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Thrifty , Frugal or just a tightwad?

D

da.bees

Well-known Member
Just wondering how many others do things to save money or make life easier that others find odd.
I save milk,oil,detergent and a few other containers. Use them to hold used motor oil,trans fluid and anti-freeze makeing it easy to carry to recycle center. Fill with water,recap,poke a hole in bottom and set next to a plant needing slow watering. Fill with water and freeze for cooler ice. Distilled water jug full of tap water carried in vehicles and on machinery beats ditch water any day. Bright orange detergent jugs subsitute as athletics field markers,trotline floats,traffic cone and over width/lingth flag in a pinch. Will not store fuel or chemicals in anything other than origional or desinated containers.
Feed bag closed with zip tie is much tougher than trash bags and some are about as water resistant.
Now I need to find a market for all that used round bale twine. LOL
 
You better bet I save everything. I come from a long line of German Mennonite tightwads. I learned to work fields by pointing the tractor at the T post across the section that had a used bleach bottle on it. That white bottle sure stands out. I keep old oil jugs and antifreeze jugs. I keep one with water in it in every vehicle all summer. I use old chicken feed bags in the trash cans instead of buying bags. If it's a plastic container I can use it for fence staples, keeping extra bolts from rolling around the truck, or pouring the old bacon grease in.

I am compulsively neat and won't even leave tractors out to clutter the barnyard. That makes keeping things to reuse a challenge because I don't like piles of things hanging around. Everyone I know makes fun of me, but when something breaks at midnight I have something here that will fix it or get by. The neighbor couldn't believe that I was going to keep an old leaking water pump for the generator. I told her when the new one goes out at midnight during a blizzard I won't mind this one that drips a little. You won't mind it either because you will be coming down the road to warm up. I've only made it this far by being crafty.
 
Definitions

It you are rich you are thrifty or frugal.

If you are not rich you are cheap. LOL

I guess I'm cheap.
 
I am frugal, and we live within our means, but we always try to be generous towards others. I just cant stand the people that can afford to be generous, but wont. We were at a big summer picnic and everyone pitches in and brings food. One couple always brings the adsolute minimum they can. Thats their attitude towards everything. Bring the least and eat the most...
 
Royse, Great ! Thanks for posting.

My wife, a city girl, is not going to understand when I start flossing my teeth with those little strands of twine, however !! ☺ ☺
 
Ireland is tied together with baler twine! Dont think the netwrap has
the same potential!
Sam
 
I appreciate people who do not waste. I dislike people who want everybody to do things for them and not pay a fair price. One old fellow would not have a tractor tire fixed unless he knew the cost. All three shops in town charged about the same. One quoted a price of $35 plus boot or tube if needed where he usually charged $40. The tire needed a small boot but the Mechanic convinced the old man that it needed a big boot that normally cost $12 and said it was a $20 boot and that the tube was ruined and his $20 dollar tube became a $22 tube. The old man never knew the difference.
 
Well most of my buildings are made from what most would call scrap iron. My shop is made from mobile home frame I-Beam and parts of dock section as in a couple other buildings I have. Parts of my house are built form buildings I have taken apart and reused. I do not pay to have my car/tuck tires disposed of I keep them and use them on machines I have and the list could go on and on
 
The baler twine raised a red flag. My guy was tiling and the machine started jumping up and down but without the noise of hitting a rock. He had hit an old run that the then tile man had dumped the strings that hold the roll into the trench. About 20 minutes later of cutting and digging they were going again. I burned that immediately.
 
I was taught not to waste anything that can be used or re-used. Feed bags get used as heavy duty trash bags when needed. Save all twine to re-try the bags and other projects. Scrap steel pile, socks and shirts become oil rags, etc.

Even have a thing going with a few buddies, before we finally throw anything away, we call all the other friends to see if they need it. If not I put it out the road a few days before trash in hopes that another "recycler" will have a use.

I don"t think we are cheap or frugal. Most of us have a fixed amount of money to spend. So the money you save over time on trash bags (feed bags), steel (steel pile) etc, it all adds up. Maybe a six pack, maybe a case, maybe a new front tire for a tractor.

Unfortunately among my friends I have earned the name Dr. Welfare. They say they know of no one cheaper and more frugal than me that wont spend a penny. Guess I am proud of my nick-name.

Rick a.k.a. Dr. Welfare
 
I build a lot of stuff I need, want, out of bed rails. Pretty strong steel. get them cheap from various sources, including thrift stores. This was my latest project.
a137402.jpg
 
Being thrifty or frugal is good, being creative is even better!
Somewhere though, you've got to draw a line.

My dad would add water to an empty ketchup bottle, shake it up
and pour the runny mess on a sandwich. It was even worse when
he added water the second time. Frugal? How much do you save?

I had a boss once that bragged about when his grandkids said they
were hungry, he took them to Sam's club for all the free samples.

Same boss actually bought a pound of hamburg and a pound of
ground chuck, fried them and weighed them to see if the cost
per pound was worth buying chuck. No mention of taste.

Drive all over town with gas at $3/gallon to save 50 cents on something?

How about not filling your prescriptions?

Somewhere there's a line you just can't cross!

I don't run worn out tires on my road vehicles and I don't try to
save a penny on brakes.

Now, if you need to stay a little warmer plowing snow.....

mvphoto1512.jpg
 
I think I"ve done just about everything listed so far to at least some degree.

