The Ultimate Cheap Guy -- Your Frugal Tips?

Yeah, I know what you mean about the built in batteries. I'm still ticked that I can't just pop out the battery and replace it like I did with my ancient Palm Treo. But, if you have an iPhone and the battery is getting wimpy, Apple will replace it, no questions asked, for $29 if you do it before the end of the year. Then the price goes up to, I think, $79.

I still use the iPad Air I got in Jan. of 2014. I only charge it 2-3 times a week, but it doesn't get used very much. A little web browsing, video watching, and Kindle reading almost every day is it. iOS 12 sped it up a lot.

Edit to add:
With the battery life, like the Prius battery, they have a limited number of cycles. Partial cycles add up. So heavy use will wear out the battery more quickly, while the same amount of use on a bigger battery will have less wear.

 

We put everything we can on our credit cards to get cash back:

For credit card purchases we get 5% back when we first use:

Chase Freedom Card
-5% back on up to $1,500 in combined purchases in bonus categories each quarter you activate
-no annual fee
-$150 bonus after you spend $500 on purchases in your first 3 months from account opening

then for remaining purchases we use:

Capital One Venture Card
-2% back on everything (to erase travel expenses including air fare, taxi/Uber/Lyft, hotels, car rentals, parking lot fees, etc)
-one-time bonus of $500 when you spend $3,000 on purchases within 3 months from account opening
-$0 intro annual fee for the first year; $95/yr after that (if you don't put enough on your credit card for this to be worth while, get one of the 1.5% back credit cards mentioned earlier in this thread is better at that point)
-no foreign transaction fees

Just got rid of cable a few months ago. DirectTV Now for $40/month for 65+ channels including local channels. Unbundled internet and have 18Mb/s up/down for $34/month

T-Mobile ONE (military veteran rate)
-$110/month after taxes
-5 lines
-unlimited talk, text, and data in U.S.
-unlimited talk, text, and data (first 5GB is 4G LTE) in Mexico & Canada
-in-flight texting +1 hour of data on all Gogo-enabled flights to, from, or within the U.S.
-unlimited personal hotspot data included at max 3G speeds
-Netflix standard 2-screen subscription
-stream unlimited entertainment; non-netflix video at DVD quality at 480p
-unlimited data and texting in 210+ countries and destinations; calls from covered countries over Wi-Fi are $.25/min (no charge for Wi-Fi calls to US, Mexico and Canada; data speeds ~128Kbps )

 

How about roasting your own coffee bean at home. I drink coffee more than any other kind of beverage, but rarely buy brewed coffee in store. When I was in college, I drunk plenty of dorm room brewed Chock full o'Nuts, but never Folgers. After graduating college, for many years, I bought roasted speciality coffee at local coffee shops where they sold freshly roasted coffee in bulk. This practice continued even after the second wave of coffee gained the popularity and very good speciality coffee beans roasted fresh became widely available in stores like Starbucks, Coffee Connections (later bought out by Starbucks), Peet's Coffee, etc, etc. I was mostly satisfied with professionally roasted speciality coffees but was paying well over $10/lb. Little over ten years ago, when premium speciality coffee shops riding on second wave became accepted by general consumers, I moved on to home roasting. Ever since, no going back to store bought coffee including those highly touted third wave coffee shops. A cup of premium Geisha coffee which was sold at a few Starbuck stores in US for over $10 a cup can be had at home for less than $1. Most of premium coffee cost only $0.10/cup when you roast beans at home. I even take my own roasted coffee with me and brew myself. I don't even know what a cup of coffee cost at Starbucks nowadays.

 

We used to buy whole beans by the kilo cheap, but now buying by the pound for over $15 CDN per pound, from a local independent coffee shop, they roast their own. One motivation was to avoid using multimaterial single use bags.

 

I now purchase bulk green coffee beans (unroasted coffee beans) from speciality coffee trader like Sweet Maria's, Burman Coffee, Bodhi Leaf Coffee in 10 - 20 lb bag. No storage bags are needed.

 

I built my own house. Poured the footers, laid 4,000 block, back filled it framed it, roofed it, plumbing, electrical.

You get the picture.

I was saving a lot of money until my divorce.

 

you guys are making me feel like a spendthrift.

 

My parents once bought a house (for about £300,000 / US$400,000, about ten years ago) on their Amex card. It meant they had to make ten payments - paying up to their credit limit and then paying it off immediately - over a couple of days. But it gave them enough British Airways points to visit me three or four times in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

 

I've never had car payments - I've always just bought cars I can afford to pay for in cash. And I don't buy new - I let someone else take that initial depreciation hit. I think that's two money-saving tips.

I think the house (and our previous apartment) are the only things we've borrowed money to buy. Saving up to buy a house or apartment in cash isn't an option in Sydney.

