What are some of the out of the ordinary ways that you save money? You know the ones that make your relatives give each other that look over your head! Like maybe it's time to have you checked out by a mental health professional (just kidding of course) I remember once money was pretty tight nad I ran out of laundry soap. My husband works out of town in the summer and he had a bunch of those little bars of soap. I put them in an old pan with some water and melted them down into a thick rather gloppy mess and used this to wash my clothes for most of a winter. I just left it sitting on a shelf in my laundry room and added some water when it got really thick. I used about a fourth of a cup in a load of clothes, they came clean and smelled pretty good. My daughter called it my witches brew and almost died laughing. One day my mom was there and my daughter showed her what I was using to wash laundry. My mom said she would have loaned me the money to buy some soap!! But my theory was that I had a supply of soap that filled the need so why buy any. Now at least I know I can get by without it!!!! Let's hear some frugal out of the ordinary money saving tips for the New Year. THANKS.

-- Melissa (cmnorris@1st.net), December 22, 2000

Answers

Scrounging at old dumps.When hiking around you often come across old dumps in the woods.I've come home with some pretty awful looking treasures.Even hubbie would shake his head. Some had to be pitched, but some cleaned up good.Found milk of magnesia blue bottles in a swamp dump. Old glass lid jars in another place.If I find an old dump,I start hunting.

Scrouging while picking up litter roadside also.Found $20 once.

-- sharon wt (wildflower@ekyol.com), December 22, 2000.

I love these questions!!!!My favorite thing to do is to walk thru he grocery store and say "I made that" ,(Fruit,ketchup,soap,candle,we raise what meat we do eat,I dry snacks for the kids etc. you get it..or"I don't need need that"(flour grains,soup mix etc.cuz we started a bulk buying co-op)I love to walk thru wal-mart and see the 89.99 quilt I just bought at the goodwill for 10.00I make 4 batches of soap each year 2 to sell,1 to give away and 1 gets us thru the yearMy son is a butcher so I get cheap fat and render it at home.I water down shampoo when I use store bought,dish soap etc.A lot of this started over Y2k,but it has been a fun adventure still.We would like to take this next few years to learn all the skills we can ,and then...well we shall see where God leads!!!...and make gifts!!! gotta go I'm on a roll lol teri

-- teri (mrs_smurf2000@yahoo.ca), December 22, 2000.

Hmmm my family thinks that everything I do is weird. My Grandma officially gave up on me when I got my first milk cow. For me my garden and milk cow are my biggest money savers. Cheese, butter and ice cream are expensive! Since I have been living on a cistern here lately I have begun to realise how much water a conventional home wastes. Since we have been snowed in and can't get water delivered it became crucial to conserve it. Even with a low flush toilet we use tons of water. We started using 'dirty' water from doing laundry and baths to flush the toilet. I told some friends of mine about how much less water I was using....I think they have psychiatrists combing the woods with a straight jacket!

-- Amanda in Mo (aseley@townsqr.com), December 22, 2000.

teri, I do the same thing in the stores. I have an old standing friend who is a real go-get-um consumer and she just looks at me and shakes her head sometimes. My extended family (even some of my adult children) thought I had really gone over the edge the couple years that we didn't have a phone. I think of all the things I have done, that was the one that drew the most controversy.

-- diane (gardiacaprines@yahoo.com), December 22, 2000.

I save the empty toilet paper rolls. I put them in a empty detergent box on top of the dryer and stuff them with dryer lint and use them for fire starters.

-- Martha Matthews (marthafromwa@webtv.com), December 22, 2000.

We were a bit short of money when our house was being built so I sold my pickup and built my own little sports car. Plywood body on a steel frame with genuine (i.e. willow) wicker work trim. I drove it every day for ten years and it never went out of fashion!

-- John Hill (john@cnd.co.nz), December 23, 2000.

Presently people at work think I'm a little nuts as i was always taking wood out of the scrap wood bin at the motor pool where i work Pallets crates what ever is in good shape and will work on what i'm building Had a offer of 400 dollars on the wifes bookcase/hutch. And from bieing a landscaper in the past you would be supprised how many flowers and shrubs that our customers will pay you to take away. And never mind fire wood Heck you would be supprised at the number that would buy it back after it was split. Had a niebor that built the nicest two car garage in the area from the crates he salvaged form work he only Paid for concrete, nails, shingles, and paint.

-- Anthony J. DiDonato (didonato@vvm.com), December 23, 2000.

Now that husband has started a handyman business (he started in June) he's seeing that there are a lot of things that others throw away that are still good and usable...maybe I can even get him interested in dumptster diving how!!! He got perfectly good lights that are really pretty for our ceiling fan...that somebody was throwing away...he's gotten bathroom lights and a beautiful storm door in perfect condition somebody has just thrown out...the glass and everything in it was still intact!

We can and freeze a lot from our garden and that is a major money saver for us and I've really gotten into making jams and jellies...

We've just bartered a little but he may bater some work to get us several boxes of self-stick tile that someone has stored in their garage that we could really use in our kitchen where the vinyl is peeling up....

We're just trying to watch every penny!!!

-- Suzy in 'Bama (slgt@yahoo.com), December 23, 2000.

My froiends think everything I do is really weird. They cannot comprrhend why I would want to can my own food when it's 100 degrees outside and you can buy it 3 for a dollar at the store. The goat milking is a real stretch for them as well.

