Here’s a couple examples from my life:
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Safety Razor. I get a better shave and it’s like $15 for 100 razor blades, which lasts me a couple years. Way way way better than the disposable multi-blade Gillette things, which sell 5 heads for $20.
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Handkerchiefs. I am prone to allergies, so instead of constantly buying disposable tissues, we now have a stack of handkerchiefs that can just be used a few times and then thrown in the wash. This has also saved me loads.
What about you?
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Buy from bulk stores and markets instead of bagged supermarket products.
Switch to soap strips instead of liquid detergent for laundry
Cook yourself instead of getting delivery
Use public transport and or bike
Buy local produce and fruits that are in season
Use public transport
This is the biggest cost savings for me right now… Assuming I get a cheap rust bucket paid in full (estimate in metro Vancouver, BC in Canadian $s):
- I’d expect to pay $200 a month in insurance
- I’d expect to pay at least $100 a month in gas
- I’d expect to pay $250 a month in parking fees
- I’d expect to pay at least $500 a year in maintenance, repair and incidental items (oil, winter tire storage etc.)
So all together that’s $591 per month or $7100 per year.
Transit costs me $135/month and I’m lucky to live and work somewhere where transit actually sort of works.
This is particularly true with the multitude or car sharing programs that are available in major cities like Vancouver. The odd time you need a vehicle it is trivial to rent one, which is still cheaper than owning a vehicle.
You don’t even need a car sharing program, rental car companies still exist.
And this is true both for people looking to use public transit, as well as people people afraid to go electric because they take one monster road trip every 2 years, or people considering buying a pickup truck because one time they had to move a couch.
as far as buying bulk, the idea it to look for price per unit, and with this you have to take at least a medium (month) or long (annual) look at the pricing. This is your typical restaurant budget strategy.
And this assumes you have storage space, which not everyone has.
my dumbass read
Cook yourself
I love the principle of buying from bulk store but after a non-zero number of weevil infestations I tread carefully. Could just be bad luck though.
I feel like those pop-top plastic barrels would prevent weevils?
Perhaps. We probably could have sealed things better in jars, but it sure was a big and disconcerting mess.
Switch to soap strips instead of liquid detergent for laundry
What is this wizardry you speak of? [begins Google session]
Wear a condom
Yes, kids are very expensive.
condoms contribute to landfill. babies left in the woods do not.
/s/hjBabies left in woods grow up to kill and eat horny teens in festive seasons, disrupting the local economy.
not to be all social darwanist, but i think if a baby can survive on its own in the woods, it deserves to grow up to be a horny teenager
It is hunting and killing the horny teens in a horror film-like fashion.
I know how to fix almost anything mechanical and I usually try to buy really high quality things when I can. It means spending more money up front, but things tend to last a lifetime and I don’t have to buy it again.
An interesting realization was that “saving money” and “reducing waste” are often competing optimums. I live in the developing world where there people waste a lifetime sitting at home doing nothing to save money. I am one of two or three people in my neighborhood with a job – the rest “save tons more money than I do” but don’t have jobs so their real income after inflation is negative.
Anyway, I figure out what my time is worth (based on what I estimate I could earn by grabbing extra contract work). Then I don’t spend my time saving money unless it saves something at least comparable to my hourly rate, or it’s in a context where working would be impossible, or there’s a nontangible element (e.g. repairing a thing I like a lot).
I prioritize not wasting my time first (it’s the only resource I can’t buy more of), and spend most of my spare effort finding ways to make more money (I regularly cram-study 2-3 hours per day for this purpose, usually tech). Then with the extra money I make, I can save 80% of my income on a good month.
When I started this habit, I made about 135 USD per month and had zero savings. Even if I saved 100% of my earnings, it still amounts to essentially nothing – so it became obvious that the best way to save more money, was to earn more money. When I had a little money, I didn’t put it in the bank – I invested it in myself by buying tools to learn more things and provide more services to accelerate my gains.
