What are your tips for saving money and reducing waste?
Here's a couple examples from my life:
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Safety Razor. I get a better shave and it's like $15 for 100 razor blades, which lasts me a couple years. Way way way better than the disposable multi-blade Gillette things, which sell 5 heads for $20.
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Handkerchiefs. I am prone to allergies, so instead of constantly buying disposable tissues, we now have a stack of handkerchiefs that can just be used a few times and then thrown in the wash. This has also saved me loads.
What about you?
Buy from bulk stores and markets instead of bagged supermarket products.
Switch to soap strips instead of liquid detergent for laundry
Cook yourself instead of getting delivery
Use public transport and or bike
Buy local produce and fruits that are in season
This is the biggest cost savings for me right now... Assuming I get a cheap rust bucket paid in full (estimate in metro Vancouver, BC in Canadian $s):
So all together that's $591 per month or $7100 per year.
Transit costs me $135/month and I'm lucky to live and work somewhere where transit actually sort of works.
This is particularly true with the multitude or car sharing programs that are available in major cities like Vancouver. The odd time you need a vehicle it is trivial to rent one, which is still cheaper than owning a vehicle.
You don't even need a car sharing program, rental car companies still exist.
And this is true both for people looking to use public transit, as well as people people afraid to go electric because they take one monster road trip every 2 years, or people considering buying a pickup truck because one time they had to move a couch.
as far as buying bulk, the idea it to look for price per unit, and with this you have to take at least a medium (month) or long (annual) look at the pricing. This is your typical restaurant budget strategy.
And this assumes you have storage space, which not everyone has.
I love the principle of buying from bulk store but after a non-zero number of weevil infestations I tread carefully. Could just be bad luck though.
I feel like those pop-top plastic barrels would prevent weevils?
Perhaps. We probably could have sealed things better in jars, but it sure was a big and disconcerting mess.
my dumbass read
Switch to soap strips instead of liquid detergent for laundry
What is this wizardry you speak of? [begins Google session]
Wear a condom
Yes, kids are very expensive.
condoms contribute to landfill. babies left in the woods do not.
/s/hjBabies left in woods grow up to kill and eat horny teens in festive seasons, disrupting the local economy.
not to be all social darwanist, but i think if a baby can survive on its own in the woods, it deserves to grow up to be a horny teenager
It is hunting and killing the horny teens in a horror film-like fashion.
I know how to fix almost anything mechanical and I usually try to buy really high quality things when I can. It means spending more money up front, but things tend to last a lifetime and I don't have to buy it again.
I can't even fathom the amount of money I've saved from buying older used vehicles and doing all my own automotive work on them, or fixing all my appliances. I couldn't fathom a $400 vehicle payment. My prius I've had for three years I installed a new oem hybrid battery in and have a grand total of about $7,000 into (three years of tires and replacement parts and buying the car itself). Never had a vehicle loan in my 25 years of driving.
I wouldnt dream of swapping out a gas tank, or a combustion engine, but I did a diy battery swap on my gen 1 Leaf, and it was surprisingly easy (well, physically it was hell, but engineering-wise it was a piece of cake).
My attitude to fixing anything is "well, it doesn't work now, it's not like I could break it more". Swapped out a 3 euro rubber ring on a 400 euro coffee machine last week, and feeling pretty good about it.
The leaf is quite doable, because it has a small battery and a small range. Most evs though, and the ranges that are needed to be a full on vehicle replacement without the need of a 2nd ice vehicle for trips out of town are far beyond the 85 mile range of a subcompact car like the leaf. The batteries are over 1,000 pounds and run the length of the vehicles underside.
I can swap out a 4 cylinder ice at my house (sure, that is beyond your average do it yourselfer). In no way could I swap out a 1,060 pound battery in a tesla model 3.
For the record, swapping out a gas tank is not very hard.
What time are you from where a $400 vehicle payment is a lot?
I mean yes, people have payments over 700 a month but to me, paying 400 would be a lot.
Many people have payments over $700 a month.
60 months at $700 a month is $42 000 and that’s not much when you include financing cost.