We're currently paying well over twice what we have to on the mortgage, and yes, that's saving us a lot of money.

 

I time my supermarket visits for when they're reducing the price of the meat that's about to go out of date, and I freeze what I'm not cooking on the day. It saves us about 50% on our meat costs. I tend to go for the going-out-of-date stuff for other food too, with reductions of 20-80% off the original price.

I don't plan a menu before I go shopping. I see what's on special, and I work my cooking around that.

It's weird: it's something most Australians don't do. I'll see people - people who are clearly not rich - moving the reduced-price going-out-of-date meat out of the way so they can get to the full-price stuff. I do not understand why they would do this. The only people here I know who buy the out-of-date stuff are British (specifically, Scottish and Northern English) expats.

But it's something my family always does, and we've always been quite competitive about it. When we go to my aunt and uncle's house near Glasgow, the first thing we'll talk about is how much money they saved at the supermarket that week. At my parents' local supermarket in England, the receipt shows you how much money you've saved by shopping this way. Dad once spent £4 on one trip to the shops, and the receipt showed that while he'd spent £4, the original, not-near-its-sell-by-date price of what he'd bought was £39, so he'd saved £35. He was so pleased that he scanned the receipt and e-mailed it to me. I saved the file, and then got it printed onto a mug which I gave him for Christmas. He was delighted with it.

We also go out to a market in far-west Sydney on a Sunday. My wife buys antiques that she resells on eBay, and I do food shopping. We get cheap vegetables sold by the farmers there. And there's a very nice Lebanese guy who sells "frustrated stock" - stuff that's been shipped to the wrong country and that's not worth sending back - and out-of-date stuff that's still OK. I get my canned goods, soft drinks and confectionery from him - it's usually about 80% cheaper than it would be at the supermarket.

I reckon we spend about 30% of what our friends spend on food, and we eat better than they do.

We can't do apples here. But we have a grapefruit tree and a couple of mandarin trees in the garden, and they're an excellent source of free deliciousness.

 

Avoiding paying over the odds for a massively-expensive Apple phone is what Huawei is for.

 

Huawei Trolls Apple By Giving Away Powerbanks To iPhone XS Launch Queue | Tech Times

 

Yes, for a fee, as do several of my utilities. In every such case, the fee is greater than the reward, so I don't use cards for them.

No cable TV, I turned into a refusenik three decades ago. Free over-the-air has more than enough programming choice for the amount of TV I want to watch.

Spouse gets most movies free through the library. She doesn't need first-run stuff because the backlog of old stuff is more than sufficient to consume her available viewing time. I watch very few movies.

No house energy bill anymore, thanks to more energy efficient appliances / heat / building envelope and DIY rooftop solar. I still pay a fixed electric connection charge, but production incentive payments way more than cover that for now. (Incentives will expire in a few years.)

Back in the old days of near 10% interest rates, when the portion of the payment that initially went to principal was tiny, I was paying enough extra principal to knock off 3-6 months at a time. When the principal slice grew, so had my income, so the mortgage continued to get shrink fast. Gone by mid-late 1990s, so that payment stream went towards retirement savings (outside of workplace programs, which were already maxed out under the lower limits of that era).

In the 20th Century, I borrowed no more than 50% of a car's cost, with repayment no longer than 24 months. In the 21st Century, no car loans at all, just straight cash.

No coffee, it upsets my stomach too much. This must be genetic, all us sibling inherited it from mom, but only 1 out of 3 in the next generation inherited it.

 

Yes, I just don't like coffee. I think that saves me a fortune.

 

Huawei is one of Chinese phone US state department was warning against buying. Not that I believe Apple or Google are much more trustworthy, IMOH.

 

I'm really very familiar with them.

I can understand objections to Huawei constructing network equipment. They were barred from building Australia's National Broadband Network, and with good reason. They've recently been barred from building any 5G infrastructure in Australia, which I think is less than ideal: I understand security concerns on a backbone, but not on last-mile stuff unless it covers critical government departments or other things that require security. This ban is just going to push up the price of our 5G services.

But barring them from consumer electronics is bizarre. There's really no risk there at all.

 

Netflix is a pretty cheap vice, around $9 CDN monthly up here. We go from one serial to the next, the occasional movie.

QUOTE="Starship16, post: 2785603, member: 165367"]My folks washed and reused all plastic ziploc bags, several times.[/QUOTE]

You don't do that?

Yeah besides years old zip locks, we have a roll of saran wrap getting kinda dusty, 'cause we rinse and hang to dry the used pieces, drape them on the handle of a food processor, for reuse. For wrapping tomato halves, cheese blocks, that sort of thing.

Save-On takes plastic bags for recycling, as does Returnit Recyclers a little further down the road. The latter also take styrofoam meat trays, and sort of styrofoam.