Last year when I plopped down $150 to visit the rainforest, I had a couple of hours to kill before my friend finished seeing patients for the day and we could escape. I made my way almost by memory from downtown Olympia up through the lush forest. I wound along the Puget Sound to an overgrown parking lot at the Evergreen State College. Students here take one class at a time and there are no letter grades. Don’t tell anyone but there was a time when some students actually lived secretly in tree houses in the woods. There used to be a drum circle over by the quad, and this place was inhabited by some bright, free thinking, misfits. I know all of this because one wife, two kids, and one career ago I spent my first year of college here before transferring to the University of Minnesota.
Dumpster Diving
My roommates and I found out that the salvation army store in Olympia got rid of dumpsters full of goods at the end of every month when the items didn’t sell in the store. It was perfectly good donations that just got trashed because there was no room for it. So late one night, my friends and I went dumpster diving before trash pickup the next day. We furnished our 5 bedroom dorm with a vacuum, a TV, some tables, and even a bowling ball (that’s another story). Dumpster diving to furnish my place may be the most insanely frugal thing I’ve ever done. However there are more.
Necessity as The Origin of Thrift
Last week, I shared the paradox of success that those who have already established themselves and already have an excess of opportunities and resources seem to be offered even more. At the same time those who have nothing and could really use an opportunity seem to have fewer that come their way. Momentum builds to tipping points and beyond. Today, I want to explore the other end of this spectrum. Early in the journey, I started out dumpster diving. That same year, I survived mainly off of fried potatoes and onions because the cost was pennies a day. When money is tight, necessity can be the mother of invention. I considered this fun and something of a revelation at the time. It got me thinking about value for a dollar.
My Most Extreme Penny Pinching
How many of you ever ducked into a second movie at the theater after the first one ended? Did you ever hack a vending or gum ball machine when you were little? I thought it would be funny to look back at some of the most extreme insanely frugal and sometimes questionably legal things I have ever done:
- In high school, I sometimes buried a pizza slice under my salad and only paid for the salad.
- I used to download so many pirate mp3s online that now as a musician myself I still feel guilty about it.
- Once I attempted hitchhiking in Ireland to save a few dollars but nobody picked me up because I looked too clean cut like I didn’t need the help.
- Once I wanted to impress some friends but didn’t want to drop the cash to buy sushi grade salmon and tuna… so I rinsed the cheap stuff and passed it off as fancy sushi :/ (luckily no one got violently ill).
- In college I sometimes brought mini bottles of booze in my pocket to the bar and would just order a coke and spike it myself.
- Going to college in Minnesota in the winter, my room mates and I kept the heat so low that we all walked around the main area in hats and jackets. I secretly put a space heater in my bedroom. At the end of the lease, I found out that each of my room mates did the same thing.
- Also in Minnesota I rented an attic apartment with no stove or oven for $130 a month. There was no heating bill because the poor insulation meant that the heat from the 1st and 2nd floors just rose up into my place. I also got really creative with a toaster oven.
- I biked year round to class at the University of Minnesota to save on parking. The ice and snow led to me crashing every once in awhile and getting hit by cars a couple times. One ended with me on the hood yelling at the terrified driver through the windshield. Luckily I never was severely injured. In case you did not know healthcare can be pretty damn expensive.
When Did Frugality Stop Being Cool?
People often make fun of the ultra frugal for being miserly idiots who focus on minutia and spend a dollar of labor to save 50 cents. However, in college, this was not a deprivation. It was fun. It was a discovery and a sort of life hack that seemed apparently missed by others. Somewhere along the journey this changed. I don’t think I would feel the same way dumpster diving today and these are of course extreme examples. However I do question why some level of thriftiness was considered kind of fun and entertaining when I was in my teens and 20s but might be considered trashy or foolish now.
A Healthy Level of Frugality
I will maintain that frugality can be a virtue. As I discussed in this previous article, most religions and many philosophers through the ages have sung the praises of frugality. It is integral to the self reliance espoused by the American renaissance. There is a freedom in being content with less.