An interesting realization was that "saving money" and "reducing waste" are often competing optimums. I live in the developing world where there people waste a lifetime sitting at home doing nothing to save money. I am one of two or three people in my neighborhood with a job -- the rest "save tons more money than I do" but don't have jobs so their real income after inflation is negative.
Anyway, I figure out what my time is worth (based on what I estimate I could earn by grabbing extra contract work). Then I don't spend my time saving money unless it saves something at least comparable to my hourly rate, or it's in a context where working would be impossible, or there's a nontangible element (e.g. repairing a thing I like a lot).
I prioritize not wasting my time first (it's the only resource I can't buy more of), and spend most of my spare effort finding ways to make more money (I regularly cram-study 2-3 hours per day for this purpose, usually tech). Then with the extra money I make, I can save 80% of my income on a good month.
When I started this habit, I made about 135 USD per month and had zero savings. Even if I saved 100% of my earnings, it still amounts to essentially nothing -- so it became obvious that the best way to save more money, was to earn more money. When I had a little money, I didn't put it in the bank -- I invested it in myself by buying tools to learn more things and provide more services to accelerate my gains.
Anyway it's not the right advice for everyone, I'm just another fool like the rest of us, but I hope it's maybe useful to someone out there.
This comment generally only applies if you are earlier in your career or don't have much to spend (earning will result in more money than saving). If you're already making a middle to above average income, you're likely better off reducing spending and increasing investments — 99.99% of rich people (including the minority born poor) don't get rich through their labor (wage); they get rich through assets, whether through owning and building a business, or buying and holding shares in them.
I agree to a large extent! There are some interesting caveats though (mainly that I'm not in the USA). Six years ago I had a Vietnamese company license and 0$. I'm only very recently anything like "middle class" so I don't have much experience with it.
The company license was key (as you say), but not due to growing it as an asset -- it was more accurately an instrument to extract remuneration based on the value I deliver, instead of just the amount of time I spend. It also gave me control of how I spend my time. That meant that early on, I could only tackle low-value work and times were tough... but eventually I could solve more expensive problems and demand far more than I could as an employee. Selling solutions as a contractor (especially to foreign companies) made a ton more money than selling my labor as an employee.
In other words, my company is not worth much money as an asset, because without me, it's non-functional. I also work with a lot of foreign VCs and am convinced that private equity inflates valuations pre-IPO by enough that there's a lot less upside to capture than there used to be. Gone are the days when a private investor could buy e.g. Microsoft shares and see a 30x upside. Also, I'm in Vietnam -- we do have a functional stock market, but the volume is much lower and stock ownership less attractive overall. Anyway, overall it would be hard to sell my company.
So there is a decent argument that my optimal path really is though labor -- but definitely not through "wages". Working for wages was always a mess where I only got paid half the time, and had to work all the time. Also it means my visa status depends on my employer, which has always lead to flagrant abuse. With my own company, I get more stable visa status.
I've also been offered equity for my work. However, I have said no 100% of the time and this has never been a mistake so far. One day maybe, but equity is a weirder prospect here than in the USA.
So I focus on selling the solutions to the most expensive problems I can solve. That's put me on track to a home + modest retirement for my wife and I. That's "enough money" for me and I will likely go back to academia and volunteer work ASAP. I have no desire for millions of dollars -- even if I can maybe see a possible path to it.
I wish you and your family the best in that endeavour.
Can I ask what job/s you did starting off?
Ah, I was foolish enough to do web development in the developing world. It seemed like a good idea at the time -- as the economy grew, I reasoned businesses would need websites -- so I started a company to do this. In truth, it was really hard to bring client expectations in line with reality, most businesses were rent-seekers and did not want to invest even a small amount in their future, and I had stiff competition from undocumented migrant workers from the West that did not have any overhead. I barely scraped by at the time, and now platforms like Wix / Facebook / Grab / Lazada capture nearly all of that market anyhow.
Those were the early days of running my company. Later, I got into prototyping, which was a vertically-integrated margin business instead of a horizontal volume one (the former is much easier to run in Asia!). There is very little competition in my niche, but pivoting was brutally hard due to my low income at the time. I also got into writing about the things I was working on, which helped pay the bills. In many ways, my time spent here is an experiment in reflecting on some of the lessons I've learned.