Anyway it’s not the right advice for everyone, I’m just another fool like the rest of us, but I hope it’s maybe useful to someone out there.
This comment generally only applies if you are earlier in your career or don’t have much to spend (earning will result in more money than saving). If you’re already making a middle to above average income, you’re likely better off reducing spending and increasing investments — 99.99% of rich people (including the minority born poor) don’t get rich through their labor (wage); they get rich through assets, whether through owning and building a business, or buying and holding shares in them.
I agree to a large extent! There are some interesting caveats though (mainly that I’m not in the USA). Six years ago I had a Vietnamese company license and 0$. I’m only very recently anything like “middle class” so I don’t have much experience with it.
The company license was key (as you say), but not due to growing it as an asset – it was more accurately an instrument to extract remuneration based on the value I deliver, instead of just the amount of time I spend. It also gave me control of how I spend my time. That meant that early on, I could only tackle low-value work and times were tough… but eventually I could solve more expensive problems and demand far more than I could as an employee. Selling solutions as a contractor (especially to foreign companies) made a ton more money than selling my labor as an employee.
In other words, my company is not worth much money as an asset, because without me, it’s non-functional. I also work with a lot of foreign VCs and am convinced that private equity inflates valuations pre-IPO by enough that there’s a lot less upside to capture than there used to be. Gone are the days when a private investor could buy e.g. Microsoft shares and see a 30x upside. Also, I’m in Vietnam – we do have a functional stock market, but the volume is much lower and stock ownership less attractive overall. Anyway, overall it would be hard to sell my company.
So there is a decent argument that my optimal path really is though labor – but definitely not through “wages”. Working for wages was always a mess where I only got paid half the time, and had to work all the time. Also it means my visa status depends on my employer, which has always lead to flagrant abuse. With my own company, I get more stable visa status.
I’ve also been offered equity for my work. However, I have said no 100% of the time and this has never been a mistake so far. One day maybe, but equity is a weirder prospect here than in the USA.
So I focus on selling the solutions to the most expensive problems I can solve. That’s put me on track to a home + modest retirement for my wife and I. That’s “enough money” for me and I will likely go back to academia and volunteer work ASAP. I have no desire for millions of dollars – even if I can maybe see a possible path to it.
I wish you and your family the best in that endeavour.
Can I ask what job/s you did starting off?
Ah, I was foolish enough to do web development in the developing world. It seemed like a good idea at the time – as the economy grew, I reasoned businesses would need websites – so I started a company to do this. In truth, it was really hard to bring client expectations in line with reality, most businesses were rent-seekers and did not want to invest even a small amount in their future, and I had stiff competition from undocumented migrant workers from the West that did not have any overhead. I barely scraped by at the time, and now platforms like Wix / Facebook / Grab / Lazada capture nearly all of that market anyhow.
Those were the early days of running my company. Later, I got into prototyping, which was a vertically-integrated margin business instead of a horizontal volume one (the former is much easier to run in Asia!). There is very little competition in my niche, but pivoting was brutally hard due to my low income at the time. I also got into writing about the things I was working on, which helped pay the bills. In many ways, my time spent here is an experiment in reflecting on some of the lessons I’ve learned.
Before that, I managed a branch of an Australian advertising company. That was my first job in Vietnam. I replaced seven or eight people. I received my salary less than half the time – but what can you do when your visa depends on your employer? Those years were quite bad too.
Prior to immigrating, I worked in medical research, and before that I was a scientist. Those years were pretty easy (even if they did not seem so at the time), but also around then I became acutely aware that I had no future in my home country. Looking back, I’m grateful for that – I had no right to see that far ahead, or with such clarity. It was pure luck that I had all the right ideas in my mind at the same time.
Did you have to do a lot of study to acquire those positions?
Medical research and science? Yeah. 3 years undergrad and 2 grad school, at a research university. One year between them, where I taught myself advanced statistics, experimental design, and Linux system administration. Undergrad was just a blur of studying and exams, but after that it was a bit better.
