Which thrifty thing do you do that you're surprised that no one else does?

[Sizeofalentil]

Basically, that

I'm always surprised when people don't bulk buy things (toilet paper, store cupboard staples etc) or only buy name brands. How much tastier can a posh tinned tomato really be?

Dh is mortified when I reuse bath water to water the plants or make my own cleaning cloths from old pants. But he does love a charity shop bargain (most of his coats are from there).

What are your favourite thrifty tips or what thrifty things are you surprised that other people don't do?

Always google for discount codes, free p&p codes, etc.

Refuse to buy “brand” sportswear, eg North Face. My kids do ask but they don’t get. Doesn’t really bother them. They’re easy going.

Always check online reviews before purchases - many reviews suggest a cheaper alternative that’s better quality.

Buy Japanese cars - found this out after years of European car ownership and expensive part replacements. Current car is 15 years old, 160,000 miles and rarely needs replacement parts.

Use Gumtree for buying toys - nearly new bikes, etc so much cheaper.

Primark clearance rail in menswear is full of XS clothing - I’ve bought shirts and trousers for £1 and jackets for £5 and under for my 13 and 14 year old sons!

I will directly email retailer ask for a code
Or leave items in basket,wait til retailer email you with a code

What a useful thread - thanks OP! The things I do that most people I know don't are:

Spend money on exercise, hair & skin care instead of clothes and makeup.
Buy a cheap 2nd hand cross trainer instead of expensive club membership.
Buy fewer but better quality clothes (I mix M&S with The White Company).
Find a decent at home hairdresser (£60 for a trim and full-head colour 4 times a year).
Spend money on decorating your house but buy cheap furniture - it will look way more expensive than the other way around.
Line dry almost everything so rarely use a dryer.
In colder months we put the heating on only until the radiators become hot and then turn it off as the house stays warm for ages.
Planning meals around what’s left in the fridge, larder and freezer saves a lot.
Finally, this seems minor but can really add up: when hand washing, only run the water to wet hands and rinse rather than having it running the whole time.

For the several of you not paying for a tv licence because you have Sky, you most definitely DO need a tv licence.

Brilliant thread OP, thanks! Loads of useful tips here.
I also save all my butter papers, as did/does my mother.
wash silver foil and reuse it.
make stock from chicken carcasses and freeze it (in the slow cooker). We use this as a basis for soup, cook rice/couscous etc in it. Some I boil down to concentrate and freeze in 100ml portions for when you just need a bit.
buy a free range chicken from Aldi, poach it and cut it up for the kids' sandwiches. We get (more) stock (yes well, I may have a bit of a stock problem...) and it does about a week and half of sarnies for 3 kids (2 teens).
buy a basil plant from supermarket, split it up into 4-5 pots. Each one gives you as much basil as the original

I've got a ton of seedlings on the go on various windowsillsgetting bit enough before they are planted outside. They are potted up in a variety of temp pots: takeaway cartons, pringles tubes sawn in half (keeping the lid so I can use both halves as pots), large yoghurt pots, the cardboard tub some instant mash came in, a pepsi bottle from when DS had his mates around with the top cut off, big cardboard tubs that were full of bulk coffee granules and were being thrown away at work. Empty tins. Takeaway coffee cups. (I've got a reusable cup but we were just at a conference where the cups were biodegradable so I saved the empty cups from my friends drinks to bring home.) The list is endless. I haven't bought a seedling pot in years.

...what happened to my punctuation and spelling there?!

Another nice bonus of these pots is because they are essentially rubbish, when you give seedings away, you don't need to get the pot back.

Run the car on used chip oil. Some cars can run on veg oil unmodified; you literally just filter the oil and tip it into the tank. Other cars cost about £1000 to modify.

Only older diesel cars are suitable, but you wouldn't be wanting to buy a new car anyway would you?

Mine runs on gas ⛽️ lpg is under 61p a litre, it was produced as a dual fuel car and so didn’t cost me any extra. Log is easy to get, most Morrison sell it and anyway I can still run on petrol

I make 2 tissues last for 3 days, even in winter:

1. take 2 sheets of strong kitchen roll, and fold at the seam to make a square shape.
2. take 2 tissues and lay them on the kitchen roll.
3. fold over 3cm the tissues at the top, then fold a 2nd time.
4. use the folded 3cm strip, until it gets too wet.
5. then fold 3cm of tissue again, hiding the wet bit.
6. repeat from no.4 until there is no more tissue to fold over.

So now, instead of using 1 tissue per "blow", 10 per day or 70 per week, I now use just 6 tissues per week.
Save a tree, save the world.

Your maths is a bit wonky only a bronchial Dickensian waif uses 70 tissues a week
And they’re probably an extra in Les Mis given their consumptive state
On off chance I am ill No I don’t want to recycle a multiply folded bit of kitchen towel for 3day

I don't think I do anything particularly different, but bulk buying when things are on offer is a speciality of mine. One of my ex lodgers used to comment that I had enough bog roll to keep a small island supplied (he exaggerated).
Some things I only buy when they're on special offer - like stain remover, chocolate (our supermarket always have one or other chocolate on special, I don't understand why anyone would pay full price for them!)

I can't remember if UK supermarkets always do this too but Aussie ones will always give the "price per kg" as well as the actual price, so it makes cost comparison between different sizes of product much easier.

Oh and one thing I do that really saves money is I only get my hair cut once a year at most.