I am certainly at a different place on the spectrum of resources and opportunities than I was at in college. However, I still carry some of these frugality habits and lessons with me. I am not serving my friends questionable sushi or spiking my coke with a pocket mini bottle at a business dinner. My means and my opportunities have changed. The path that has gotten me to here has been a continuum. However, I am still living far below my means, I am still concerned with value for my dollar, and I still love a good bargain.
What do you think? I want to hear your story of insanely extreme frugality in the comments!
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9 comments
Fill every empty space in your frig with a full bottle of tap water. A fully loaded frig of liquid cools itself making it where your frig does not have to turn on as often to cool itself and if the power or water pump goes out you have plenty of water:)
Nice! I have to admit that I had to google this one to fact check because it kind of seemed counter intuitive to me, but you are exactly right. Less air to displace in fridge means less warm air in when door opens and less energy used. Also not having to buy bottled water is a definite plus 🙂 thanks for sharing Jennifer
I’m fairly high ranking at a tech services company, yet drive a car I bought for $2800, eat peanut butter sandwiches 3x a week at my desk and my alcohol budget for this year is $200. If you are at Wal Mart and see a guy in French cuffs hugging a 30 pack of High Life come say hi.
I agree and think it’s not that hard to get to a point where you enjoy the lack of spending more than fancy stuff you can spend your money on. Having a family changes the situation somewhat, you need to be able to pivot back and forth between frugal and ultra frugal … you can eat oatmeal two meals a day for a week to save $20 but then you need to be able to take your family out for $4 ice creams without feeling guilty about the expenditure assuming they don’t want to pursue extreme frugality as well. But realize another family is spending $80 at the movies while you spend $15 on ice cream and a nice walk.
This is an awesome point Doug and I agree with you. Pursuing frugality and FI in a marriage is a balancing act that I should talk about more in the future. It is also all relative as you point out.
I just got introduced to your blog because posts from both of our sites were included in Michelle’s Australian FI Weekly over at FrugalityandFreedom.com. I actually didn’t start dumpster diving until I was in my 40’s and regret all of the missed opportunities for increasing my positive environmental impact as well as my finances. I too discovered the abundance overflowing from thrift store (and university) dumpsters and earned several thousand dollars over a 2 year period selling those rescued items on eBay and Craigslist (https://www.richandresilientliving.com/waste-stream-diversion-part-ii-sustainable-side-hustles/). These days I mainly only dive for food. 90% of what I eat has been rescued from my local natural health food store or Aldi dumpster plus my boyfriend’s food forest/garden, and what I forage/barter/or am gifted. I’m truly saddened by all of the still edible food that still continues to get directed out the back doors of every grocery store into dumpsters or trash compactors even by stores that donate a good bit to food banks. And it’s still happening now amidst Covid19 food shortages, not in such large amounts, but there’s still good food coming out the back doors…..
As we see how fragile financial wealth can be in these trying times, I hope more people will open their minds to the abundance that surrounds them that they so often overlook. There’s really no such thing as waste – there are only misdirected resources. Hopefully, we can start doing a better job of eliminating/capturing the waste stream and not allowing that abundance and those resources to escape (especially since we often then use more resources to process/handle them in the waste stream).
Wow Laura! Making $1000’s off of waste while helping the environment and providing what others need at a reduced price sounds like a triple win. I am not sure where you are based but here in the USA I have read that we lose 30-40% of the food supply to waste at all levels in the chain. Crazy, and seems like an opportunity for us to be more efficient for sure. Thanks for sharing
I used to bike to class too. One day it was raining heavily and I still biked the approximately 3 miles to get there, rather than take the bus. Tucson, especially near the university, has very poor drainage so the streets flood and turn into rivers, so I biked through about a foot of water.
I definitely used to dumpster dive regularly for food into my 30s even with a near 6 figure salary, and only recently stopped because I no longer live near Aldi (definitely the best place to shop and dive…). Some of my best hauls include 5 still frozen whole chickens, and over 100 dollars worth of salmon sides. I never got sick. During that time I would only need to supplement my dives, grocery shopping cost 20-25 dollars per week.
Haha, thanks for sharing your super frugal ways too and making me look less like a fringe wierdo 😂. I love these stories because it raises the question of what choices we make because we should versus because that is just “how it’s done.”