What's the most extreme example of effort to save a few pennies you have heard of?

[wineoclockthanks]

Lighthearted!!

Mine is someone who buys shirts/t-shirts and asks for the hangers, then returns the clothes minus the hangers.

I did mention that Wilkos sell 10 wire hangers for £1.75 but she was adamant it was worth it.

Please can I stress this is lighthearted, I am also on a tight budget and count my pennies so not judging at all.

DF was a war baby and notorious for scrimpimg. He'd save old screws, nuts, and bolts in jars, save the ends of soap, recycle unfranked stamps, use bathtowels until they were virtually see through etc. Drove DM potty. She said he had "short arms and long pockets" . DF bought her a Valentine card the day after I was born and "recycled" it as a standing joke every year for decades. He only bought her a new valentines card when he was gravely ill.
Got something in my eye when i found the original card wrapped in tissue when clearing their house.

Doesn't worry me in the slightest if anyone sees me break of the stem from the broccoli why should it? I don't but bruised apples or squashed oranges I choose the ones I want....so what's different with the broccoli? I also don't dig it with nails a swift snap and it's done

And who's going buy just a stalk?

The weight of the stalks is factored into the price. The more people who break off the stalk, and only pay for the floret, the more the price will need to increase.

You are not frugal or clever; you are a thief.

littleredpears
Soooooo funny

I don't think there's anything wrong with saving money.
People always think I'm a bit crazy with my money saving. When we were saving up for our house I worked at an office located near a shopping mall. I'd walk through the trolley parks after work on the way home and pick up all the old reciepts and claim the price match discount on them, pick up any change on the floor and collect the priority moment offer. With these, coupons and try me free offers I didn't have to pay any cash for food for over 8 months, I actually ended up with £60 profit. I have loosened the purse strings a bit more now we have the house but I still love being frugal, it's become a fun game.

used to live on a border town (Canada/US), so used to cross into US to get cheaper stuff all the time.

the battery on the car of a friend was going out, so he was going across to Walmart on US side to get a new one, plus they install it for free. his car died at the top of the border bridge... so he coasted down the other side to the customs/immigration kiosk, then got a jumpstart. got half a mile down the road, broke down in the middle of the road, where a cop came along and made him get towed to walmart (lots of complaining about the towing charge).

he then went into walmart, where by that time the auto dept was closed and noone to do the free installation. so he asked to borrow tools to do it himself, and was told no. he then said could he buy tools, use them and then return them. he was told no (he could have just bought them and then returned them later - return policies in the US are quite lax).

so... instead of buying a $5 screwdriver or whatever he needed and returning it on his next trip across the border, he slept in his car in the walmart parking lot overnight until the auto dept reopened, just to get
the free installation.

Friends grandad used to make tea from the water he had just done his boiled egg in 🤢

To those commenting on not using a fridge in winter my scottish GPIL only got a fridge in the 80s.

Brother who never buys toilet roll & takes McDonald's napkins home!!! He likes to come round & ask for one carrot or an onion!!! I once bought a mop in 90s for about £1.50 my friend reminded me how she couldn't get over seeing me with said mop, returning it to the supermarket as I'd seen another one for £1.25. (We were poor growing up!!)

I cut my Brillo pads in half.

Some ideas on this thread are brilliant , some plain bonkers

A TA I worked with used to store stuff I'd intended to throw away from the classroom as it was really old stuff from decades ago in pieces and unusable etc . In her living room.

I've done/do lots of things on this thread but not any of the bonkers ones.

PIL only use their oven at Christmas. House is always cold and dark. DH is the complete opposite though, to the other extreme!

One thing I've been doing for years that isn't mentioned is turning off the cooker before food is fully cooked. It will finish cooking in the heat of the pot. My pots are all heavy bottomed ones though.

I do have a bit of a "waste not want not" mentality and reuse tea bags if it's just for me, try to save water and drive economically more for ecological reasons. However I will not tolerate cheap loo roll, pay a gardener and pay extra for prechopped veg. My time is valuable too.

I think some of these examples must have very poor mental health or have had very skint childhoods.

