Here’s a couple examples from my life:
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Safety Razor. I get a better shave and it’s like $15 for 100 razor blades, which lasts me a couple years. Way way way better than the disposable multi-blade Gillette things, which sell 5 heads for $20.
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Handkerchiefs. I am prone to allergies, so instead of constantly buying disposable tissues, we now have a stack of handkerchiefs that can just be used a few times and then thrown in the wash. This has also saved me loads.
What about you?
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An interesting realization was that “saving money” and “reducing waste” are often competing optimums. I live in the developing world where there people waste a lifetime sitting at home doing nothing to save money. I am one of two or three people in my neighborhood with a job – the rest “save tons more money than I do” but don’t have jobs so their real income after inflation is negative.
Anyway, I figure out what my time is worth (based on what I estimate I could earn by grabbing extra contract work). Then I don’t spend my time saving money unless it saves something at least comparable to my hourly rate, or it’s in a context where working would be impossible, or there’s a nontangible element (e.g. repairing a thing I like a lot).
I prioritize not wasting my time first (it’s the only resource I can’t buy more of), and spend most of my spare effort finding ways to make more money (I regularly cram-study 2-3 hours per day for this purpose, usually tech). Then with the extra money I make, I can save 80% of my income on a good month.
When I started this habit, I made about 135 USD per month and had zero savings. Even if I saved 100% of my earnings, it still amounts to essentially nothing – so it became obvious that the best way to save more money, was to earn more money. When I had a little money, I didn’t put it in the bank – I invested it in myself by buying tools to learn more things and provide more services to accelerate my gains.
Anyway it’s not the right advice for everyone, I’m just another fool like the rest of us, but I hope it’s maybe useful to someone out there.
This comment generally only applies if you are earlier in your career or don’t have much to spend (earning will result in more money than saving). If you’re already making a middle to above average income, you’re likely better off reducing spending and increasing investments — 99.99% of rich people (including the minority born poor) don’t get rich through their labor (wage); they get rich through assets, whether through owning and building a business, or buying and holding shares in them.
I agree to a large extent! There are some interesting caveats though (mainly that I’m not in the USA). Six years ago I had a Vietnamese company license and 0$. I’m only very recently anything like “middle class” so I don’t have much experience with it.
The company license was key (as you say), but not due to growing it as an asset – it was more accurately an instrument to extract remuneration based on the value I deliver, instead of just the amount of time I spend. It also gave me control of how I spend my time. That meant that early on, I could only tackle low-value work and times were tough… but eventually I could solve more expensive problems and demand far more than I could as an employee. Selling solutions as a contractor (especially to foreign companies) made a ton more money than selling my labor as an employee.
In other words, my company is not worth much money as an asset, because without me, it’s non-functional. I also work with a lot of foreign VCs and am convinced that private equity inflates valuations pre-IPO by enough that there’s a lot less upside to capture than there used to be. Gone are the days when a private investor could buy e.g. Microsoft shares and see a 30x upside. Also, I’m in Vietnam – we do have a functional stock market, but the volume is much lower and stock ownership less attractive overall. Anyway, overall it would be hard to sell my company.
So there is a decent argument that my optimal path really is though labor – but definitely not through “wages”. Working for wages was always a mess where I only got paid half the time, and had to work all the time. Also it means my visa status depends on my employer, which has always lead to flagrant abuse. With my own company, I get more stable visa status.
I’ve also been offered equity for my work. However, I have said no 100% of the time and this has never been a mistake so far. One day maybe, but equity is a weirder prospect here than in the USA.
So I focus on selling the solutions to the most expensive problems I can solve. That’s put me on track to a home + modest retirement for my wife and I. That’s “enough money” for me and I will likely go back to academia and volunteer work ASAP. I have no desire for millions of dollars – even if I can maybe see a possible path to it.
I wish you and your family the best in that endeavour.
Can I ask what job/s you did starting off?
Ah, I was foolish enough to do web development in the developing world. It seemed like a good idea at the time – as the economy grew, I reasoned businesses would need websites – so I started a company to do this. In truth, it was really hard to bring client expectations in line with reality, most businesses were rent-seekers and did not want to invest even a small amount in their future, and I had stiff competition from undocumented migrant workers from the West that did not have any overhead. I barely scraped by at the time, and now platforms like Wix / Facebook / Grab / Lazada capture nearly all of that market anyhow.
Those were the early days of running my company. Later, I got into prototyping, which was a vertically-integrated margin business instead of a horizontal volume one (the former is much easier to run in Asia!). There is very little competition in my niche, but pivoting was brutally hard due to my low income at the time. I also got into writing about the things I was working on, which helped pay the bills. In many ways, my time spent here is an experiment in reflecting on some of the lessons I’ve learned.
Before that, I managed a branch of an Australian advertising company. That was my first job in Vietnam. I replaced seven or eight people. I received my salary less than half the time – but what can you do when your visa depends on your employer? Those years were quite bad too.
Prior to immigrating, I worked in medical research, and before that I was a scientist. Those years were pretty easy (even if they did not seem so at the time), but also around then I became acutely aware that I had no future in my home country. Looking back, I’m grateful for that – I had no right to see that far ahead, or with such clarity. It was pure luck that I had all the right ideas in my mind at the same time.