Use cloth hankies.

at tissue geometry

it's a whole other world

Kabia all that 3 day folding,handling of a wet germ infested paper towel isn’t good
You keeping a damp,ambient temperature absorbent germ soaked cloth isnt saving the world
It’s just a beach towel,for germs that you’re habitually handling and folding

We are beyond Viz at this point.

How much tastier can a posh tinned tomato really be?

Not read through thread so apologies if someone else also commented on this bit, but I thought the above until I tried Mutti tinned tomatoes available from Ocado , takes tomato based dishes to another level!

Pinkstripeycat
Boiled chicken bones/carcasses and beef bones = stock or broth, which can be used in multiple other dishes as well as home made soups.

My freezer has multiple containers of stock for home cooking, all flavoured (and enriched) with items I might otherwise throw away like parsley stalks and broccoli stalks, as well as rosemary and thyme that I grow myself, and other herbs. I also have containers of veggie stock made from water I have boiled or steamed broccoli, carrots, green beans, etc., in.

you watch Sky channels live on your TV, you'll need a TV licence for this. ... Even if you're only planning to use Sky Go to catch up on programmes, you'll still need a licence because you can watch BBC and other Freeview content through the service.

I do laugh when the Eat Well for Less brigade swear it’s their usual brand and it turns out to be Aldi. I know I’m a bad person

Funniest example on there that I remember was a couple that had to spend £180 a time on branded champagne for their regular dinner parties and they swapped it for Aldi cava at a fiver a bottle and they unanimously declared it nicer than their usual champagne.

Also on the 'shop well for less' sister programme they could rarely differentiate expensive beauty products and toiletries from supermarket versions at about a tenth of the price, despite initial claims that only clinique or Molton Brown would do.

Gwen why do you avoid Timpsons on principle? I think their initiatives to give ex convicts a second chance by providing jobs and training is an excellent idea. One of the best ways to help people avoid a life of crime is to allow them to earn money legitimately.

I have a large herb pot outside. I never buy herbs from the garden centre but, instead, from the supermarket ( often yellow stickered so cheap). They look and smell amazing and bush up nicely when looked after and then there are always fresh herbs to hand when recipes call for them.

When the DH and I both had well paid jobs we used to buy nice chocolates. However, the price of chocolate has gone through the roof so I have traded down to bars which are much cheaper on a per gram basis. I check the price per 100 grams on the shop shelf edge and go for those on offer. I also wait for bargain periods like after Easter. I bought no eggs before hand but managed to get £60 worth of nice chocolate treats (Green and Blacks and so on) for a tenner afterwards. Ditto Christmas, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s and Halloween.

My DS is very generous and has let me be the extra customer on his Amazon Prime account so I have free, swift delivery on everything and access to Amazon Prime media. He has also added me to his Netflix account so I have that for free too. Some people do not know that you can have multiple users and it all saves a fortune. You do not even have to be at the same address to get the Netflix.

I do not have a phone contract. I pay £6 a month on O2 Pay As You Go and top up minor sums when I exceed my data limits.

I don’t buy clothes or ‘stuff’ now I am retired, I ‘ make do and mend’ as they said in the war. However, if I have to buy something I compare the car parking charges for my shopping town with postage and pick the cheapest.

On the subject of parking, it has become a major outlay now that local authorities have ramped the charges up as a de facto tax. I have changed my shopping town to a less salubrious one and park in Morrisons for free. It is a ten minute walk to the other shops but I make that part of my exercise regime to count Fitbit steps.

I often do not use the car at all and then, when I need to buy something from a shop, will plan several errands together, combined with a walk, to save fuel.

I need to do a herb pot. I tried splitting a supermarket coriander pot after reading about it on here and put it on the kitchen windowsill only for it to wither and aparently die, so I put it just outside the back door, with the intention of sticking in the composter but it is now thriving .

So I just need to get my arse into gear and plant some seeds or split some more supermarket pots or something.

I have posted several time on this thread as money saving ideas I use have occurred to me.

However, what has underpinned my approach to money is two fold. Firstly, my DH and I have a joint account and very similar frugal ideas about life. We like the nice things life offers but we do not want to pay over the odds for them and are continually prudent.

The second thing is crucial. Ever since we have been together (1977) we have had a joint account book and every penny of income and outgoing goes through this book so we always know where we are financially. When we are paid ( pensions now) we put the sum in and then take out a global sum for standing orders and regular bills. We calculate what we will have to pay over the year, divide it by twelve and add it to the standing order sum s, when the bill hits us there is cash there to pay it. We also take out a sum for household bills, the car and a holiday.

The advantage is that we never think we have more money than we have and we have saved for a holiday rather than paid for it on credit. What is left is disposable income and that is ours to save or spend as we decide.

We also had a Chequebook mortgage which calculated our debt daily. When we were paid it took a lot off the mortgage and bonuses and pay rises also reduced the mortgage and, therefore, the interest. We wiped years off the mortgage with this method and £thousands off the interest.

We also had a rule of ‘save the pay rise’. If you can live on a sum of money then it makes sense to save anything extra you get to pay off debt or mortgage rather than splurge it on spurious treats. The feeling of being debt free or of having savings beats any ephemeral possession or treat or holiday. And, of course, if you put pennies away from your budget every month, after a year, you can have the holiday anyway.

They say that the way to lose weight is have a set of scales in your bathroom and use them every day. This book is the financial equivalent of that. You always know where you are.

You can do spreadsheets on line but I use a triple entry book keeping ledger from W.H Smith so it is all there in black and white (or red!).