Asklemmy

I have very debilitating anxiety that traps me in my apartment the vast majority of the time, so I save a lot of money from not having to pay tram/bus fees and stuff like that...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I pirate damn near every piece of media I consume.

I also have my automatic 401k contributions at work cranked up to like 15%. I never see the money in my bank account so I don't even think about it and force myself to fit into a smaller budget- which is the best way to save.

Local library for entertainment - free ebooks, free streaming of movies, passes to museums/state parks etc.

Eat at home, cook in bulk and eat leftovers to save time/money.

Ad block for watching YouTube/network tv without annoying ad breaks

Bodyweight fitness, walking, and at home yoga for exercise - no need for a gym membership

Use Facebook marketplace to get free/cheap furniture

sometimes i pirate groceries at self-checkout

Creative? Cut your own hair.

You guys SAVE money by pirating? I'm pretty sure I could subscribe to all existing streaming services for a like a decade for the amout I spend on my NAS and harddrives.

We stopped after one kid. Saved a lot of money. Friends all have 3-4 and are always broke. We have plenty of capital to enjoy life, vacation, and live a modest life.

• pirate media: shows, books
• bulk buying toiletries / cleaning supplies when there's a good deal somewhere
• use contraption for toothpaste and other toiletries
• skip lunch often
• take care of appliances by fully cleaning them often
• do dishes and laundry at night
• YouTube the hell out of things that break to figure out a way to fix it myself
• use a heated blanket during the day to keep the heater on 16 C°
• cut my own hair with the help of YouTube

One meal a day

I collect all sorts of crap from the side of the road and either fix it and sell it, strip it for parts and sell those, or scrap them out for scrap metal. I actually find it very therapeutic and Ive earned a lot of favors by giving friends and family free fridges, washers, dryers etc that ive fixed. More of an 'earning' rather than 'saving' but i normally get a few grand a year.

Something that I will claim I did to save money was get a new motorcycle. I traded two bikes, one that was exceedingly hard to grt parts for, and one that had a ton of miles, a ton of abuse, and had reached the point where it needed something fixed once a week. So now I have just one, and it actually works.

The other, more reasonable thing I've done has been more cooking at home. No more getting fast food, because it's no longer fast, or cheap. A really interesting side effect of this is my wife and I losing weight, me not needing to medicate myself to sleep anymore, a drastic reduction in antacid/tums intake, and a stark reduction in the amount of junk food I crave. I used to want a soda all the time, now it's water or maybe tea. I was originally tired of the way the prices kept going up, amd just tried to cook for myself, and I started looking up recipies... now I have a collection of recipies that I might turn into a family cookbook, and I'm adding to it all the time.

I like to buy things that save money in the long run. Cooking, biking, cheap Steam games over expensive console games. I offer VPN or other subscriptions to family if I can.

Having cheap hobbies

And that's it for hobbies really, though I do have a few more those are really the ones I typically orbit the most.

Also cooking as much as possible vs eating out. I still eat out once a month with my friends but I cook almost every other meal I eat. Some are frozen (I'm not perfect) but even then it's cheaper than picking up takeout.

And not drinking alcohol anymore. I couldn't believe how much I was spending on alcohol until I quit drinking. Though I avoided drinking at bars (holy shit it's expensive) those bottles weren't cheap.

Brewing my own tea and coffee also saves a lot of money. It blows my mind how much some people I know spend on coffee simply because they don't brew it themselves.

Maintaining my car rather than upgrading it every 5-7 years. Also doing what I can myself (or with friends) rather than going to a mechanic. My car was made in 2007, I plan to drive it until I can't fix it anymore. Then I get another used car to maintain as well.

There's a lot really but that's just a brief... (looks up) briefish list

Get a bicycle and use that for as much of your transportation needs as is possible.

If you can avoid owning a car by this method, you save a lot of money on car payments (or invested capital)/insurance/maintenance/fuel. Even if it doesn't allow you to ditch a car, you'll spend less on fuel.

If it replaces public transportation trips, then you save a bit on those.

Finally, the health benefits of extra exercise are going to pay huge dividends that are hard to measure but significant nonetheless.

Cutting down on alcohol. Due to Australian tax, it's actually pretty expensive (except cheap wine). Beers at lunch add up.

Pirating media

Buying a large set of 500 mL plastic takeaway boxes with lids (Chinese takeout boxes). They're more useful than just poverty Tupperware, you can use them for storing lots of things, as small mixing bowls, etc.

Buying spices in bulk. There's a store here where you bring your own jars and stuff, all the cumin is loose and you just pay for product weight (which is way cheaper than mainstream supermarkets).

Asian grocers. Everything is generally cheaper, and they sell these large jars of minced garlic with big chunks of garlic (rather than the puree from woolworths).

Generally, the more interesting yet low effort you can make your cooking, the less you'll feel the need to eat out or splurge on "reward" meals. Asian food can be very good for that (east asian, south asian, middle east), and you'll impress your white friends.

Canned and frozen versions of vegetables, instead of fresh. If you're making a stew or curry, it doesn't really matter. Also, frozen broccoli is more floret (the tree bits you pretend to be a dinosaur at) by weight.

Just steal stuff. Do it irregularly, and always be a polite smiling face to service staff. Bring your own bags and hide your stolen produce under the bags. Leave the bags in the trolley and fill up stuff you buy on top of them.

Service what debts you can.

