What thrifty tips do you NOT recommend?

[ArcheryAnnie]

There's been discussion on other threads about some "thrifty tips" which don't seem all that sensible, like rinsing the sauce off spaghetti hoops to reuse the cooked pasta (wastes sauce and calories), or boiling soap to make shower gel (wastes electricity and soap - better just use the soap bar). What other thrifty tips have you either invented or tried, that you would warn other people off?

Here's mine: people have said a pinch of cheap curry powder helps elevate all kinds of dishes, including baked beans, tinned tomatoes, etc, and helps ring the changes in a monotonous diet. Here's what curry powder doesn't elevate, kids: porridge oats. Many, many years ago (pre DS), desperate for something other than plain porridge made with water, which had formed the bulk of our diet all week, we tried currying the porridge with an onion. Now, if I make or buy terrible food, I'll still usually eat it anyway, and just determine not to buy or cook it again. Not so this: oats, curry power and the onion all wasted. Don't ever repeat my mistake!

Tell me about it! A well known brand has the ability to buy the pattern and wool direct from them on line, average price £120 a jumper.

If you don't knit as a hobby, and don't want to wear acrylic don't bother.

Not getting / cancelling pet insurance. Definitely a bad idea!

Nobody buys a chicken in order to make stock. To make stock you need a carcass and boiling water. Anything else is optional. Without knowing a) how long people are assuming you simmer the carcass for and b) the cost of the power needed to simmer it for that amount of time
then it’s not just hard to understand. It’s impossible.

food is the last place you should scrimp on as it will just store up health issues for later.

buy the highest quality with what you can afford. If that means no meat and more potatoes, beans and cabbage then do that for the majority of your meals but eating very cheap sausages that have very little actual meat in them regularly isn’t going to do you any favours.

I’m not sure if you’re agreeing with me or not - my point was that people can’t afford a chicken in the first place never mind the uncertainty of the power used. There’s threads on here where people are sitting in the dark rather than turn lights on to save a couple of pence.

Economising because you want to stretch things further doesn’t invalidate the Jack Munro tips from a bed sit on £40 a week. They are just different sides of the same coin.
I bought 3 frozen chicken carcasses from the butcher to make stock, for £1. It makes everything I add it to more nutritious.
Top useless saving: any fruit in a punnet from Aldi/Lidl as they’ve rotted before you’re home.

This depends on the kettle. Some older kettles and cheap kettles need a larger min amount of water in order to function properly so putting that water in a flask or making a second hot drink up in a travel mug makes sense because you can’t boil less.

with ‘eco kettles’ you can safely boil just what you need and should save energy.

I think the stock option makes sense for everyone that's not on the absolute breadline.

I think it's unfair to compare it to the Asda value stock cubes, a fairer comparison would be to those packs found in the fridge section, which according to Asdas website is £1.60 per 450 grams. Making your own is a massive bargain in comparison.

<hits head off wall>

Hmm…not sure about your maths. I have the chicken carcass already. if I wasn’t boiling it I’d be wasting small fragments of meat left on carcass. If using shop stock cube I’d need to have boiling water anyway so that cost is no different.
I cook my stock in pressure cooker for 10 mins on induction hob. I then leave to cool and it continues to cook for a bit longer when hob is off.
I get about 3L of stock form it that can be basis of soup or stews etc.
amd it taste way better. And it’s not full of the crap UPF stabilisers, ph adjusters and other crap that shop bought stock has.

How big are his lips?

Trying to cook meals for 20p...
I mean I can.. but they're not really tasty, nutritious, filling etc. As a stop gap, fine, as a permanent way of eating? Urgh.
It's not good for morale... In fact, having to make meals for as little as possible is probably the most crushing thing about poverty really.

I don't mind not using heating, being a bit chilly is preferable to me.

I don't care about not having a holidays or expensive days out, a wander to the park is nice in the sunny weather.
I don't even mind that I can't afford a car really.
I could do all that if I had a nice tasty tea to look forward to every day instead of trying the next slop recipe from the manual of cheap slop slinging.