Before that, I managed a branch of an Australian advertising company. That was my first job in Vietnam. I replaced seven or eight people. I received my salary less than half the time -- but what can you do when your visa depends on your employer? Those years were quite bad too.
Prior to immigrating, I worked in medical research, and before that I was a scientist. Those years were pretty easy (even if they did not seem so at the time), but also around then I became acutely aware that I had no future in my home country. Looking back, I'm grateful for that -- I had no right to see that far ahead, or with such clarity. It was pure luck that I had all the right ideas in my mind at the same time.
Did you have to do a lot of study to acquire those positions?
Medical research and science? Yeah. 3 years undergrad and 2 grad school, at a research university. One year between them, where I taught myself advanced statistics, experimental design, and Linux system administration. Undergrad was just a blur of studying and exams, but after that it was a bit better.
Long story short, medical research is a surprisingly complicated way to be poor. Salaries are way lower than I thought. I could have earned more money just working in retail, and the hours were worse (e.g. the clinic was always open during a clinical trial).
I also co-founded a tool sharing nonprofit and taught myself electronic engineering and some software, starting in grad school but continuing until I emigrated. After I got here, I just sort of took the first job I could get, so no initial studying for that one. I started studying software engineering more seriously starting around then.
I study around 2-3 hours per day.
This comment did not go where I thought it was going but very interesting. You're clearly making the right call for your personal finances.
I assumed you were going to say something about like expensive composting equipment or aluminum straws.
Haha oh goodness no. Things I actually bought to save money (when I could afford to) were an efficient A/C unit with an inverter (better sleep = faster learning = more money), and a new motorcycle. Not having reliable transit was costing me a lot of money in wasted time so that was a big one to fix. It's more fuel-efficient too, I use 2-2.5L of petrol a week. I also moved somewhere safer, where the building hadn't literally collapsed on me before.
Poverty is complicated, there's no simple way out of it, and the people who say there is... have generally never really been poor (although some have, there are few universal truths here). Saving money is rarely a useful solution -- it's more important to bootstrap yourself to better opportunities, which is really hard without any financial security. The way to do this is super specific to the exact circumstances -- and there's probably not always a way out. If you have money, of course you can afford to take time to study a new skill and so on. If you don't, perhaps you'll pay for it with a part of yourself that you're not going to get back.
Saving money is not entirely useless, it's a really effective strategy if you already have made some money, and are about to have a sharp reduction in income. It lets you protect your gains better than other people with wealth, so you inch ahead of them every time the market corrects (you don't have to invest to be affected). The inverse strategy (look for ways to spend) you have to do earlier, to inch ahead again. Your timing has to be better than the market, and it has more information than you, because you don't have the money or connections to have better information. So again, you're going to have to pay in the currencies of the desperate -- cut out those kinder parts of your mind that betray you to mediocre financial decisions. Then you can perhaps (very slowly) convert modest sums of money into more life-changing sums of money, and eventually land ownership.
Health is a problem too. It's hard to cram-study engineering if you're busy dying of cholera. Not my fondest memory, but perhaps an instructive one. I learned that I don't fear death, only failure.
I guess escaping poverty wasn't some glorious victory I feel proud of. It was more accurately a series of sad, Faustian bargains. Where at each step, you can end up receiving nothing. Even the devils of our fictions are kinder than the market, and less hungry.
Buy and use whole chickens instead of buying chicken pieces. They're not difficult to break down yourself, a youtube tutorial is all you need.
Then keep the bones and stuff that would normally be considered waste. Put them into sturdy ziplock bags and freeze until you have a few of them. Then take them out and use them to make a chicken stock that can be the base of a soup or stew.
Add to that, onion butts, potato peels, corn cobs, tough mushroom stems, etc. All great for stock.
Not really a money saver, but I've been buying shampoo and conditioner bars. They often come in cardboard or paper wrapping instead of plastic containers like regular shampoo and conditioners. I enjoy the reduced plastic waste, and they don't take up as much space in the shower.