Pallet scrounging and building a shed from tin taken from an abandoned falling down building...Oh, spending four days knocking the broken shower drain out from under two feet of concrete so I could fix it without having to spend a minimum of 1k drew a lot of strange looks. There were some real squeamish moments with weird little wriggly things. But 1K is a ton of cash and I fugured I could shower with the house every minute or two until I got it done. I did get it done! Nothing that would be wierd to anyone here, but to other people...it's straight out crazy.

-- Doreen (animalwaitress@excite.com), December 23, 2000.

Wake up and start our day! Freinds and family say insanity doesn't run in our family.... IT GALLOPS!! example they say "why raise worms for compost when you can buy it?" My response "I like to and I WONT buy it." then I whinny and say the insanity gallop pledge.

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), December 23, 2000.

My co-workers think I'm nuts because I'm always checking out the trash pile (I work for Habitat for Humanity) looking for useful things. Our supervisor recently threw out a high-end power cord and a nice pneumatic hose that had been accidentally ruined when our truck was being backed up and was guided onto them by well meaning, but green coworkers, and spun out. I took them home and hubby says he can put new ends on both of them, getting two hoses and two cords for free. The irony of it is that I was the one driving the truck (first month on the job!) (also the first - and no doubt last - time he had ever brought his own tools to the site!). I'm always getting goodies like oodles of copper wire cut-offs when the electricians come through (just right for craft projects, but could be collected for salvage) and plenty of small odds and ends of all kinds of construction stuff like busted window screens and the like (just the thing for an outdoor dehydrator!). However, my friends thought I had gone completely over the edge this fall, during my leaf envy phase. We needed leaves and Durham NC is full of them (whereas I have a dearth of anything but quackgrass). So I spent my lunch hours raking leaves and plundering bags set out on the curb by the locals. Talk about weird looks!

Cheapo hint: If you get your gas when it's cold out (am, usually), the gas is more condensed and you get a bit more for your cash than you would otherwise! Talk about cheap!

We always run around back of the local strip malls when we go grocery shopping as you never know what you'll find. Thom also used to bring home all kinds of stuff when he was working as an apt maintenance guy - people would just move out and leave whole rooms of stuff behind. I was joking with a volunteer the other day about this and when we figure it out, I was wearing only one or two things that I actually paid for (thrift store pants and coat) and the rest were gifts or found. It's very cold here now, so I was really layered up, too. It was pretty funny to think that I was almost completely clothed for free, while wearing so much!

-- Soni (thomkilroy@hotmail.com), December 23, 2000.

I do what teri does. Feels good all over not to be dependent on the grocery for everything, doesn't it?

-- Cindy (atilrthehony_1@yahoo.com), December 24, 2000.

My husband is the junkster! I am thrifty about most household stuff, my family has been shocked, but nice about it and even curious about some, I guess it started when my kids were little and I used cloth diapers, my Mom refused to use them when she watched them for me, she kept her own box of disposables, then there was the hanging out clothes to dry in pleasant weather, (and I have a dryer), using baking soda, vinegar and bleach for cleaning (this one my sis has used when in a pinch), but I guess the biggest shocker even for a few homestead friends was when I started making and using my own feminine cloth pads, now my sis wants me to make her a few to try.

-- Carol in Tx (cwaldrop@peoplescom.net), December 24, 2000.

We trashpick! We end up driving into the city for regular doc's appts about twice a month, and we try to schedule it with the day before trash day in the ritzy areas. We have college calendars and hit the university dumpsters on end-of-semester move-out day. Most of the stuff in our house is trashpicked, except for what is gifts. We milk goats, keep chickens for eggs, make our own cheese and yogurt, have a wood cookstove and cut our own wood - on weeks when the snow is too thick to haul logs out of the back woods, we've gone to the pallet recycler place and gotten free falling-apart pallets, cut them up and burned them. Oh, yeah, free pallets in decent shape make superb animal fencing. And old windows at the dump can become a greenhouse, or cold frames. We have two chest freezers, which do contribute to the electric bill, but we stuff them full! We buy produce out of the grocery store "slightly wilted" bin, precut or preshred it, and freeze it in plastic bags, then it's ready for use later. All leftovers are similarly frozen in single-size bags and labeled. Anything that nobody wants to eat goes to the animals. We buy day-old bread cheap at bakeries and freeze it in 2 layers of plastic grocery-store bag. We ask at bakeries for their 2 or 3 day old donuts or rolls for food for our chickens (and OK, we eat some of it). When the grocery store has corn in the summer, we show up and take away all the scrap cornhusks (there are usually bags full) and feed them to our sheep and goats. Oh, and we insulated our outbuildings by asking every city friend we had to save us all the styrofoam packing peanuts their business or job was throwing away - we got four pickup truck loads and filled all the spaces between the inner and outer walls and it works good! (Don't do this with starch peanuts, or with any wall with a stove or heating element.) We built a "field kitchen" for hot summer days, with "big storage coolers" made of dead washers and dryers. We sunk a dead fridge into the ground on its back in the barn for a root cellar. And so on.....I'd better stop now.

Raven

-- Raven Kaldera (cauldronfarm@hotmail.com), December 26, 2000.

There is a treasure trove of free canning jars out there! Each time I stop by the re-cycling center, I peer into the clear glass bin. The yuppie spaghetti sauce (5 Brothers, Classico, et al) jars are actually mason jars. Also, they are 26 oz, which I find an ideal size for those things (and spaghetti sauce is one) where a pint is too little, and a quart is too much. GL!

-- Brad (homefixer@SacoRiver.net), December 27, 2000.