Hmm rinsed hoops and cheese.. yum fucking eee.. 🤢

Switching energy company. Even a few years ago it would be briefly cheaper then they'd put the price up anyway. It never saved much. And some end up being a false economy when you find out their customer service is just appalling.

Also see insurance. Before buying cheap, see how they deal with claims on Trustpilot. All companies are nice when you are giving them money.

The only things I save money on successfully are mostly food-related and probably pretty obvious to most people/what they do anyway:

• Making my own lunch for work and not buying take away coffee
• Planning meals and shopping from a list
• Shopping mostly at Aldi/Lidl (saves around 30%)
• Eating not very much meat- lentils, pulses, rice and beans are very cheap and healthy. Also I often just get the tinned/packet version which are quickly reheated and cheap anyway rather than spend hours boiling things.

Also other obvious things like keeping track of direct debits/regular payments and what they all relate to and whether I need them.

I don't find bulk cooking saves money as it uses a lot of energy to cook in bulk and then I don't have the freezer space. Plus I don't particularly want to serve reheated freezer meals during the week even if I did make it myself. Or spend otherwise free time at the weekend cooking! I just make weekday meals that don't take much to cook and take less than half an hour to put together.

Because you need to cook it again to get the stock, whereas an OXO cube and some boiled water is cheaper.

No. 10 is brilliant. And we always had a double sleeping bag-it's surprising how much warmer you stay.

So technically I make jumpers very cheaply.

I buy a sheep fleece from a farmer for no more than £5 - so i get a well fitted 100% wool jumper for a fiver.

But this is another one of those false economy things, I do it because I love it but its not cheaper because it takes ages to wash, card, spin, dye and knit the thing. And I had to spend several hundred pounds on the equipment to make it.

Same with growing veg. We are 80% self sufficient on veg, 20% of fruit but that will increase soon, and 95% self sufficient on eggs.

Excellent, our food bills at the supermarket at very low indeed, and we seed save and get free manure from farmers so the ongoing costs are fairly low.

But only if you ignore the fact that to buy a house with a big enough garden/piece of land to do this our mortgage is way higher than it needs to be (no allotments round here). So financially we would have been better off to get a cheaper house with lower mortgage payments and spend more money at the supermarket.

Rinsed spaghetti hoops is grim. 500g Dried spaghetti can be bought for <50p and takes about 8 minutes to cook.

Cabbages are currently $20 each here and we are heading into a serious potato shortage as well as enjoying an egg shortage. It's mind buggering to see staples like these so out of reach/unobtainable.

Growing veg I love doing but it is rather a lot of time and effort. Once you factor that in it doesn't make a lot of sense financially, but I just like doing it.

I always get some of the super 6.

groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/Super-6

$20 for a cabbage is boggling. They are still about 50p in the UK.

When we were children, and parents very poor, Mum used to buy jumpers at jumble sales; wash and unravel them and reknit the wool. One of her friends thought we were well off, because my sister and I were always well dressed!

Don't try and use a gousto code which is not applied due to so many oeople using it which then in turn actually costs you £50 and then you have to go through the hassle of cancelling the box and getting a refund

The very worst thrifty tip is buying cheap dog poo bags - the consequences can be dire.........

I'm going to disagree with you, in part.
My Ddog is old and has behavioural issues (so wouldn't tolerate most treatments).
We accepted that if something happened now then it'd be time to say farewell. At which point, why spend £20-30 a month?!
If you want your pet to live longer then yes, it's not a saving.

Public transport. If you have to run a car anyway, then parking and fuel to pop into town isn't much more than catching the bus.

You don't need buckets of water, just a basin of water, a bath mat to catch drips and a few flannels, which probably won't need hot washes unless you are in a real state. If you're washing bits that might be be grimier, you don't need a flannel at all, just cup a handful of water, place towel underneath to catch drips and squoush where necessary.

It actually takes less time than it does to write it down. Would I rather have a shower? Yes. But at times in the winter when our heating hasn't been working it's actually less chilling to have a basin wash than to remove all clothing, wet all your skin, and then shiver in an unheated bathroom when you get out of the shower.

Perhaps bidets would be worth bringing back in. We used to have one and it did have its uses!