

I undoubtedly pee outside more than inside year round. I'm not hydroeconomic, just happens to be where I'm at I guess.

I knew a guy that used to dip tobacco from cigarettes. He would rip open a cigarette and stuff it in like a dip. He wasn’t normal by any means

I pull used cardboard silhouette targets from the trash cans at the range to use as backers for my paper targets. Always have 5 or 6 in my truck, and there are always more to replace the ones that get really chewed up.

My grandmother raised two daughters during the depression. The lessons learned were never lost. She did a lot of the behaviours mentioned in the thread. When we moved her out of her house, days were spent dealing with “provisions.” Hundreds if not thousands of jars, drawers full of washed aluminium foil, rubber bands and paper goods. In the end it was hard to calculate if she threw virtually anything away. The most memorable and most fitting for this thread is a box I found on her back porch in her tool room. There I found a box labelled, “string too short to use.” It was filled with over 60 years worth of small bits and pieces of twine and string, most under two inches long. Those must’ve  been rough years to live in.

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I find myself bringing old used equipment from work home for scrap. Some of it I tore apart to separate SS and aluminum. Some fridges I cut the aluminum sides off. I found a lot of it useful when working on my aluminum frame vintage travel trailer.

I knew a guy so cheap he’d wash out his condoms and reuse them. How do I know?  I used his bathroom and saw one hanging to dry   Yuk! I never went back

I had a roommate who would buy a carton of smokes on payday. Smoke them down 1/2 way, the put them out and save them. Then he would take the butts and reroll them
Then he would Smoke them. If he ran out of the handrolls he would take the filters and chew on them until he got paid.

Not mine, but I think it’s genius
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There’s a whole lot of reasons to stop being poor in this thread.

An old timer I grew up around use to tell me when he was a kid in the depression he would walk around the neighborhood with a pale to collect potato peels to make for dinner for his family. His dad was a drunk and spent what little money they had at the bar.

My mom is one to not flush piss and told us not to as kids. She always bitches about the water bill being high, I always thought it was a valid point until I started paying a water bill myself of $30, and only fluctuates about $10 when I water the garden or fill the kids pool a dozen times in a month. She blames it on having a cistern as a kid and running out of water in the dry months. Said they would only get a bath about once a week.

This reminded me of my grandma.
When she went out to eat she’d order ice water with lemon, free, and add sugar packets from the condiment holder at the table to make lemonade.
PB&J at grandmas was normal peanut butter and a bunch of the free jelly packets from those condiment holders.
You don’t see them much anymore but it seems every restaurant in the 70s had them.  

I knew if I read this thread there would be something I could use.
this is it.

my father acquired lumber by tearing down old houses.  we would have to pull out the nails and straighten them with a hammer to be reused.  I was 15 before I learned you could buy nails in a store.

While a neat idea in a pinch, zip-ties are definitely more expensive than trimmer line.

My dad was frustrated with the total cost of a flip house, so to save money he decided he’d put astroturf in the kitchen. Months later a realtor told him the AstroTurf may be part of the reason it wasn’t selling.

How does one store a used rubber? A Ziplock bag? And if so, let’s say he gets lucky one night and pulls out a Ziplock bag with a low mileage condom, you’d figure the girl would dry up like the Sahara and the dude is left with no poon.

My boss dropped a smoke in the drain pan from doing an oil change on a tractor, when he pulled the smoke out he broke it, he had the kid helping us give him the used bandaid off of his finger to hold the smoke together while he smoked it. He smoked through the band aid.

Kicker is he can afford more smokes then anyone I know.

My parents are loaded, but because of the way they lived, I didnt know it for most of my childhood.

This thread brings back shitty memories.

My elderly neighbor gave us a homemade fruit cake for Christmas one year. Having only ever heard jokes about them we unwrapped the Saran Wrap to check it out. It was on one of those styrofoam trays raw meat comes on and still had the blood diaper on it.

I used to watch dad and learned how to straighten nails.  He was so good, I dare you to pick out one that was bent and then straighten vs a new one.  He was that good.

Both grandmothers used cool whip, butter and other empty containers for food storage.  

Back then, jelly jars were also drinking glasses.  Both grandmothers had a complete set of jelly drinking glasses.  

My moms mother would cook rice everyday, she is the one that I learned to cook from.  She would wash her rice and used the rinse water to water her pot plants on the front porch, she had the prettiest plants, rice water works wonders.

Bread loaf wrappers served as make shift plastic storage bags, she also saved all rubber bands from the news paper and tie wraps from bread.  Also saved string

Other grandmother would use old bed sheets and ripped them to make ties for her tomato plants.  She would also use cantaloupe peelings and coffee grounds to make compost for her plants

They all were adults during the depression and learned to survive

Your Grandma was cool.

I do that with Chinese takeout containers. The plastic ones, not the paper boxes. Just seems like the responsible thing to do.

Brilliant!

Ever been on a shallow well? Or have a big township water bill?  If it's yellow let it mellow a time or two.

Stories of how to be cheap are going to be valuable in coming years or months.

Listen carefully.

Ex’s grandmother would dry and REUSE toilet paper! Not kidding. Nasty as hell.

My dads moms husband Felton.  So My Grandmothers (dads Mom) husband (Dads Step father).

