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Whats a useful moneysaving tip you want to share? (lazysoci.al)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I use soap to clean myself. Every part of myself. Including my hair. Get a good, plain, unscented natural soap—and here I mean soap, not "beauty bar" or other such terminology used to disguise the actual composition—and you'll save oodles of money while avoiding the laurel sulfates that are so damaging to skin. You can even splurge a bit and get an Aleppo soap or any kind of castile soap that's ludicrously expensive for a soap and yet will be cheaper than having:

shampoo
conditioner
rinse
body wash
facial wash
facial rinse
… and a cast of thousands of other expensive products the "beauty" industry foists off on you.

Then there's deodorant. The last deodorant I bought cost me 20 bucks. For a supply that's thus far lasted me five years and is about half-finished. This is because I use alum powder (ground-up alum crystal) as my deodorant. You'll need the extra cost of a spray bottle too, so add a buck or two for the first use. But then it's about 2-3 teaspoons in a 500ml spray bottle every couple of weeks, topped with water. It's 100% unscented, will actually neutralize scents if, say on a really hot day of hard work, your clothes start smelling gamy, and works better than any commercial deodorant I've ever used in my entire life.

(If you want the same product for orders of magnitude more money, you can look up brands like "Crystal Stick" or the like, but you won't be able to neutralize odours on your clothing with it.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

As a former soapmaker, I'll suggest looking for someone in your area making quality soap that you like. Find some great handmade soap and you'll never go back to the commercial crap.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

I use nothing but handmade soaps. My main soap is Aleppo soap (from Syria) with a backup soap that's a goat milk soap (from Xinjiang). I occasionally splurge and get some "sugar soap" from Thailand.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I commented elsewhere about the excellent deodorant tip, but about soap... have you tried... not really using soap? Or extremely minimal amounts?

I stopped effectively using soap on my body about 8 years ago and I'll talk about the reasons later. To refine that a bit more, it takes me about a year to go through one 700mL bottle of body wash. That might conjure immediate thoughts of oily hair, blackheads, greasy complexion, body odor, and so forth. In my personal experience what happened was the exact opposite!

My persistent flaky skull went away, my bodily psoriasis improved dramatically, my constant accumulation of facial blackheads stopped, acne became a distant memory, frequent earwax plugs stopped, hair became supple and lustrous, skin looked oxygenated and uniform. My whole life shaving left my skin a rosy, seeping, abraded mess and after stopping the soap I can say with no hyperbole I can shave with only water and my skin looks and feels happy and unbothered. My overall stink level probably went down by a factor of 10, no joke.

This might venture into the realm of kookery somewhat, but I believe humans did not evolve to use soap to the degree it's used overall in society.

We should use soap, we must use soap. I don't want to cook out of my cast iron that's not been washed out and has sat there with congealing pork gravy for 2 days. There's no problem with soap, but I take issue with whatever 'force' took root sometime in the 50's that made people believe they must obliterate all the scary things everywhere infinity always via it's over-application.

Edit: To give an example, I don't think we should be washing the oils out of our scalps with soaps. Our scalps made that sebum for a reason. Then we buy products to try to undo the damage of the soap but can we just geodesic this problem and not disturb our scalps in the first place

Thoughts?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

You stink

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

No.

The less you wash the less you stink, quite counterintuitively.

Your body knows what to do. Wash your undercarriage and armpits, and then only a very little bit. Everything else makes you stink worse.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I used shampoos and body washes. I had all the problems you cited. I switched to soap. They all went away. ("Body wash", you see, is not soap. Nor is shampoo. Nor are "beauty bars" or any of the other terms the "beauty" industry foists off on us as cleansing products.

The issue, it turns out, is that most "cleansing" products are sodium or potassium (I forget which) laurel sulfate at their core (something that's easier to make at industrial scale and to attach additives like scents and such), and that stuff is horrifically bad for skin in a wide variety of ways. All the other crap we add like "moisturizers" and "conditioners" and "rinses" and such is there to undo the damage that the cleaning product caused in the first place.

Soap (real soap) is chemically very different and doesn't have the drying and damaging impact on skin that laurel sulfate does.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Yes SLS is your industrial surfactant. But it's just an alcohol molecule I think, hard on skin when used to excess but not inherently bad.