And you can also take them with you on airplanes
Adding some more
Im pretty certain since cardboard has plastic on the outer layer for graphics
Yeah peel off plastic the rest is compostable even the ink used on cardboard
Aleppo soaps are great. We buy like 5 bars. Lasts us about a year or more. Better than normal/modern soaps. Ancient wisdom makes these soaps.
I'm sorry to be that guy, but this most likely will be worse for the environment.
Reusable bags are alot more poluting than plastic bags, because the manufacturing process can use up to 100x the energy.
What you SHOULD buy as a reusable is a higher quality plastic bag that is made from reusable plastic.
This sounds wrong I know.
I will also be that guy and say mine have already reached carbon neutral. I’ve had them for 4 years now and probably close to 1000 trips and have saved thousands if not more plastic bags in that time already. They have no rips or tears and I expect them to last another 10 to 15 years. I don’t think reusable plastic would get that sort of shelf life unless you rarely use them.
You are probably right if you can get that many trips out of it. And I was also only focusing on the environment and not the money saved, which is also wrong of me taking OPs question into account.
My thermostat has a setting which allows for a greater temperature swing. I have it set at 2*. With the temperature set at 68f the heat refill not come on until the temperature reaches 66f. This causes the heat to run longer but less frequently, which is more efficient than running in short bursts. I also have a setting which runs the fan for a few minutes after the heat stops which scavenges the remaining heated air out of the air ducts.
I also open up my eastern/southern facing drapes/blinds in the morning to allow the sun to heat up the house through the windows for some free heat throughout the day.
Probably doesn't apply to >90% of people here, but if you ever get to build your own house, build it so the longer side faces south, and the shorter side west (in the northern hemisphere). Then you get more midday sun in the winter when the sun is further south, and less evening sun in the summer.
Removing the window screens in the winter helps a lot too.
If you have a dishwasher, do NOT rinse things before putting them in. Just scrape off the bits into the bin. A big part of the efficiency of a dishwasher comes from not running more water or the water heater unnecessarily. If you rinse you might as well hand wash.
Also, use the cheap powder and make sure to use it in the prewash phase.
Good tech connections video: https://youtu.be/_rBO8neWw04
If you have space to store stuff buy bulk in things that don’t expire.
Make your own cleaners for some things. Vinegar, dawn soap, and rubbing alcohol are the base for most.
Boardwalk laundry detergent has been a great cost saver. You have to buy 40 lbs at a time, but it works great. We typically use half the recommended amount since it’s made for larger washers.
Watch for commercial products as sometimes this is the way to go for simple items that need to be durable.
I think I'll be looking into Boardwalk. I haven't heard of that before. How long does that 40lb detergent bucket last you?
About 6 months. It even seems to be working for the sensitive skin person in the house.
To continue your first point buying a decent shaving puck and brush goes a lot further than buying shaving cream. Plus, I find it much more soothing on my face than the cream. A decent shaving soap is ~$5 and lasts a month at least.
You can also buy bar body wash instead of liquid, which is far cheaper as well.
Plants / gardening.
You get free food while reducing waste in its purest form. I have alot of indoor plants giving me seasoning, fruits and vegetables that are also pretty plants and great for the indoor environment.
Chest freezer if you have room for it, and a Costco membership if there's one within a reasonable drive. Being able to buy in bulk and freeze what you don't use can save a lot of money over time. Costco gas is also typically the cheapest so you will save a few dollars each time you fill up your car too.
I also use a double edge safety razor, but have an electric razor also for a quick morning shave. Other things I do:
I cut my hair with clippers I bought 15+ years ago for the price of 1-2 haircuts. This probably only works for people with simple, short hair, but has saved me thousands of dollars compared to getting a monthly haircut at $20+
We put a basket with cloth napkins next to the dining table and a basket with washcloths on the kitchen counter and have drastically reduced the quantity of paper towels that we use
We also save all of our egg cartons and donate them to the elementary schools. Teachers love using them to help students learn math, especially fractions. They're also useful for arts and crafts. Check with the school office before dropping them off, but I've never had the schools be anything less than enthused to have these.
