Posts Tagged ‘cheap’

Frugal, cheap, or just plain weird?

June 11th, 2008

There is an interesting thread going over at FatWallet Finance discussing the “cheapest” things people do. Some are good frugal suggestions, some are just plain cheap, and others are just plain weird. Here are some of the ones I thought were most questionable:

  • Pooping at work to save on toilet paper.
  • Taking extra condiments and napkins from fast food restaurants for use at home.
  • Diluting whole milk with water to make two gallons into three.
  • Order water with plenty of lemons and then squeeze the lemon juice into the water and add in a few sugar packets to make a poor man’s lemonade.
  • When traveling, take the extra roll of toilet paper from the hotel room each day to bring home.
  • Go in after lunch meetings at the office to eat all the leftovers.

And a few that are most certainly inappropriate on some level:

  • Going to other floors in your office building and stealing a couple of rolls of toilet paper each day, sneaking them out in your lunchbox.
  • Covering up the return address on the business reply envelopes to use to send to other recipients.
  • Using items and then returning for a refund before the return period is up.

Anyone else care to share your odd money saving tips?

Throwing money down the crapper? Toilet paper and frugality

November 29th, 2007

I got a good laugh today on my lunch break reading this post over at AskDong. Dong talks about how he scolded his dad for buying super cheap toilet paper and proceeds to analyze how little money would be saved by using the cheap TP as opposed to the “luxury” TP. According to his analysis, one would only save about $1100 over the course of a lifetime by using the super cheap store brand sandpaper TP as opposed to a super nice brand like Quilted Northern, and argues the real savings is likely even less than that because he didn’t account for “the fact that about half my toilet paper usage is provided free at work”.

For us, we are pretty cost conscious and not brand loyal by any means. However, we don’t buy the super cheap 1-ply stuff that is like sandpaper. We used Angel Soft for over a year after hitting a big grand opening sale with coupons at CVS a couple of years back, and lately we have been using either the Member’s Mark or POM stuff from Sam’s. Both of those are decent 2-ply toilet papers and are reasonable soft. For us, either of these are a good compromise between comfort and cost.

So here’s the question: Do you go cheap on the TP, or splurge for the good stuff? Leave a comment and give us an idea of just how much money you’re throwing down the crapper (literally)!