Did you have to do a lot of study to acquire those positions?
Medical research and science? Yeah. 3 years undergrad and 2 grad school, at a research university. One year between them, where I taught myself advanced statistics, experimental design, and Linux system administration. Undergrad was just a blur of studying and exams, but after that it was a bit better.
Long story short, medical research is a surprisingly complicated way to be poor. Salaries are way lower than I thought. I could have earned more money just working in retail, and the hours were worse (e.g. the clinic was always open during a clinical trial).
I also co-founded a tool sharing nonprofit and taught myself electronic engineering and some software, starting in grad school but continuing until I emigrated. After I got here, I just sort of took the first job I could get, so no initial studying for that one. I started studying software engineering more seriously starting around then.
I study around 2-3 hours per day.
Buy from bulk stores and markets instead of bagged supermarket products.
Switch to soap strips instead of liquid detergent for laundry
Cook yourself instead of getting delivery
Use public transport and or bike
Buy local produce and fruits that are in season
Use public transport
This is the biggest cost savings for me right now… Assuming I get a cheap rust bucket paid in full (estimate in metro Vancouver, BC in Canadian $s):
- I’d expect to pay $200 a month in insurance
- I’d expect to pay at least $100 a month in gas
- I’d expect to pay $250 a month in parking fees
- I’d expect to pay at least $500 a year in maintenance, repair and incidental items (oil, winter tire storage etc.)
So all together that’s $591 per month or $7100 per year.
Transit costs me $135/month and I’m lucky to live and work somewhere where transit actually sort of works.
This is particularly true with the multitude or car sharing programs that are available in major cities like Vancouver. The odd time you need a vehicle it is trivial to rent one, which is still cheaper than owning a vehicle.
You don’t even need a car sharing program, rental car companies still exist.
And this is true both for people looking to use public transit, as well as people people afraid to go electric because they take one monster road trip every 2 years, or people considering buying a pickup truck because one time they had to move a couch.
I love the principle of buying from bulk store but after a non-zero number of weevil infestations I tread carefully. Could just be bad luck though.
I feel like those pop-top plastic barrels would prevent weevils?
Perhaps. We probably could have sealed things better in jars, but it sure was a big and disconcerting mess.
as far as buying bulk, the idea it to look for price per unit, and with this you have to take at least a medium (month) or long (annual) look at the pricing. This is your typical restaurant budget strategy.
my dumbass read
Cook yourself
I wash and reuse ziploc bags until they get too many holes in them.
What do you use bags for that you can’t use reusable containers for?
Half an onion or whatever in the fridge, freezing meats in to portions, vegetable snack portions, taking crackers on the road, organizing little odds and ends, other stuff.
I do use containers and glass jars for other things and wash and reuse those too, but containers and jars take up too much space for some things and cost a lot more. The last time I bought a (100) box of ziplocks was like 6 years ago and it’s still half full so I’m ok with my method.
Definitely support this from the eco angle, but given how much you seem to use these bags (100 is a lot, but 6 years is a long time), do you not feel the $15/year is really not a big deal? Over that time, you’ve saved ~$75, which over 6 years… It’s not that much.
Not trying to discredit the method, I’m just curious as to what makes the method work for you!
It’s more about not wasting the plastic than it is about saving money. New bags come in to rotation from other sources too. Like my buddy gave me a weed cookie in a Frozen bag a year and a half ago. That one’s been rotating for a while and I smile every time I see it.
If you don’t own it, don’t pay for it. That’s one of my main principles and the motivation why I don’t pay for streaming services anymore. I also noticed that I wasn’t enjoying music and movies as much anymore anyway when it was in such high quantities. That’s just about saving money.
Other one is, I don’t buy anything of which i know of that it won’t work or keep much of its value anymore after several years. So I rarely buy anything with irreplaceable batteries, that basically ends up on the junk pile after 3 years.
I know how to fix almost anything mechanical and I usually try to buy really high quality things when I can. It means spending more money up front, but things tend to last a lifetime and I don’t have to buy it again.
I can’t even fathom the amount of money I’ve saved from buying older used vehicles and doing all my own automotive work on them, or fixing all my appliances. I couldn’t fathom a $400 vehicle payment. My prius I’ve had for three years I installed a new oem hybrid battery in and have a grand total of about $7,000 into (three years of tires and replacement parts and buying the car itself). Never had a vehicle loan in my 25 years of driving.
I wouldnt dream of swapping out a gas tank, or a combustion engine, but I did a diy battery swap on my gen 1 Leaf, and it was surprisingly easy (well, physically it was hell, but engineering-wise it was a piece of cake).
My attitude to fixing anything is “well, it doesn’t work now, it’s not like I could break it more”. Swapped out a 3 euro rubber ring on a 400 euro coffee machine last week, and feeling pretty good about it.
The leaf is quite doable, because it has a small battery and a small range. Most evs though, and the ranges that are needed to be a full on vehicle replacement without the need of a 2nd ice vehicle for trips out of town are far beyond the 85 mile range of a subcompact car like the leaf. The batteries are over 1,000 pounds and run the length of the vehicles underside.
