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What are some frugal tips your parents or grandparents taught you?

All the talk is about the importance of recycling, but the first tenet in the conservation creed is "Reduce." We have gotten away from many ways of life our parents and grandparents lived (thankfully, some of them -- e.g. only bathing once a week) and with our big, expansive homes, have forgotten how to live frugally. What are some frugal practices you grew up with? For example, keeping the thermostat set low in winter and wearing a sweater around the house. Opening the windows and running a fan instead of using the air conditioner. Closing vents off in unused rooms during heating/cooling seasons. Saving old bits of soap and either melting them down or smushing them against the new bar of soap. Reusing birthday candles. Limiting long distance phone calls. Turning off lights as you leave a room.

Public Comments

1. Use no more than five sheets of toilet paper....



2. Cut old shirts up for rags and don't forget to take off buttons for future mending. Most importantly, never borrow. Only get what you need but not what you want. Live below your means.



3. Neat question! My grandma taught me TONS about saving money. As a little girl, she introduced me to the brightly colored "clearance" signs & to check out the clearance racks before anything else. Also secondhand stores & dime stores (like the now defunct Woolworth's). And how a store might mark down something that is slightly damaged or missing a button (something you can easily fix yourself). To this day I refuse to pay full price for anything, unless it's an emergency :)



4. Good Question-

   My G'parents taught me to try to use items multiple times. The thought of buying a pre-paid telephone card and tossing it would've given them a heart-attack and they would have found other ways to use the card - Like scraping gunk out of a pan or scraping windows in the winter.

   To them it was about using it up until it could no longer be used any longer - and with their imaginations, that was a long time.

   "Frugal for Life"




5. My biggest thing is light switches. Off when out of the room...my great grandmother drove that home to me!!

   I used to always scrape toast if I burnt it. One time my grandmother threw hers away which shocked me!!! I said, " Mimmie!!! God hates waste!" She said, " I know honey, but God hates burnt toast too!"




6. It has been so long since I have seen them, but I remember my Grandmother's Triple Coupons before she passed.



7. i was taught to walk on my hands to save on shoe leather.



8. 1-Don't bye what you won't use.

   2-Put on a sweater instead of putting the heating on

   3-Cycle instead of using the car/train