what can you remember your parents doing to save money?

[HoraceCope]

we had to clean the bath with cold water
my dm would reuse foil

having to take sticks home from our walk for the fire

I thought everyone did the two half-pair of tights thing. I certainly did for work, but I know my limits and wouldn't do it on nights out nor dates.

I can remember asking my mum to quit smoking so we could go to Disneyland.

She didn’t.

ooh yes green shield stamps
my dh mother had coupons from the cigarette packets and bought all sorts for her grandchildren

Sharing bath water. Being frugal with the heating - some rooms were not heated for most of the day. My parents were obsessed with turning lights off and keeping doors closed. My mum wouldn't and still will not pay to park anywhere, if she can do anything to avoid it. Not using the phone until the cheap rate.

Remember my mum buying clothes from a catalogue on credit. She got me trousers two sizes too big and said its OK we can roll the legs up. Now I know it was just because we couldn't afford them but needed them to last longer as well.

It's why money in the bank is so anathema to me, I feel like I should be using it for something.

@taxguru Are you my sister?😆

Opening Christmas and birthday presents very carefully so that the wrapping paper could be saved for another year.

Cutting the Christmas cards up in January with pinking scissors to make the next years gift tags.
DF was a dab hand at DIY so his garage was full of "nice bits of wood" which would come in useful.

DM had an allotment and also interspersed the flower beds in the back garden with runner bean plants etc.

Yes to all the above.

The mince would get bulked out with oats and dumplings added. Stewed fruit or baked apples for pudding.

There was very tight control over toilet roll 🤣

A lot of hand me downs and hems let down.

Everything cut open to get the last scraps ie toothpaste.

My parents had good jobs but were young so only starting out in life. I remember they bought their first house when I was 5. We were sitting on deck chairs and had no carpets for a few months. I had to sleep in my old cot for a few weeks until I got a bed.

My mother used to knit a lot of our jumpers and made some of my clothes. Teabags were reused multiple times, tinfoil, wrapping paper, string were all reused. One other thing I remember is being told to only use 2 squares of toilet paper each time. Radiators upstairs had to be turned off every morning, towels were rolled up to put down as draught excluders, and the number 1 thing in 80s Ireland, making sure the immersion was turned off!

Grew up working class in the 60/early 70s so there was no heating other than one gas fire. No washing machine either or car. I don’t think my parents saved money as such they just had to do the best they could with the little they had.

We only ate meat once or twice a week. Many of our meals were vegetarian which was unusual during the 1960s. I didn’t realise how meat based most people’s diets were until I went to secondary school!

TWO SQUARES OF TOILET PAPER

I'm still haunted by this, we never run out

yes to cut off the tooth paste
rinse out the washing liquid bottle
only put the immersion heater on just before a bath!
i think there would be a fate worse than death if the Immersion heater was kept on!

We walked everywhere and I don’t really remember drinks and snacks unless we were out somewhere and we had a picnic.

These days children can’t go park without drinks and snacks.

Water Butts for garden. Dish water saved for watering lawn. Back then it was water shortages rather than money.

Chickens and veg and rhubarb. Everyone had something. My nans roast was mostly from the garden including the handpicked mince for sauce. Decent garden back then even though it was council house.

Huge sacks of potatoes - cooked a million different ways.

You went to the butchers and bought what you actually needed and weren’t seduced by super markets. The closest you came to seduction was the travelling meat wagon down the market. Always drew a crowd.

We weren't poor, nor rich. Just normal I think.

I remember sharing bath water. Second hand clothes, cars, furniture - everything in fact was from a carboot or Loot. Lots of leftovers meals. Jumpers instead of heating. Veg co-op. Meat co-op. Gathering firewood sometimes. Uniform was always MASSIVE on the first day of school. Practically sailed to school in a high wind. 😂

Honestly I do most of it now, except the bath water. And instead of Loot it's eBay or Facebook Marketplace. I can't see the point in wasting money.

I don’t think we were particularly poor except during the recession but my mum was a resourceful cook. We may have not had things during that period but it didn’t feel odd as we weren’t frivolous anyway.

I still do some of this, I can't help myself.

Rinse out and cut up everything.

Reuse packaging and string.

I stretch out washing powder with soda crystals and fabric conditioner with distilled vinegar.

'air freshener is a sign of a dirty house' echoes round my head 😂 (and costs money)

A lot of it I just simply agree with though. Why not use the last scraps of what you've bought? And too much detergent is bad for the machine. And pegging out washing is fun! Why buy packaging when so much of it comes through the letterbox every day.

I really wish I could make clothes and curtains and cushions. But I know it would cost a fortune and look shit.

I will never run out of toilet roll though. Or share bath water.

We grew a lot of our food - curly kale, purple sprouting broccoli, beetroot, radishes, tomatoes, carrots, raspberries and loganberries. We had a small orchard, and the apples were wrapped and used for desserts throughout the winter. We used to bottle a lot of soft fruit and make jam. We also made bean sprouts and kefir - this was in the 1970s.

We also had no roof, but a tarpaulin over the back of the house for quite a while as my Dad ran out of money for the renovations. Also had to flush the loo with a bucket.

Clothes were all hand me downs from cousins, or made at home with bits of fabric passed on by my great gran who owned a tailoring business.

Oh yes the stone of tatties kept in the porch! Mum said it gave her security knowing there could always be egg and chips or tattie soup at the end of the month.

And she always boiled the chicken carcass for soup 🤢 I refused that and called it cadaver soup.

Passing clothes from cousin to cousin, and siblings. Many of them must have been worn by up to 5 children.

Mum's knickers being reused as dusters.

The only room that was heated was the living room.

Clothes were made (fabric from the market) or jumble sales/ passed down from mums friends
They had a side hustle of growing bedding plants/ doing hanging baskets/ wallflowers in the winter. Dad had an agreement to pick up the wooden boxes from the local supermarkets for this and therefore could pick through the bins. I grew up thinking it was totally normal to eat thrown out food and we loved Saturdays (before Sunday opening) as the cake counter would be cleared into one big bag and though squashed you could have your pick of cake.
Rural black economy - we ate a lot of rabbit/ pheasant/ pigeon that turned up on the woodpile mysteriously. Dad would do favours for other people which these were payment for. Also see 'not having your fruit weighed properly at the pick your own'
Things like doing some beating at a shoot for the free food and as many pheasants as you could carry
Driving a series of total rust bucket vans which had been used at British Leyland for internal parts movements for thousands of miles, but only within the factory and basically dissolved as soon as they saw the outside. Usually had a piece of plywood in the footwell on each side to cover the hole through the floorpan
Growing/ raising as much of their own food as possible - we drank goats milk (male goats sold as meat sort of legally or swapped for other things), made butter/cream/yogurt, did lamb, baby beef, pork on excess milk and the original babies were swaps with others or bought very cheaply at market, foraged blackberries/apples/mushrooms/plums, our own hens for eggs. Sounds idyllic, but an awful lot of eating marrow as it was very seasonally based.
My dad basically hustled all his life really

All my clothes were bought bigger and taken up.

I was quite fat in the Reception class, but lost the weight later.

Mum bought me a large pinafore dress and took up the hem. In S1/Y8 I was still wearing it - the pinafore had been removed, the hem had been let down and a small hole darned (hidden by the pleats).