Ask Lemmy

i live in a garbage can

I cut my own hair. Doesn't sound like an inconvenience, but in the summer our house has no AC, and you'd be surprised just how stuffy one person can make a bathroom in 30 mins. And my hair has mostly looked like shit for 25 years. (The local hair styling school charges $2 less than local salons, so it's not super cheap here.)

I did surveys for money so I could buy things I otherwise wouldn't. I made thousands doing it and bought SO much stuff I needed and wanted. I got entirely sick of them though as it really is a grind and stopped. It's impressive how much stuff I bought with this money. (I'm happy to tell anyone how). Sometimes when I'm leaving for work I just think of everything I'm wearing or carrying that I didn't pay a penny for.

I go to the hair salon school and let students cut my hair to save money (it's super cheap) and began colouring it myself. I only get my hair cut like twice a year as well despite wanting to do it more.

I have like seven digital library cards, I give the library a fake address in their city and sign up. It actually only benefits them that they get more patrons reading books. I can request books at my library anyway that they don't have in their collection and they'll get it from another library too.

My health benefits through my workplace include orthotic sole inserts, but also you get two pairs of shoes. That's two pairs of shoes a YEAR. I have coworkers who do it and don't use the orthotic insert, just for the shoes. If you have workplace benefits look at everything they give you and use whatever you can.

I will price match at the grocery store to the penny. You just stand there and say "this is 5 dollars at Walmart" and nobody ever checks so if it's really expensive I'll tell them it's a price I've seen it be before even if it isn't that week. The cashiers will also say "this is X amount at X store" and ring it up without me asking sometimes too.

I'll go to my doctor and get a prescription for something so it goes through my benefits even if I could buy something to treat it over the counter. I'm Canadian so it doesn't cost me to go, and they're legit conditions, but I don't HAVE to go in. Universal health care for the win.

Our drug reps bring us food like once a week so that's usually my lunch that day.

My workplace has an employee perks program where insurance or phone carrier or clothing stores or whatever will give you discounts. My phone carrier was going to charge me 30 dollars more a month to upgrade my phone, so I went and looked into their phone plans, and got an employee pricing plan for less than half of that with much more data and international calling, through the same carrier through an employee pricing plan dealer. It was even 5 dollars less when I went to pick it up on Tuesday because the plans change all the time. So now I get 100 GB of data, international calling and texting as well as all my usual features, for 45 dollars plus 1 dollar a month for a new Pixel 10. Can't wait to hand my old phone in on Saturday to my carrier and tell them I'm done with their bullshit as they were going to charge me 100 a month. Fuck you Bell Canada.

A local church has a "good food box" program (for anyone who wants it, not just for low income people) where you get a bag of 10-11 fruits and vegetables every other week for 22 dollars. Saves me mountains of money at the grocery store and it's very practical. It's absolutely great, and you just pick it up at one of the two locations.

I usually take my hourly wage and compare it to the inconvenience. For example, if that inconvenience takes about an hour of my life, but saves me more than my hourly wage, I take it. There are exceptions of course, for example if I am low on money.

I'll use an office stapler to close a limb laceration before going anywhere near an emergency room because America is a fucking capitalist hellscape. So, moderate, I guess.

I’m pretty broke and have been for most of my life, so I’m pretty willing to be inconvenienced. Only thing I have to my name is a very old house in need of substantial work I can’t afford to do, on a very small town lot, and a car that’s falling apart.

I keep my heat set to 60f/15.6c at most, which is well outside of my comfort zone (I prefer being too warm over too cold). I use heated mattress pads/blankets to make it bearable, as they cost exceptionally little to use round the clock for a month, around a dollar a month vs the several hundred per month my heat goes up when kept to a comfortable temp.

I grow as much of my own food as I can. I know people do the math and determine that home grown somehow costs just as much as store bought, so it’s only good as a hobby, and I genuinely don’t understand that calculation. I compost and mix compost into my garden soil and my food is basically free..? And I recently added a small flock of chickens that eat my plant scraps and food scraps, and their waste is great fertilizer. It’s a nice holistic system. I also have some plants like tomatoes and peppers that grow year-round in hydroponics, the small amount of electric and powder nutrients used to grow them costs far less than the food they produce. I’m working on expanding my hydro options to sell surplus to friends and family.

I use compressed sawdust pellets (like for pellet stoves or horse bedding) as cat litter. It’s basically the same thing as feline pine but it’s $7 for 40lbs, which is enough to completely toss and replace the litter about 10 times per bag, more in summer because I use less (takes longer to dry out so needs to be replaced faster anyway). The litter is compostable, so it goes into a special pile that gets used as yard/flower garden dirt. However this requires that I stir up the litter at least twice a day, to allow the urine to dry properly. Else it just reeks of ammonia.

All food scraps, whether cat food or human food, get saved for something. Scraps my chickens can’t/won’t eat, like raw carrots, onions, garlic, and celery, get turned into broth along with bones. After being turned into broth, the remaining material goes into my worm compost. Anything chivkens can eat, especially cat food my cats don’t eat, gets saved for them. Egg shells get saved (by everyone who gets eggs from me) and used as calcium supplement for them.

If I can build or make something, even poorly, I’ll do that before buying a thing (beer, bread, covey coop, chicken coop, shelves, etc.). If I can repurpose existing tools to do a thing I only need to do once, I probably will even if the task is far more frustrating as a result. I desperately wish we had tool library here so I could just borrow stuff. But no. And on this same sort of trajectory; I’ll do things manually rather than using gas or buying new tools. I inherited a ton of really high quality hand tools from my grandfather, and I use them quite a lot. I also shovel snow by hand rather than putting gas in my snowblower, unless we are expecting a blizzard.

I have more but this is already too long so ima just stop.

Yesterday I transported a seven-foot long, 70# piece of furniture across town by bus.

How much do I dislike the inconvenience? Some types of inconvenience I'm very tolerant of, but others I'd rather pay the money.

Often times when it is discretionary, I choose to just skip it altogether. Like if I'm not willing to run out for fast food, I'm not going to use one of the delivery apps.

I almost never order snacks or fast food delivered, cheaper to walk to the store if I want it

A lot, I've walked across a city rather than pay for a taxi

Eight

Enough to use the stupid fucking fast food apps that need to ask which location I'm ordering from six times and every screen takes two seconds to load.

In a though spot? No new stuff. Rent, food, internet, electricity. Put everything to the side I can afford.

I live in a tiny garage "apartment" with only a washing machine, no dryer, and essentially "babies first refrigerator" too small to even keep a tub of ice cream in the freezer just so that I don't have to live paycheck to paycheck.

I'll take a bus for 1h rather than pay a taxi to get someplace in 10 min to save $40.

I have no idea, I'm quite frugal already without it being an inconvenience. If I'd step it up a notch to inconvenience I wouldn't be saving much more.

More dependent on how much money. $100 is a lot for me in general, so I'll definitely go out of my way. $20... Maybe, depending how much inconvenience and how much the remaining price is. I'll never under any circumstance inconvenience myself over less than $5, because I can't fathom a situation where $5 saves my life. Maybe if my entire family died.

I usually consider

• how much I hate doing it
• how long it will take to do vs
• how long it will take to find someone to do it
• how much it will cost. The weight of what is acceptable changes depending on how much I need the money at that time.

It depends on how much money you make, right ?

I'm fortunate enough that I have no issue covering essential expenses, so I've setup an automatic transfer after payday to move some of my wages to a savings account. In other words, I don't have to inconvenience myself at all to save

I will pay to avoid inconvenience.

I use spotify premium.