If you don't own it, don't pay for it. That's one of my main principles and the motivation why I don't pay for streaming services anymore. I also noticed that I wasn't enjoying music and movies as much anymore anyway when it was in such high quantities. That's just about saving money.
Other one is, I don't buy anything of which i know of that it won't work or keep much of its value anymore after several years. So I rarely buy anything with irreplaceable batteries, that basically ends up on the junk pile after 3 years.
I wash and reuse ziploc bags until they get too many holes in them.
What do you use bags for that you can't use reusable containers for?
Half an onion or whatever in the fridge, freezing meats in to portions, vegetable snack portions, taking crackers on the road, organizing little odds and ends, other stuff.
I do use containers and glass jars for other things and wash and reuse those too, but containers and jars take up too much space for some things and cost a lot more. The last time I bought a (100) box of ziplocks was like 6 years ago and it’s still half full so I’m ok with my method.
Definitely support this from the eco angle, but given how much you seem to use these bags (100 is a lot, but 6 years is a long time), do you not feel the $15/year is really not a big deal? Over that time, you've saved ~$75, which over 6 years... It's not that much.
Not trying to discredit the method, I'm just curious as to what makes the method work for you!
It’s more about not wasting the plastic than it is about saving money. New bags come in to rotation from other sources too. Like my buddy gave me a weed cookie in a Frozen bag a year and a half ago. That one’s been rotating for a while and I smile every time I see it.
I second the safety razors. Except I've been running through the same box since 2016 and I'm barely half through. Takes a bit to learn, but when I want a real smooth shave nothing beats it (except maybe an actual blade razor).
When I get up in the mornings, I just don't want to do all the wet shave stuff. I use an electric razer. I have one at work (I work a 48 hour shift) that's 15 years old I paid $175 for that still works great (replaced the battery in it once. A $6 18650 battery) and one I've had 3 years now I paid $100 for. In the grand scheme of things a few hundred bucks for 15 years of shaving and still going is really a drop in the bucket.
That's impressive, I never found an electric that I liked.
Use a budget
The college geography department will sometimes sell old and outdated maps to raise some funds, rather than just recycling them. They make great wrapping paper that's unique to you.
I use a $20 beard trimmer to buzz my whole face twice a week. It lasts five years or so. I do still have to shave occasionally but
Ditch the car, live near transit, ride a bike.
If only I could afford to live near transit...
The real question is, can you afford not to?
Cheapest city with moderately decent public transit is probably Washington DC. With an average home price comparable to the one I live in without public transit of about $600,000 more than my current home. Even if I didn't own my truck outright (8 years old, 58k miles) and the price of gasoline doubled, my payback period for 100% free public transit is greater than infinity with a 5% cost of money calculated in.
It's a bit like solar. I've run the numbers, and had others run the numbers, and the conclusion is that it would require replacing solar panels twice before I made back my investment, even with a 0% loan for the panels and install.
I'd love to be part of it. I'd love to have European-style public transit. Even in the few places where viable public transit exists in the US, it's not affordable to move to those places. shrug
Cheapest city with decent pubtrans is almost certainly Chicago, where you can still buy a SFH for under 200K pretty easily.
The weasel words in your reply are "comparable to the one I live in". Of course dense areas have the best transit, and if course homes and especially lot sizes are smaller in dense areas, and prohibitively expensive at the scale of lots you see in less urbanized areas. It's ridiculous to compare.
The fact is, the large homes far away from city centers are heavily subsidized by the convenience of personal automotives. If we're going to unravel car dependency or even the current high level of car incentivization we currently experience, the true cost of that lifestyle will be shown to be much higher.
One I don't see here that we follow, if we didn't absolutely need it yesterday we don't want it today. Keeps us from buying things that seem like a good idea for aren't really solving a problem for us.
Edit: Here's another one. Buy cars for cash instead of a loan. Here's how we do it: We save about ~$400 a month to buy a car, in a year we buy a ~$5000 car. We do it again and then sell that first car for about what we bought it for and put the new ~$5000 towards it.
Right now my wife drives a 2023 Ioniq 5 and I drive a 2014 Z51 Corvette with no payments. To be fair we've been doing this for a long time and we no longer do yearly upgrades. Last time was 5 years between upgrades and this time we think it'll be 10 years between upgrades.
tldr: Being mindful and trying to find new ways of using stuff that I already have before I go buy new.
