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!

Oh god family cloth for bum wiping is the most disgusting thing I've ever heard of.

@Woop, I honestly don’t think anyone would notice the red lentils I add to anything mince based, e.g. shepherd’s pie or spag bol sauce. They break up, and what with all the other ingredients (I add finely chopped veg too) any lentil flavour is swallowed up, so to speak.

Without a doubt, especially at the start, growing your own fruit and vegetables is more expensive than buying them.

It starts to get more economic further down the line as you start to build up your own tools, compost etc. This requires space to store these things.

We are fortunate to be in an area where allotments are available. We have the space to get horse manure delivered by the ton and store it until it rots down. We have year on year of composted vegetation. I only buy compost for setting seeds. Even then I don't buy seed compost, I buy a general purpose compost and sieve it but I have the space to store everything.

I would never recommend grow your own as a headline money saver.

To save boiling it twice and therefore save electricity

@MrsLargeEmbodied my gran got old jumpers from jumble sales, unpicked them then washed the wool to straighten it I believe then re knitted the most amazing jumpers, often without a pattern. As a child I was often asked by teachers where our jumpers came from.

I didn't realise how much people detested lentils until I joined MN:)

Of course you can wash your hair in the bath! What a weird thing to say. Not all of us have showers.

I came on to say this too! Sainsburys worked out cheaper for us. And the food has better dates.

I recently discovered that trying to get cheaper broadband wasn’t worth it. So many spam emails, issues with direct debits being taken twice, poor customer services and the broadband itself is more glitchy on video calls. I wish I just sacrificed the extra £6 a month and kept a good service 😭

@KangarooKenny Mine is! I don't know what I do to it, either. Possibly because it isn't used often enough in some rooms? We have downstairs loo, kitchen sink, utility sink, 2 en-suites and a family bathroom. En-suite is fine with a bar (though maybe it's because it's a posh one. Every other room does better with liquid.

@apintortwo got a soap dish/mat or three.



I agree. I add them to the same kinds of meals as you and it doesn't make any difference to the flavour.

this one probably won't end well! www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4606930-not-paying-for-childcare-this-autumn-as-bills-go-up

IBS sufferer here, it's not the taste of them I object to, it's the side effects!!

But you aren’t boiling the water twice if you boil as much as you need each time. Every drop of water is boiled once and used.

Bit it would change the texture

But you can't wash your hair in the bath?

How do children get their hair washed when in the bath?

It is if you are buying the chicken anyway and throwing the carcass away? Isn't that the point?

Yes this has definitely been our experience, and the fresh food from Sainsburys is much better quality than the Aldi and Lidl near us.

Interesting to hear about the broadband as we’re thinking of switching when our Sky contract runs out in November 😬

Completely agree with you

Oh my god, this.

My husband drives me nuts with this. Saves money buying the thinnest, shittiest bin bags in the world.

Even if you triple bad something, the bastards still rip.

And they are never tall enough for our bin anyway, so you end up having to take the bin bag out before it’s full.

So wasteful.

I think a lot of people have very different ideas about what 'thrift' actually is.

There are different kinds of money-saving tips. The one about rinsing spaghetti hoops is for people who are being given tinned spaghetti at food banks and are fed up with eating it as it is. It's not a tip for knocking a few pence off the price of your weekly shop. (Personally I still think it's a rubbish tip as there are better ways of changing the flavour of spaghetti hoops than washing them, but the point is that nobody is actually saying it's cheaper than buying dried pasta; they're saying that there are things you can do with it if you have nothing else.)

Similarly the chicken stock thing - that is a tip for people who can afford to by chicken but still want to save a couple of quid here and there because if you save a couple of quid here and there on various things all year round, you can buy a treat with it at the end of the year. It's not aimed at people who are struggling so much that they couldn't afford to roast a chicken in the first place.

I think 'hobby thrift' is fine, if that's what floats your boat - but where it gets annoying is when people start sharing what are clearly hobby-thrift tips as if they're going to be helpful for people for whom thrift is a survival necessity, as often they just aren't applicable.

I tried to grow my own veg.

I moved into a house last year which had two wooden vegetable beds.

I had to get new compost, buy the plants.

I don’t know what I’ve done wrong, but i basically paid almost £100 for five strawberries and and a handful of tomatoes.

Even the lettuce hasn’t grown from the baby plants I put in 8 weeks ago. It still looks the same.

I should have learned my lesson from a few years ago when a bowl of baby potatoes cost me £15 to grow. Could have just bought some in aldi for 50p.

Of course you can wash your hair in the bath And you don't need to faff about standing up and making sure your hair doesn't touch the water, either. Bath water doesn't get THAT grim unless you wait three weeks between them, and the surface tension of the water will make sure dirt doesn't stick to you.

For kettles, boiling half the amount of water twice uses the same amount of electricity as boiling the full amount of water once.

Depends on the light available, PlainJane. My back garden only has intermittent sun, so it's useless for strawberries and tomatoes. Raspberries, rhubarb and currants do ok though, and some herbs.

I also grow certain veg, watercress, salad leaves, spring onions, carrots and beets. That's all though as some shop bought are pretty expensive, go off quickly and some are just tasteless.
Since being on a water meter I also have a watering can that I use to collect the cold water from the sink tap while I'm waiting for it to run hot and transfer to a water butt it's surprising how much you waste down the plug hole.

I only buy fairy a big bottle from home bargains for £2 lasts us for months. My ex always insisted we got the cheapest. We went through a bottle a week but cost more overall.