Whenever my brother visits, he only ever brings things with reduced stickers on them! Instead of a bottle of wine, he'll bring a bag of pears reduced to 10p with some kind of half-arsed story of why he thought of you when he saw them, or something else equally unlikely that you know you will never be able to use before it rots. I don't know how he doesn't die of shame, because he is very comfortably off and he does this to friends he visits too!

I always keep gift bags and bottle bags and reuse. Daft to throw them away. We are a scattered family and do a meet up and present swop in December - presents usually in Christmas carrier bags which are recycled over and over. I've had some of my bags back more than once.

When I was a kid we always saved wrapping paper, ironed it if necessary! I used to love getting it out again every Christmas. It even smelt Christmassy somehow.

Some years ago I worked in payroll. A young lad started work who had been on the dole and was struggling because he had to wait four weeks to be paid. He was supposed to be paid just before the August bank holiday, but for some reason his pay didn’t go into his bank. He came into the department desperate as he literally had no money for food or for getting to work.

The overall boss refused to give him an advance as “he should be better at managing his money.”

A couple of months later, same boss had a huge tantrum because his expenses hadn’t been paid and insisted on a manual payroll variation rather than waiting for the next payday. I processed it, thinking he must be missing a substantial amount. It was for just under £10. This was a man who earned ten times what that young man did. I’ve never forgotten that meanness.

A friend of my Mum’s takes an empty litre bottle of Jack Daniel’s when she goes to an all inclusive holiday in Spain. Every time she is going back to her room she gets one and then fills up the empty bottle and bring it home.
Some of these things are penny pinching, but some seem more environment based.

I reuse gift bags. Not because of saving money, because of the environment. When they become tatty course they get thrown.
Using the water for plants and switching off your TV sockets etc is great for the environment.
Some of these things are stingy and madness!

I love this thread.

Dear (deceased) Grandad used to recycle Christmas cards - he cut it down the crease, kept the written on bit, and send the front with a message hand written on the back of it, in one of the envelopes he had saved from junk mail received during the year. He and my gran reused teabags. Definitely a hangover from the Emergency (Ireland) as they were both born early 20th century.

Oh just remembered he never threw out paint - just mixed all the ends of tins together till he had enough to paint a room. The sitting room was the colour of ointment...

My DM and I had a recycled gift bag - it was a running joke but went back and forth between us for about 5 Christmases, saved us both a good bit of wrapping paper. I think one of us eventually wrote on the little gift tag on the handle which broke the cycle.

A know a lovely family who are very environmentally conscious.
When they have finished any medication - tablets that are in strips - they spend ages scraping all foil from the plastic, to enable more thorough recycling. Complete lunacy, as it all goes into the same recycling container.

My lovely Dad is an exceptional money saver. Always goes to the supermarket at optimum 'eat today, or die' clearance time. He then proceeds to purchase any old shit that is heavily reduced.
He can get a full trolley load for under a tenner. He then proceeds to give away any items that DM and himself would not use, because he can't leave a mega bargain!

Notable incident was 'the asparagus situation'. DD notes that the asparagus was on BOGOF. Each pack was originally £1.99. All packs were reduced to 10p.
This was back when supermarkets were not clever enough with managing reductions on multi buy offers.

He filled the trolley with every pack. There were dozens! He then added other reduced items, calculating the cost, until it exceeded the overall value of half of the asparagus packs, at original cost.

The lady on the till paid no attention to the till readings: 2 asparagus @ 10p =20p - minus £1.99! She rang it all through, and his total shop came to about £3!!
He did things like this often. Nobody corrected it for YEARS. Rarely was it so effective though.

On his way home, he posted packs of asparagus through every letterbox en-route! He saved 10 for me, and kept about 15!!!
I will always wonder WTF people thought when they found asparagus on their doormats!!

Im considering buying one day travel insurance from a certain site to get a free cinema ticket for star wars...

I quite often buy packs of reduced meat and stick them in the freezer. I used to work PT at Asda, and one Sunday they had a trolley-load of packs of grated parmesan at 10p each (last day of expiry) I bought 20 packs and froze them-they lasted me over a year!