Long story short, medical research is a surprisingly complicated way to be poor. Salaries are way lower than I thought. I could have earned more money just working in retail, and the hours were worse (e.g. the clinic was always open during a clinical trial).
I also co-founded a tool sharing nonprofit and taught myself electronic engineering and some software, starting in grad school but continuing until I emigrated. After I got here, I just sort of took the first job I could get, so no initial studying for that one. I started studying software engineering more seriously starting around then.
I study around 2-3 hours per day.
This comment did not go where I thought it was going but very interesting. You’re clearly making the right call for your personal finances.
I assumed you were going to say something about like expensive composting equipment or aluminum straws.
Haha oh goodness no. Things I actually bought to save money (when I could afford to) were an efficient A/C unit with an inverter (better sleep = faster learning = more money), and a new motorcycle. Not having reliable transit was costing me a lot of money in wasted time so that was a big one to fix. It’s more fuel-efficient too, I use 2-2.5L of petrol a week. I also moved somewhere safer, where the building hadn’t literally collapsed on me before.
Poverty is complicated, there’s no simple way out of it, and the people who say there is… have generally never really been poor (although some have, there are few universal truths here). Saving money is rarely a useful solution – it’s more important to bootstrap yourself to better opportunities, which is really hard without any financial security. The way to do this is super specific to the exact circumstances – and there’s probably not always a way out. If you have money, of course you can afford to take time to study a new skill and so on. If you don’t, perhaps you’ll pay for it with a part of yourself that you’re not going to get back.
Saving money is not entirely useless, it’s a really effective strategy if you already have made some money, and are about to have a sharp reduction in income. It lets you protect your gains better than other people with wealth, so you inch ahead of them every time the market corrects (you don’t have to invest to be affected). The inverse strategy (look for ways to spend) you have to do earlier, to inch ahead again. Your timing has to be better than the market, and it has more information than you, because you don’t have the money or connections to have better information. So again, you’re going to have to pay in the currencies of the desperate – cut out those kinder parts of your mind that betray you to mediocre financial decisions. Then you can perhaps (very slowly) convert modest sums of money into more life-changing sums of money, and eventually land ownership.
Health is a problem too. It’s hard to cram-study engineering if you’re busy dying of cholera. Not my fondest memory, but perhaps an instructive one. I learned that I don’t fear death, only failure.
I guess escaping poverty wasn’t some glorious victory I feel proud of. It was more accurately a series of sad, Faustian bargains. Where at each step, you can end up receiving nothing. Even the devils of our fictions are kinder than the market, and less hungry.
Buy and use whole chickens instead of buying chicken pieces. They’re not difficult to break down yourself, a youtube tutorial is all you need.
Then keep the bones and stuff that would normally be considered waste. Put them into sturdy ziplock bags and freeze until you have a few of them. Then take them out and use them to make a chicken stock that can be the base of a soup or stew.
Add to that, onion butts, potato peels, corn cobs, tough mushroom stems, etc. All great for stock.
Not really a money saver, but I’ve been buying shampoo and conditioner bars. They often come in cardboard or paper wrapping instead of plastic containers like regular shampoo and conditioners. I enjoy the reduced plastic waste, and they don’t take up as much space in the shower.
And you can also take them with you on airplanes
Adding some more
- Reusable canvas bags when shopping
- Compost (all cardboard in the US is compostable btw)
- Buy directly from farmers. I bought half a cow and a whole pig a year ago and it’s lasted me this long. I wanted to see how much money I saved off market price of the cuts and it was around $2000
- Reusable storage containers and bags for leftovers. I have silicon ziplock bags and glass containers. Works amazing.
- Plastic wrap can be replaced with beeswax wrap (reusable) or basic cloths and works really well too
- Bar soap is better for the environment too
Im pretty certain since cardboard has plastic on the outer layer for graphics
Yeah peel off plastic the rest is compostable even the ink used on cardboard
Aleppo soaps are great. We buy like 5 bars. Lasts us about a year or more. Better than normal/modern soaps. Ancient wisdom makes these soaps.