Really, the biggest costs tend to be emergency vehicle servicing, hospitalisations, and rent. Any way to reduce those (sharehousing, having friends that can do those sorts of work, spreading the work out amongst the community) will go way further than a lot of things I've just listed. Community is hard to find though

Make a weekly menu, pin it on the fridge and stick to it. Then buy only the ingredients needed.

The key of success is to be lucid and plan 1 or 2 lazy day, with pizzas or whatever, dishes that don't need any effort to make.

You'll save a ton in groceries, and will waste almost nothing. Bonus point : you can generate the menus with an AI.

I’m single and childfree. Saves a shitload of money.

I have 1% of my check go into an account that isn’t connected to a card, or connected to my main savings and checking. I have to go to the bank if I need it. With me being a bit lazy, money adds up over long periods of time

Foraging. I've just started getting into it more. So far I have been loving pine needle tea - high in vitamin C which can replace the need for expensive fruit from the grocery store.

I made sumac "iced tea" which was excellent and also nutritious.

Looking forward to spring to forage dandelions for salad, since the store price is unrealistic for me. Apparently wild greens are more nutritious anyway.

I haven't paid for heating in 2 years. We do have gas heating at home, but we also have a wood stove and a wood lot, so we just use the wood we have.
I also live car-free and asked my boss to give me a cargo e-bike as bonus 4 years ago. I'm lucky enough to live in a city with good public transport and a car-sharing provider. I pay around 200€/year for transportation.
This frees up money for vacations, going to restaurants and buying good quality food in general.

Some things basically come for free when they were used. Washing machine, stoves... Disassembling them to fully clean them takes a day or two, but it's still faster than buying new and chances are good, someone wants to get rid of their high quality stuff near you and will give it away for cheap if you "dispose" it for them.

I’ve got a system going with library cards from various cities I’ve lived. I’ve got the max ebooks on hold on each so I have constant queue of books to read. It’s free and I’m supporting the usage stats for a public service.

We used to bounce around with all the meal delivery services when they were offering good deals. I’d quit one, try another, and soon the first one would have a good “come back to us” discount. That dried up so we just use the recipe cards and buy the ingredients ourselves. Saves some of the cognitive labor of hunting down recipes every week and we can cook in larger amounts to have leftovers throughout the week. I don’t know how some of you skip meals regularly, I’d be a mess.

Replacing your landline with a an obitalk box, which let's you use google voice with a normal landline phone and answering machine, making your landline totally free as long as you have internet! :D

Learn to buy in bulk when it makes sense and learn to cook. You don’t need to eat rice and ramen (tho I do love me some…). Turkeys around Tgiving in the us are stupid cheap, pork butts smoke easily (you can even cheat and do them in a standard oven), and cheap beef makes great stew for less than $1/meal. Fish can be affordable too, if that’s your thing. It’s mostly about building a modest cabinet of spices and learning to turn simple foods into restaurant-level results. You’ll learn to prefer eating in because it’s literally better than paying someone else 5x as much for (honestly) mediocre food.

I also plan ahead (like 8-12 months) and I take vacations based on what’s cheap and always travel off-peak. I traveled around the world for three weeks last year - Tokyo, Bangkok, Copenhagen, Prague, and Iceland - for $5k, including two flight segments in first class. Took my family of 3 to Lisbon, Dublin, and all over UK (Cardiff to Aberdeen) for two weeks this year for about the same total. And that was without using any CC points (which I do game from time to time, but I loathe manufactured spending). Neither of those are “cheap” trips, true, but I have friends who don’t plan and will complain that it’s “always” $1.5-2k each to fly us-eu.

I save a lot on spending by not having anything to spend

I can save money on transportation by walking, even though I sometimes waste a lot of time.

I have a champion mountain bike, world class, light and funky that I ride around town with, or to work.

It's from 1996 (I think) and it cost me 100€ + 2x50€ for counti pro MTB tyres plus some 260€ four-five years later to renovate it top notch (gears, 2 rims, break stuff). It's good to roll another 15 years with minimal costs.

Vac sealer. Bulk.

I understand, for alot of people living in apartments or room sharing situations this is difficult. But, taking advantage of sales and utilizing a vac sealer can go a long way.

If you don't mind pork, it can be extremely budget friendly and is a good source of protein. Here in Canada it can sometimes get to $2 or under a pound for pork chops or shoulder. Same with whole chickens or dark meat cuts.

When this happens. I often buy $30-60+ worth, take it home, portion it to family meal size and vac seal/date/label it.

After doing this for a while, even with beef products. My chest freezer slowly fills up and eventually, we get to the point where we don't buy much meat during our weekly grocery visit, unless of course, I see a really good meat deal.

In addition, learning to process and prepare you're own meat products like sausage, burgers, raviolis, meat balls, jerky can also go a very long way. My family doesn't buy any frozen processed crap meat products. We do everything from scratch, and it's soooo much better. Last year I bought pork shoulders only on sale and kept them in the freezer. I would only buy under $2 a pound. I ended up making around 50 pounds of sausage (Italian and brats) that sausage lasted us almost 10 months.

Tofu and lentils are so much cheaper than meat.

Diy'ing things too. If you ever need a new tool or household item or have to fix something you're almost certainly not the first, so searching up DIY _ or How to Fix _ will almost always pull up a handy guide. I've saved thousands at this point

I’m working a job at a low salary to force myself to develop frugal habits.

Last time I made a lot of money my life went to shit AND I didn’t save any of it.