SAVING money by trimming expenses is VERY imortant.
Buy foods at large supermarkets. Look for store brand equivalents to name-brand goods. Avoid 'organic,' that usually means 'smaller, shriveled, won't last as long in the fridge, and 30% more expensive.' Local grocers are a possibility but be sure to know what the baseline prices are. Sometimes you CAN get a deal when tomato season or cucumber or zucchini season hits and EVERYBODY is selling these for 50 cents each because they all grew TONS of it. But in the Portlandia area there are lots of local growers who are trying to sell at 'boutique' prices.' - Fuggeddaboudit, geddoddah-heeyah.
Never buy foods, tools, or supplies at gas station convenience stores, especially canned goods or dried foods like cup ramen.
Convenience store prices can be triple the price of normal grocery stores, or even more.
Watch out for toys that come with monthly costs instead of 'buy it once and own it' prices.
Want to listen to the radio? Buy an AM-FM-Shortwave for $35 or less.
Shop for a used one at Goodwill or a flea market, then listen to the whole world.
DO NOT BUY Sirius or XM radio at $10 or $12 A MONTH.
Don't buy cable. Borrow media from your library.
Or read books - the characters and special effects are better when you make them with your own head.
There are a ton of other great ideas in three neat books called 'The Tightwad Gazette' by Amy Dacyczyn (sounds like 'decision.')
You can make a lot of household cleaners and stuff yourself for real cheap. They're a lot less enviro-weenie dumbed-down, which means you can mix things up strong enough to really work well, so a little goes a long way.
Glass cleaner: 2/3 household ammonia, 1/3 denatured alcohol. Add blue food coloring if you really need to.
Laundry: 2 tablespoons trisodium phosphate (ask for 'real' TSP at a paint store, do not buy the fake 'TSP-90' or other fake substitutes) and 1 cup of sodium carbonate.
KA-POW cleaning power at about 10 cents a load.
Another way to stretch cleaning chemicals and save money: WAIT. Don't spray on and wipe or scour immediately afterward. WAIT 10 or 20 seconds - let the chemicals attack the stuff to be cleaned off. When spraying chemicals on plants, add a teeny dab of dish soap to the chemical. This breaks the surface tension of the water and lets the liquid soak into the plant rather than roll off the leaves and onto the ground. Same goes for spraying an insecticide barrier around your house or the perimeters of your apartment rooms - the soap will let the chemical penetrate into the pores of concrete or soak into the wood so the killing power of the poison lasts longer. You also use less per area, saving MONEY on chemicals.
Some you can compound yourself. Boric acid powder is awesome on eliminating spiders inside the house.
Make toys for your kids or your friends' kids that run on simple physics rather than batteries.
Spool dozers and match-stick rockets are great fun. So are slingshots,
candle turbines, soda can or soup can telephones.
You might find a crystal radio toy kit at a flea market. It might be cheap because no one hooked on 3D computer gaming thinks these things could possibly be any fun. Again - free radio listening with no batteries, (just an earphone) and you can change the components to listen to all kinds of AM signals.
As a boy I used to be able to pick up Boston's Logan Airport TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach CONtrol) from my house in Andover MA 30 miles away.
It was exciting listening, and imagining where the planes were in 3D space around the airport, and hearing foreign accents from international flights and imagining what those countries were like. That and the polite way the controllers would wish the departing pilots a good flight or say 'Welcome home' to incoming American pilots from overseas.
Entertain people with your crafts and the next thing you know they invite you to dinner and that's ONE more meal saved from your budget.
SAVING money isn't income, and bartering your skills for a meal here and there is very hard to detect and tax, which gets your major income thief - government - out of your hair.
Superjaz is VERY right on this - 50 cents saved here and there adds up faster than you might think!
