formatting newbie ;)
As the title says, i'm (we) a long time lurker here. Not because i need to save some money, but because i and my my wife are minimalists. So here are the things we did to get more frugal:
- Eating
We are vegans. When we started we spend a lot of money on meat sustitudes. They're overall expensive here in germany. So i bought a used sous vide vaccum sealer and some bpa free sous vide bags (sealer was 20€, bags are 6€ for 50 bags). I buy gluten for 6,49€ a kilo. Add a generous 10€ for seasoning an i get 2,4kg "meat on avereage. The vacuum sealer broke even in 2 weeks. Ohterwise we rely on beans, rice, potatoes and fresh veggies. Quinoa is something we eat once a week. I also make my own Almond Milk. I can make 4 litres with the prices i get 2 in a store. I also started making our own sweets. we are fond of date balls. They are very expensive. so i bought dates and make our own in the food processor. The beauty is that everything has multible purposes: Dates for the sweets and to sweeten the almond milk. Almonds for the milk and the date balls. cocoa for hot coco and the date balls. Cocoa butter for beauty oils and date balls.
- Personal Hygiene
we switched to soap. I buy 600g block of french olive oil soap at 4,95€. This lasts 4 Months for washing hands an showering. We had some concerns about the ph level, but we only shower every other day so the skin can regenerate. Plus my wife had an parasite outbreak at work (Old people home). She was the only one not affected because, as the doctor told her, soap kills the little buggers while ph neutral soap does nothing to them. Win win. shampoo is still used because dandruff. Not negotiable.
- IT and entertainment
We switched to Thinkpads (T420). Cheap spare parts on ebay. I was a big time gamer back then but i grew tired of it and the Thinkpad manages what i still play very well. Plus the minimalism was a big factor for going mobile. No more big rig. Mobile is still a Moto G2 LTE. Its 4 years old, but thanks to LineageOS as of the time i'm writing this i got the January 2018 Security Patches. No need to buy something new. For TV and web radio i use 2 Raspberry Pi 3 i scored for 50€ with some goodies. No more Advertisements.
- Car
Everything we can repair ourselfs we repair. a recent example are the breaks: to renew all break disks and brake pads we would had to pay 700€ in a shop. I bought the parts on ebay for 72€. Also i bought oil and a filter for 20€ and a new exhaust pipe for 60€. Then i spend 25€ to rent a hy draulic ramp (including the rent for special tools). After two hours we were done. A free pdf gave us all the Nm we needed. All up to code. After that we had a 600€ repair we simply couldn't do ourselves (Breaklines were rusty). It costed us 650€ because it is a very complicated thing with our car. But it wasn't to bad because of the savings with the things we could do ourselves.
- Misc
When ever i wash towels i put my dish scrubber in the washing machine with them. I wash towels at 95 Celsius. The dish scrubbr comes out as new with no smell to anything. Our current scrupper is 3 years old and looks like new. I do not do that with toothbrushes! Maybe it's an option, but mouth hygiene (and teeth) is too important to experiment with.
We only buy used. For example, i bought a big 750ml milk frither for our morning matcha latte for 25€. New price is 89€ and it is a current modell. I took it apart, cleaned out previous spills and it is like new. Used IT, used LED TV (32. we want something bigger, but wealso only want a new one when the old is dead.)
We got no fridge. We use a camping cooler. It uses 95% less energy and it suits our needs (Almond Milk, Seitan, curry paste, small stuff). In winter we simply have a thermo box outside on the balcony (so nothing freezes in the night).
Beauty Products are nearly non existant. we make our on body oil (Olive oil with lavender, tea tree oil or with a mixture of cocoa butter and coconut oil). My wife doesn't use makeup. Never did. So no clutter anywhere.
No sodas. we dring Fruit teas if we crave for something sweet.
No coffemaker. We have an adjustable electric kettle and a filtercone. also good for green tea thanks to the adjustable temperature. Waiting for water to cool down wastes energy.
Generally we repair everything we can. electronics, our car (already mentioned). Currently i'm in the process of getting powertools to make our own furniture. I like things modular and easy to dissasemble.
For storage containers we use glasses (from stuff we bought). They are air and water tight and cost nothing.
We live in a small appartment (Cheap rent, no shabby part of town). For years we thought we need something bigger. But we learned that the place isn't the problem. Our stuff is. so we cleaned out over the course of several years.
we don't go out to eat. we cherish cooking and our food is guaranteed sweat and spit free. we also use reuseable cups for our selfmade coffee to got. We bought rahter expensive cups, but the investment was in in 2 months and they are very sturdy.
Hobbies is something we are currently evaluating. I like to star sewing. My wife knits.
January 19, 2018 at 03:37AM