I can swap out a 4 cylinder ice at my house (sure, that is beyond your average do it yourselfer). In no way could I swap out a 1,060 pound battery in a tesla model 3.
For the record, swapping out a gas tank is not very hard.
If you have a dishwasher, do NOT rinse things before putting them in. Just scrape off the bits into the bin. A big part of the efficiency of a dishwasher comes from not running more water or the water heater unnecessarily. If you rinse you might as well hand wash.
Also, use the cheap powder and make sure to use it in the prewash phase.
Good tech connections video: https://youtu.be/_rBO8neWw04
I also use a double edge safety razor, but have an electric razor also for a quick morning shave. Other things I do:
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I cut my hair with clippers I bought 15+ years ago for the price of 1-2 haircuts. This probably only works for people with simple, short hair, but has saved me thousands of dollars compared to getting a monthly haircut at $20+
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We put a basket with cloth napkins next to the dining table and a basket with washcloths on the kitchen counter and have drastically reduced the quantity of paper towels that we use
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One I don’t see here that we follow, if we didn’t absolutely need it yesterday we don’t want it today. Keeps us from buying things that seem like a good idea for aren’t really solving a problem for us.
Edit: Here’s another one. Buy cars for cash instead of a loan. Here’s how we do it: We save about $400 a month to buy a car, in a year we buy a ~5000 car. We do it again and then sell that first car for about what we bought it for and put the new ~5000 towards it.
Right now my wife drives a 2023 Ioniq 5 and I drive a 2014 Z51 Corvette with no payments. To be fair we’ve been doing this for a long time and we no longer do yearly upgrades. Last time was 5 years between upgrades and this time we think it’ll be 10 years between upgrades.
Not really a money saver, but I’ve been buying shampoo and conditioner bars. They often come in cardboard or paper wrapping instead of plastic containers like regular shampoo and conditioners. I enjoy the reduced plastic waste, and they don’t take up as much space in the shower.
The college geography department will sometimes sell old and outdated maps to raise some funds, rather than just recycling them. They make great wrapping paper that’s unique to you.
We also save all of our egg cartons and donate them to the elementary schools. Teachers love using them to help students learn math, especially fractions. They’re also useful for arts and crafts. Check with the school office before dropping them off, but I’ve never had the schools be anything less than enthused to have these.
My thermostat has a setting which allows for a greater temperature swing. I have it set at 2*. With the temperature set at 68f the heat refill not come on until the temperature reaches 66f. This causes the heat to run longer but less frequently, which is more efficient than running in short bursts. I also have a setting which runs the fan for a few minutes after the heat stops which scavenges the remaining heated air out of the air ducts.
I also open up my eastern/southern facing drapes/blinds in the morning to allow the sun to heat up the house through the windows for some free heat throughout the day.
Removing the window screens in the winter helps a lot too.
tldr: Being mindful and trying to find new ways of using stuff that I already have before I go buy new.
I reuse. All those bigly plastic bags from 20+ toilet paper rolls - I use them at least as thrash bags. That’s like simplest one, but also for example when my clothes are beyond being deemed worthy of being sleepwear, they get cut into cloths to live on as cleaning utensils.
When something breaks I tend to try to repair it instead of getting new stuff. If that’s impractical or not possible, depending on a thing I disassemble it, and salvage what can be useful. Also by doing this I learn how stuff was made, which I liked to know since being a kid :)
I found europalletes and repurposed them to make my balcony space nicer (made flooring and a small bench out of them) I also ask people if they have spare construction materials, like bits of wood or stuff like that. There are fb neighbour groups in my area, and it makes so much sense to me to use what I can get in my projects. I rarely have a full-on plan/vision of the stuff I want to make. I much rather have a storage with random materials and stuff and play adult version of Lego with them.
When faced with obsolete electronics, I try to repurpose it and assimilate into little Borg of mine (how I like to call my little network). I learned java a bit to write small android app to decode amiibo NFC data to control the stuff around my flat when phone (placed under the tabletop) detected Pikachu statue my lights toggled. Such stuff.
I dunno if with me it’s less about saving and more about how to use things in different way and getting most out of stuff. A chipped cup can still be an awesome pot for your new plant friend. Broken cutlery knife can be helpful as a tool when you wouldn’t want to use proper knife.
That said. When I have to buy something, like hobby-related, or electronics so guitar, piano, home recording studio shit like that, also PC parts - I set myself a budget, read upon things available, do my research and order stuff for 110% of my initial budget. What I mean by this, we have a saying in polish - chytry dwa razy traci - sly/greedy loses twice - as in you buy cheap shit, it breaks, you have to buy new thing again. When I set on buying something it will take me months to do my homework, and also because of my upbringing, lessens the anxiety from spending money.
Use a budget
To continue your first point buying a decent shaving puck and brush goes a lot further than buying shaving cream. Plus, I find it much more soothing on my face than the cream. A decent shaving soap is ~$5 and lasts a month at least.
You can also buy bar body wash instead of liquid, which is far cheaper as well.
