Free entrance days: Zoos, museums, IMAX, gardens, concerts, festivals, kid's sports, and on and on...

I understand there's even a cookbook for cooking on your engine.

I love this thread - this is fun!

The very cheapest things I have done include picking up stuff left out on garbage day from people who were moving.  I found great stuff including food, toiletries, cleaning products, clothes.  I also have furniture, lamps and two beautiful, large rugs from the side of the road. 

I reuse tea bags (I like three used bags for a new cup to get the right strength.)  I reuse all kinds of bags for lunches or storing veggies - anything I used to do with a ziplock.  I use cloth bags for shopping and get plastic shopping bags from my family to use to line the garbage cans. Newspaper plastic bags are used to clean up after the dog.

When going out to dinner with friends, when I see that they aren't going to take home their leftovers, I ask if I can box them up and take them home.  It is surprising, but I've never had any negative looks or comments from this - usually people are happy that the food isn't going to waste (begs the question why they don't take it home themselves.) 

I have a reputation among friends and family that I will take any and all clothing.  I take what I want for myself first, then give stuff to other friends and family, then give the rest to Goodwill and get a tax write-off. 

I have repaired holes in socks and underwear to make them last longer.  The majority of my socks are second-hand (but not the underwear.)

I also scrounge around in the recycle bins at school for the Coke points and get free Cokes that way (totally free since I never bought the product in the first place.)

Keep the posts coming so we can all get some new ideas!

Alison in Pittsburgh

Speaking of repairing underwear, does anyone know where colored elastic can be had for repairing panties?  All I can get locally is white, and I would have to drive 35 miles for black thin elastic.  Any favorite Internet resources for the confirmed cheapskate?

Another cheap-as-dirt behavior: using a pair of my earrings for curtain tiebacks for lace curtains.  Just pull 'em back and hook the earring in.

About that cooking-on-the-engine:  be careful, you could be providing a buffet for stray cats.  They can and will climb into an engine compartment, and I can personally testify that they adore frozen burritos!

Re: scrounging for Coke points -- when I was in my single (divorced with 3 teens) years, I was in college finishing my BA.  I routinely checked around the soda and snack machines for dropped change.  Lots of the students came from wealthy families and didn't care if they dropped a nickel or a dime, or even a quarter.  I cared!  I cared a whole lot!  And I didn't mind if anyone saw me grubbing around under the machines for the money.

I also kept my eyes peeled when I walked on any well-traveled sidewalk, because there was always change here and there.  Mostly pennies, but hey, they added up.  Once I found a $5 bill!  And in the library, I found a subway fare card worth over $8 tucked into a book I was checking out.  The card had been de-magnetized by the library's checkout machine, but I took the card to the subway toll booth, they verified the amount, and sent me a new card with that amount on it.  Since I rode the subway to work and school each day, that was a significant coup.

 I made my own Rice-a-Roni type mixes, sewed a lot of my own clothes, etc.

I do the ordinarily cheap things, like ketchup packets, sugar packets, etc from restaurants. But I have family that takes the cake. My cousin was the head of our family business and his salary was around $300,000/year. This man used coupons to eat at McDonalds. The man that ran the company before him would save the leftover coffee at the end of the day and add it to the fresh brew the next day. And now, my mother who lived through WW1 and WW2 and is still alive, washes out the cat litter. She scoops out the poop then washes the litter from the box and spreads it on the back porch to dry. Voila new cat litter! 

I've patched the pants that I wear to work on several occasions. 

Sadly, I have "chub rub" which is where the inner thighs of a pair of pants wear out before the rest of them do.  I was determined not to buy any more pants for work since I only wear them to work and nowhere else(they're cargo pants, the kind with lots of pockets.  Great for my job, but not my favorite look).  So, I took one pair of pants that had a serious blowout and wore them to patch my roof.  Once they were totally ruined, I cut out ever usable scrap of fabric from them.  Then, I cut patches from that fabric and used fabric glue to patch the holes in the other pairs.  Worked great, the patched pants are still going strong and the patches are holding up.  Since the patches are in a very hard to see place, no one is the wiser and I'm getting a lot more life out of pants I thought were ruined.

Now if my diet would just work as well as my patches........   

Michele4084:

Sadly, I have "chub rub"

Oh my goodness, I had never heard that term before. Too funny!

(Now I know there is an actual term for my condition...LOL)

My dh is a cheapskate and a long time ago I realized that I can't stop him and might as well join him! We were driving home from church, took a side road to escape a traffic jam and I screeched to a stop. There was a suit on a rack at a garage sale. The jacket fit my dh perfectly. The pants needed some tailoring. $5 for the suit and $20 for the tailoring. However, since then I have learned to tailor clothing so it could have been a $5 suit! We also use toilet paper rolls to cinch up loose cords or store cords. I use the plastic bags from the grocery store as trash can liners. For the dogs' heartworm meds, I buy double the dose in a tablet (not a chew) chop it in half and wrap each half in a half of a pill pocket for each dog. I save about 90 percent a year on heartworm meds with this method. Also, I get the double the weight advantix, use an empty diabetic syringe (no needle) and put exactly half the tube on each dog. I pay about 30 percent this way rather than buying smaller tubes. I also give my dogs the vaccinations, deworming and other care required, absent an emergency or surgery requiring a vet's care. I was squeemish about doing this myself but saw that breeders usually do these things themselves to save on vet costs. I also make my own laundry detergent and use vinegar as a fabric softener.

This is the best one I have ever heard, and it's not even mine.  I worked with a gal who had waitressed at one time, and you had to wear black shoes.  Well, her shoes had a hole in the toe, and she couldn't afford a new pair, so she took a black marker and colored the end of her toe black to match the shoe, and you couldn't tell.  Now that's Frugal!!