He was 90+ years old when he died in 2006. He got around better than me at 85 than me today.  Some kid hit him in their car and totaled it. When the car was totaled he would walk 5+ miles from home to where my grand mother was in the nursing home.
My aunt tried to get him a car and he said He could get a new car for $3000.  UH Yeah this was in Late 2000. So she gets him a used pontiac 6000 it ran and he started driving it. HE drew on social security at 2k a month plus a Retirement from some chemical company for around $1500 a month. He also had full social security. My grand mother drew almost $3k from social security and had full medicare. They were so old and they didn't pay property or income taxes anymore.  

So a few years later he gets in the nursing home. So he was in 25 days so not enough time for him to be under Medicaid where they take everything. HE went in saying he couldn't pay so Medicaid was to kick in at 30 days. My dads mom (my grand mother) was in there so they shared a room. She had been in there a long time before this. Yet still was in under medicare so they took nothing and Medicare paid all of it.  

When he had to put her in the nursing home he put her in under Medicaid saying they didn't have the money to pay. She had over $40k in her checking account. He paid all the bills with her checking account when she was in. Dad was able to separate the finances some years before he died. She died years later around 2013. She had $20k left.
Right before he got put into the nursing home I went by their house to check on him. IT was around late november. He had power but the house was freezing cold. HE was sitting in the living room in a chair with an old electric box heater in front of him. He had on a jacket and several flannel long sleeve shirts. Gave him a hug when I left and he felt like skin and bones. He was in bad shape.

Felton had over 250k in his checking account. He had over 400,000 in his savings account when he died.
HE lived through the depression and down here in the south.
HE reused Qtips. He reused mouthwash. He had a bowl in the sink he used to wash his hands with. The water in there was the water he used as final rinse. He used that to wash his hands next time. Emptied the bowl out and then rinsed off his hands into that bowl.
Toilet paper was used sparingly to say the least. Say he was getting a drink of water with ice. While getting the ice if he dropped a piece of ice from the freezer he would let it melt a little in his hand and use it anyway. Said "Ice Washes it self". He never bought brand name anything. ONLY Sams Choice from walmart.

HE was cheap but he was also living in another world than the world of the early 2000.

For pee, some use rags and wash.  Like cloth diapers

My Father In Law would re-use coffee grounds a second time.

Cheap outs I did to my 77 International Scout;
Hose clamped a Mountain Dew can over a hole in an exhaust pipe.
Rigged a push button to the starter switch when the key ignition broke.
Pulled a points distributor out of a junkyard and replaced my electronic ignition. Walked to the junkyard with my tool box and did the work along the side of the road, where it broke down.

Grandpa replaced a wooden fence on the farm.
He made me straighten every nail we pulled and use them to build the new fence as well as every board that wasn't dry rotted to trash.

I've seen people beg for memberships on ArfCom.

I'm guilty of repurposing Amazon and other boxes to ship stuff on EE and eBay.

I made my own padded envelopes with a regular mailer like this
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fold it in half, then line one half of it with bubble wrap (scrounged of course).  That's all a padded envelope is anyway

Same here.

Grandma survived The Great Depression...

When my underwear gets old I take it on a business trip and throw it away after wearing it so that I don't have to pack it home.

Relative cut the plastic handles from cardboard boxes you sometimes see on larger boxes like TVs.  Had a coffee can full of the handles and the little squares of plastic that were inside the cardboard box.  

When building his addition 30 years ago he would go over after the carpenters left and pick up all the bent nails to straighten them out and put in another coffee can.  

He has cans of rusty bolts in the cellar as every bolt ever removed from anything had to be saved

He burned EVERYTHING in his wood stoves to heat the house.  Randomly would pull over for sticks that fell from trees to throw in the bed of the pickup for burning later.  We still have multiple garbage barrels full of tiny pieces of twigs he collected for burning.  Gotta be 5 or 6 barrels still full with no more wood stoves to burn the stuff in.

When I was a kid, everyone had a stack of Cool Whip or similar bowls in the cabinet.

another tip is when filling my car I manually turn off the pump by pressing the lever where the pump would re-mount to by hand, then give the nozzle one last squeeze when the pump is off to gain 1 oz of extra gas

Grocery store receipts if blank on one side get cut up into cheap post it notes with out the glue part

Computer print outs I don't need any more get flipped over and reused as scratch pad paper or used to print something again single sheet fed for another print out

I refill empty bottled water bottles with water from the filtered water dispenser of the fridge

Old cotton t shirts get cut up into cleaning patches or shop rags

Older neighbor when I was growing up.  He was an Engineer at Rockwell

He wouod go to MCL and get their used coffee grounds and used filters. He would dry them out on a picnic table and use them until the flavor was gone

He was also known for picking up road kill.  One time he offered mr turtle soup.

I was repairing my boots in Afghanistan with sutures and 100mph tape. Out of necessity not cheapness.

I saw a guy taking cigarette butts out of the trash at Walmart. He said it beats steeling...

Me to, I just smash them the sliver on to the new bar and let it dry out.

Fella that’s well known in the oil industry around here is also known for how cheap he is. I’ve heard from more than one source that when he has a rig out on one of his leases it’s not uncommon for him to pick up the rags laying on the ground to wash and reuse. Now for those that don’t know rig hands often grab a rag and tear it into quarters as they head out to the bushes. Yes those were among the rags he would gather. He used to be a college professor before retiring to run the family business, probably one of the three richest men in the county.

He was more modern than most of the fellas I knew like that, all hated banks, had cash hidden everywhere lol.

Exactly what I was thinking.

That’s pretty cheap-right behind using the other side of toilet paper

and jelly jar glasses.

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