I am NOT a frugalista, or at least I don’t think so. But…almost everything we buy is on sale, discounted, less than regular retail, etc. I do NOT count every single dollar I spend. I do NOT abstain from buying things most of the time because I never spend money. I DO work hard at spending less, buying fewer things, etc.
Some of my ideas might be considered “extreme,” but I just think they’re reasonable.
For example, we use “unscented” soap and deodoarant, so the 2 of us can share 1 product. I use bar soap and I have an entire “lifecycle” thing I do with it to stretch it as far as I possibly can:
I cut the bars in 1/2 and use 1/2 at each sink.
The “new” bars go from the kitchen to the bathroom when they’re about 1/2 used.
The remaining bathroom sink bar goes into the pump bottle with water that lives in the tub.
Extreme? Doesn’t take long. The pump bottle was full of diluted soap from the same manufacturer and I just decided to refill it when it was empty.
Other things we share: when DH used cartridge razors, he’d put the “dull” ones aside for me and I’d use them up. These days, he uses a double edged razor and I just use it as needed, carefully. We used to buy his and hers “oldster” vitamins, then I found the same company makes a plain “oldster” version and now we buy that.
We use unscented dish liquid as shampoo – unscented shampoo is hard to find here and expensive!
This one is probably going to be obsolete at some point, but when I want to remove a staple cleanly, I use a combo of seam ripper (sewing tool) and needle nose pliers. My fingernails are too brittle to use this way. Anyway, I do this cuz I don’t have to buy a staple remover, and when the day comes that we don’t use staples anymore, I won’t have a useless piece of plastic in my home.
Most frugal people do this but most of the people I work with don’t: pack my own lunch for work! Simple but a lunch downtown is a minimum $14-30. Probs not that weird around here though, lol!
We make our own chicken stock by saving every meat bone, onion, and carrot peels. If the chicken stock has a pork or beef bone for one round we don’t mind.
I’ll take any leftovers and reconstruct to make new meals later. I once took all of the leftovers from a work burrito thing and even though it was mostly beans, tortillas, salsa, any veggies we used it all. Every thanksgiving we take home the turkey bones to make soup/stock. We always take the ham bone from events when it would normally be thrown away.
We also share a razor and use our own blades. I dilute our hand soap because we have foaming reusable pumps. A 1/4 ratio of soap/water is perfect!
In the summer around here there’s a community event almost every other week, frequently including a bake sale for charity.
Often, the baked goods are incredibly cheap… I will stock up and stash the goodies in the freezer for later. I get “home made” goodies, help a local charity, and get cookies/baked fruit breads for the freezer with no baking on my part!
Two things I rarely see talked about, that I did for a while. (ETA I think a lot of people here did them/are doing them, too, but we also talk a lot less about than the grocery budget, etc)
Have one less bedroom and one less car as long as possible. Or more broadly, reduce spending on housing and transportation. Also, having less space drives less spending on STUFF.
Obviously, this is very situational! We still have one car partly because Spouse’s job is 100% remote and mine is hybrid/semi-flexible (ie outside occasional events I can choose to WFH or flex hours). Our friends who both work in person obviously need 2 vehicles, and so does a family with a SAH parent. We’ve definitely been thinking a 2nd vehicle is on the horizon for us. But… not yet!
For housing, I don’t walk the walk anymore but I did try to minimize expense while I was in grad school and we were paying off college debt. Now we are considering value more highly, and currently have a bit more space than we need since we’ve been hoping to procreate (but as most of you know, hitting some obstacles). And of course weighing against buying, but this would ~double our monthly payment and take 10+ years to break even for rent vs buy, so… Big commitment if we go that way.
We use safety razors so we haven’t replaced our razors in 5+ years and hopefully won’t have to for years to come. But my favorite hygiene-related hack is… just not shaving for as long as possible lol
I’m sure a lot of people not in my immediate circle do this, but when talking to friends and coworkers I’ve found that I’m usually the only one still using my prepaid phone number from 2004 (just moved to a smaller sim card each time the system gets upgraded), and I get just enough load/minutes for emergencies then optimize the data package I get, usually 48 GB at a time in case of emergency hotspot needs. Then my phone is a lower-end Android I replace only when it starts falling apart.