I’ve noticed sometimes that there’s some half-baked videos or blogs or whatever that purport this or that frugal trick, but if you look at the time or math, it’s not actually frugal for you.
What are some examples of that you’ve come across? The things that “aren’t worth it”?
For me it’s couponing. (Although I haven’t heard people talk about it recently–has it fallen out of “style”, or have businesses caught up to the loopholes folks used to exploit?)
Growing your own food. The only way to make that shit pay is to groom a cult to do it for you, large-scale.
They’re called grand parents
Oh, I see somebody cracked the code.
I still buy the vast majority of my own food, but:
I’ve been eating the same $0.99 bell pepper going on three years now.
A $3 packet of jalapeno seeds has made a year’s worth of taco tuesdays.
I’ll never buy Mint again; I couldn’t get rid of my patch of peppermint if I wanted to.
I can grow much better tomatoes than what you’ll find at the local mega mart.
A $3 packet of okra seeds will thicken a year’s worth of gumbo.
My little vegetable garden, which is smaller than my living room, yields somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 pounds of produce every year.
Respect for that - I was mostly trying to be funny with my post, I have to admit. If you have a good patch of garden, with good soil and conditions, I guess that can pay financially, and for sure psychologically. But if you have none of that… I have eaten too many shitty tomatoes grown on friends’ and neighbors’ balconies to be kind towards that anymore.
Growing your own greens and herbs is super easy with a hydroponic setup, but obviously you have to invest the time into getting it set up. There are a lot of pre-made options available these days, though, so it’s not as much work as it used to be even just a few years back. Saves me a lot of trips to the grocery store.
The only thing I’ve successfully grown is tomatoes. And they tasted weird.
Eh, it really depends. I assume you don’t mean all your food needs here. It’s pretty easy in a lot of climates and situations to supplement nutrition and/or flavor by growing even one or two plants. Source: grew peppers, spinach, etc. on my tiny tokyo apartment’s balcony and would gift friends whole plants to put on their balconies/windowsills for the same and now do small-scale farming in rural north Japan.