I reuse. All those bigly plastic bags from 20+ toilet paper rolls - I use them at least as thrash bags. That's like simplest one, but also for example when my clothes are beyond being deemed worthy of being sleepwear, they get cut into cloths to live on as cleaning utensils.
When something breaks I tend to try to repair it instead of getting new stuff. If that's impractical or not possible, depending on a thing I disassemble it, and salvage what can be useful. Also by doing this I learn how stuff was made, which I liked to know since being a kid :)
I found europalletes and repurposed them to make my balcony space nicer (made flooring and a small bench out of them) I also ask people if they have spare construction materials, like bits of wood or stuff like that. There are fb neighbour groups in my area, and it makes so much sense to me to use what I can get in my projects. I rarely have a full-on plan/vision of the stuff I want to make. I much rather have a storage with random materials and stuff and play adult version of Lego with them.
When faced with obsolete electronics, I try to repurpose it and assimilate into little Borg of mine (how I like to call my little network). I learned java a bit to write small android app to decode amiibo NFC data to control the stuff around my flat when phone (placed under the tabletop) detected Pikachu statue my lights toggled. Such stuff.
I dunno if with me it's less about saving and more about how to use things in different way and getting most out of stuff. A chipped cup can still be an awesome pot for your new plant friend. Broken cutlery knife can be helpful as a tool when you wouldn't want to use proper knife.
That said. When I have to buy something, like hobby-related, or electronics so guitar, piano, home recording studio shit like that, also PC parts - I set myself a budget, read upon things available, do my research and order stuff for 110% of my initial budget. What I mean by this, we have a saying in polish - chytry dwa razy traci - sly/greedy loses twice - as in you buy cheap shit, it breaks, you have to buy new thing again. When I set on buying something it will take me months to do my homework, and also because of my upbringing, lessens the anxiety from spending money.
I do a few things. I drink Cold Brew "black", I use the Areo Press to make my coffee. Drive a EV, I have a 3 degree temp swing on thermostat longer on and off time is more efficient away temp setpoint is 61 and home 63 and sleep 62 degrees. All led lights use a electric razor, I don't drink milk, sodas, juice only water and cold teas "Black no sugar or cream". Use a toaster oven VS the regular oven for small cooking jobs or reheating. Cook some food for the week like chicken breast and sweet potatoes and reheat in the toaster oven. When I take a shower I turn the heat maybe a degree higher if the heat isn't on so the boiler is more efficient. In the summer I have two window inverter AC set @73, the inverter AC save so much electricity and are fairly quiet. Almost forgot I was my clothes in cold water.
Those temperatures are pretty cold. It's literally illegal where I live for landlords to not provide at least 68 during the winter when the temperature is below 55 outside.
That seems very hot. We keep it at 18-20 degrees here.
68 F is 20 C.
Unless you live in Antarctica (in which case my advice probably won't reach you anyways), instead of paying for heating all the time, just wear thicker clothing in your home. If common animals can survive even the outdoors of Oymyakon on account of their fur, the cold shouldn't be any match for us pesky humans and our ability to improvise.
Learn to cook. Always eating out or getting takeout is expensive. You’ll also become healthier in the process.
If you have a simple hairstyle, it’s possible to learn to cut it yourself or have your SO/spouse help. I bought an electric razor and a set of scissors for a total of $40 and have never gone to the barber since the pandemic started. I’ve probably saved thousands in haircuts by now.
If you’re ok with eating the same food twice, cook enough food for double the amount of people at home, so you have enough leftovers for another meal, instead of having to cook again.
We used to have a lot of empty plastic water bottles but I went and got a 5 gallon jug with a pump attachment and now we can just refill the jug with good water and not waste so much plastic
The biggest bills are usually from heating and cooling. In the winter try to set your thermostat a few degrees lower and just use a blanket while you're sitting watching TV or whatever. Usually if you're up moving around doing housework or whatever being cold isn't a problem.
Also if you have a hot water heater you can set it a few degrees lower and it won't use as much energy.