- Reusable canvas bags when shopping
I’m sorry to be that guy, but this most likely will be worse for the environment.
Reusable bags are alot more poluting than plastic bags, because the manufacturing process can use up to 100x the energy.
What you SHOULD buy as a reusable is a higher quality plastic bag that is made from reusable plastic.
This sounds wrong I know.
I will also be that guy and say mine have already reached carbon neutral. I’ve had them for 4 years now and probably close to 1000 trips and have saved thousands if not more plastic bags in that time already. They have no rips or tears and I expect them to last another 10 to 15 years. I don’t think reusable plastic would get that sort of shelf life unless you rarely use them.
You are probably right if you can get that many trips out of it. And I was also only focusing on the environment and not the money saved, which is also wrong of me taking OPs question into account.
My thermostat has a setting which allows for a greater temperature swing. I have it set at 2*. With the temperature set at 68f the heat refill not come on until the temperature reaches 66f. This causes the heat to run longer but less frequently, which is more efficient than running in short bursts. I also have a setting which runs the fan for a few minutes after the heat stops which scavenges the remaining heated air out of the air ducts.
I also open up my eastern/southern facing drapes/blinds in the morning to allow the sun to heat up the house through the windows for some free heat throughout the day.
Probably doesn’t apply to >90% of people here, but if you ever get to build your own house, build it so the longer side faces south, and the shorter side west (in the northern hemisphere). Then you get more midday sun in the winter when the sun is further south, and less evening sun in the summer.
Removing the window screens in the winter helps a lot too.
If you have a dishwasher, do NOT rinse things before putting them in. Just scrape off the bits into the bin. A big part of the efficiency of a dishwasher comes from not running more water or the water heater unnecessarily. If you rinse you might as well hand wash.
Also, use the cheap powder and make sure to use it in the prewash phase.
Good tech connections video: https://youtu.be/_rBO8neWw04
If you have space to store stuff buy bulk in things that don’t expire.
Make your own cleaners for some things. Vinegar, dawn soap, and rubbing alcohol are the base for most.
Boardwalk laundry detergent has been a great cost saver. You have to buy 40 lbs at a time, but it works great. We typically use half the recommended amount since it’s made for larger washers.
Watch for commercial products as sometimes this is the way to go for simple items that need to be durable.
I think I’ll be looking into Boardwalk. I haven’t heard of that before. How long does that 40lb detergent bucket last you?
About 6 months. It even seems to be working for the sensitive skin person in the house.
To continue your first point buying a decent shaving puck and brush goes a lot further than buying shaving cream. Plus, I find it much more soothing on my face than the cream. A decent shaving soap is ~$5 and lasts a month at least.
You can also buy bar body wash instead of liquid, which is far cheaper as well.
Plants / gardening.
You get free food while reducing waste in its purest form. I have alot of indoor plants giving me seasoning, fruits and vegetables that are also pretty plants and great for the indoor environment.
I also use a double edge safety razor, but have an electric razor also for a quick morning shave. Other things I do:
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I cut my hair with clippers I bought 15+ years ago for the price of 1-2 haircuts. This probably only works for people with simple, short hair, but has saved me thousands of dollars compared to getting a monthly haircut at $20+
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We put a basket with cloth napkins next to the dining table and a basket with washcloths on the kitchen counter and have drastically reduced the quantity of paper towels that we use
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If you don’t own it, don’t pay for it. That’s one of my main principles and the motivation why I don’t pay for streaming services anymore. I also noticed that I wasn’t enjoying music and movies as much anymore anyway when it was in such high quantities. That’s just about saving money.
Other one is, I don’t buy anything of which i know of that it won’t work or keep much of its value anymore after several years. So I rarely buy anything with irreplaceable batteries, that basically ends up on the junk pile after 3 years.
We also save all of our egg cartons and donate them to the elementary schools. Teachers love using them to help students learn math, especially fractions. They’re also useful for arts and crafts. Check with the school office before dropping them off, but I’ve never had the schools be anything less than enthused to have these.