As far as being cheap or frugal, I hate to get rid of something that has life left in it, even if it needs a little TLC. Posted on CL the other night giving away a couch, love seat, and chair that I had in my house until I got married. The stuff is old, and needs a good cleaning after 6 years in storage, and a little repair to the padding under the cushings. I poste the same stuff months ago and had multiple repies wanting it but had to keep it because a machine came in "dead" and access to the stuff was blocked for over a month. Anyway, this last time all I got were smart a$$ed resonses telling me I was just a hillybilly that was too lazy to get rid of the stuff myself, or pay someone to get rid of it. I also got one telling me to burn it.

I wound up responding back to the one calling me a lazy hillbilly and gave them a piece of my mine....then posted another add telling all of them what I thought of their attitude and opinions (it got flagged and deleted within about 2 hours....LOL). In the end I felt a lot better venting and letting the lazy, good for nothing, idiots that seemed to only want "the good stuff" for free have a taste of my opinion of them. Did it do any good, I doubt it, but I sure felt better.....LOL
 
They that Necessity is the mother of Invention, but Invention was not an only child. Necessity had quite a large family that included Frugal, Thrifty, Practical, and others.
I don't think there is anything that there is much that I can add, but I have been known to start vegetable seeds in yogurt cups and such, and re-pot them as needed.
 
Sure wish I could find a mine of my own...LOL.... Funny thing if I found one, and then offered it up to the folks on CL for free, it better be dust free and have huge nuggets, diamonds, or whatever, lying around for easy pickings. No,I take that back, based on the responses I got, the 'loot' better be loaded in the carts and ready to be hauled out of the mine for them or they aren't going to be happy.....

That said, my responses to them basically stated that they could take their opinions and 'crappy' attitudes and place them in their own 'mine' where the sun doesn't shine.....and I sure ain't offering up my 'mine' for that....LOL.....Guess it must have struck a nerve with someone as fast as it got pulled....
 
LOL, Wayne, I always enjoy your posts! (Even if I give you a little &%$# from time to time!)
 
When I'm thru with something its been used and redone until it rarely exists in its original form.My Grandmother who raised kids during the Depression called it "Saving".
 
If I have something that is beyond repair, I'll take all the nuts and bolts off and put them in my shop. Saves a lot of time and truck fuel by not having to go to town every time I need a bolt or two.
Just yesterday I repaired a small break in a cross-fence. Horses had been going thru there for several weeks. When finished, one of the horses ran to the repaired fence expecting to run thru. By the time she realized there was a fence there, she couldn't stop so she had to jump over. I put some used square baler twine across the repair for visibility. No more problems.
 
Wayne, Same goes for firewood. Tried to donate free wood to low income families. One lady came out on the porch as I was neatly stacking a load of mixed hardwood. Complained that it wasn't all OAK and didn't want it. SOooooo.... Loaded it up and went down the road where there was an old man spliting wood for himself. Extremely glad to get it and thanked me over and over.
 
I'm about as cheap as you can get on a lot of stuff. Drives me nuts seeing people making $40K a year buying a $50K truck. That's stupid, simply insanely stupid. But there's the other end to it too- I'm a saver. But I run out of room. There comes a point where you just have to get rid of some of the stuff.
 
I to reuse alot of things. I work at a top 500 fortune company and see waste everyday. I clean up empty 5 gallon buckets and sometimes get nice building material from scrap shipping boxes. But sometimes you can only use so much reclaimed junk. My brother keeps old milk jugs and they are everywhere and are a huge eyesore. I prefer the empty alcohol jugs that I recycle from work that will last 5 or 6 years left out in direct sunlight..
 
Glad to see. I am not the only one to suffer through watered down ketchup. If we threw a bottle away. It had better be spotless inside.
 
Bed rails are high carbon steel.Hard stuff to weld and prone to cracking.I tend to give it away and buy new steel.
 
(quoted from post at 05:41:20 12/06/13) That ain't cheap.

Father in law drains the oil from his cars and pickups and uses it in his tractors.
Click to expand...

??? I thought everyone did that! Got a couple old rigs that leak as much oil as they burn, about a quart every hour. They get the used oil, filtered of course. No sense throwing good money after bad.
 
Bruce,


I thought I was the only one that did that. I asked my mother how to do that.

She showed me by using my sisters' hair. Talk about a tough rope when twine is braided.

D.
 
I got real good at braiding baler twine as a kid. Figured out how to braid 9 together at once, tie in new sections, and made ropes for our hay racks. You could tie them off, stand on them, and they wouldn't break.

Don't like to toss bolts, unless they are too small for a hitch pin and the threads are gone, but even then sometimes you find a use for one.

My laundry soap jugs go to the granary for stock tank floats.

Nesquick cans go to the shop for parts storage.

Aluminum cans go in the basement for use as a creosote build-up preventer.

We have about a dozen Valvoline oil jugs floating around the shop at work. I buy it by the gallon for my truck then we use them for motor oil, the boss gets it by the drum. We write "hyd" on it if we put hydraulic oil in it.

Trying to get every last 1/32 of tread worn off a tire can be done, but with the really cheap tires (think "goodyear wrangler radial") it doesn't pencil out. They won't hold a plug, so they get sent to town for patching, and if you add in just the time spent swapping the spare onto the truck, it doesn't take long to pay for a new set of good truck tires.

The boss' boy uses old twisted-up fence rods for lawn art for his mom. Old T-posts get used for making ramps for getting 4-wheelers onto/into trailers. They also work well for getting traction when a truck is stuck on ice or a pivot is stuck in the mud.
 
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