But even that, I think it's only tangential to my concept though. While the body wash can contain ingredients X, Y, or Z my point was I feel like we likely need 1/50th the amount of bodily cleansing vs the expected norms. I don't think we need to wash most of our bodies outside of our dick and pits, really. Hands obviously for sanitation reasons, the rest largely pointless and actively harmful in my worldview. Even your asshole has its own specialized lubricants that you're really not supposed to industrially strip out of there. Sorry to be graphic lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Is alum powder what the deodorant rocks are? Or are they the same method of clogging sweat glands like aluminum anti perspirant deodorants?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Deodorant rocks are alum crystal. Alum powder is the same stuff ground down to a powder. It is a deodorant, not an anti perspirant. You do not stop sweating when you use alum. It just kills the bacteria that cause the odour (which is why you can use it to temporarily clear the gamy scent of clothing as well).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I have used the crystals for years! Yes, just as you say, they are wonderful in so many ways!

They don't stain clothes, last seemingly forever, leave no sticky or feeling of residue on the body, keep me odor-free for more that 24h should I forget to reapply.

I've been reading your other comments with delight. Thank you for informing me about the powder form, I shall seek it out at once! I have found it difficult to buy them locally in the last year and the price online is often insane. I'm also quite the large-handed man so I butterfingers the sticks quite often and they shatter easily due to their brittleness, but ofc I'm to frugal to throw it away so I use the razor-sharp shards until they are small pea-size. Now I can use the powder and have infinite supply mwahahahaha!

The other great aspect is the odor neutralization aspect you mentioned. I do workout and it's very possible to lose sense of your own cloud of aroma. I've used pet enzyme spray to rid pits of persistent smells that no other cleaner thus far can remove, as (as far as I understand it) they don't break down the stank proteins and molecules like the enzyme. But if this alum powder produces the same result as the enzyme spray, I bow and thank you again. Can't wait to try it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

All these savings aside, you should also know where to save, and for that you need an example of monthly expenses you can compare yourself to. Luckily, government assistance programs do just that when they tell you how to live on their pittance.

Here's the one for Germany, rounded to nice numbers (source), so a fairly wealthy central European country:

200€ Food and drink (14%)
50€ clothes ( 3.5 %)
50€ energy
50€ transportation (!)
50€ communication
50€ leisure and culture
30€ furniture and appliances
20€ medication
50€ other

550€ total flexible costs (40%)

To compare to your bill, you also need to consider the costs the agencies just take on outside of that source I gave. These are the regular expenses that depend on location even more so, but just to have them here:

500€ rent, no utilities (source being the maximum the local agency covers in a moderately big city)
150€ utilities (guess)
200€ health insurance (guess)

850€ total inflexible costs (60%)

Making 1,400€ for one person to live one month in a German city in 2025.

Needless to say, unless you buy multiple AAA games a month, these expenses are dominated by inflexible costs, even more so if you're living in a place with a housing and health insurance crisis. Also note that the value for transportation is clearly too low for car ownership, if you need it for work that monthly expense better be covered by the extra income.

Now you should compare those values to your own expenses and reason why you spend more/less in some areas. And then you should be able to tell where you are living above your means, or if you need a more local comparison. And then you can still figure out how you can save 7% of your expenses by cooking at home.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Keep in mind you pay extra for convenience in many situations. It was said here before, but home cooking is the prime example.

Speaking of which, buy the stuff you use a lot off cheap, buy the expensive stuff only if you use it in small amounts. Example: I'm really into curry, so I use a lot of carrots and potatoes, the cheapest veggies here, but that alone is a bit bland. So i use moderate portions of whatever hearty veggies are in season (sweet potato, zucchini, pumpkin, eggplant). There's also this really good curry paste I like, and I didn't even bother comparing its price since I know I will need to buy a new one in half a year at the earliest.

As a consequence of that rule, skip on meat. Too expensive and too big portions. Even if you still want to celebrate the end of a week/month with it, you really need to learn some veggie recipes for the work week.

I find rice to be the perfect balance between work-intensive potatoes and pricey -in- comparison pasta. So I of course use literal 10s of kilos of it and don't buy the minute rice (again, surcharge for convenience), but from the local Asia mart for cheap.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

As a consequence of that rule, skip on meat. Too expensive and too big portions.

Or learn to use meat the way human being used meat before wannabe nobles deciding to ape their betters normalized a meal with over 50% of the plate being some kind of meat.

Asian cuisine (Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.) has, to me, the best balance of meat/eggs/whatever to vegetables. Proper home-cooked meals have maybe 10% of calories coming from meats. Indian cuisine is also pretty good at the meat/other balance. Europeans start going way too meat-heavy, and North Americans view vegetables as that little bit of colourful stuff around the rim of the plate that's there for colour, not consumption (or so it seems to my eyes).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Or learn to use meat the way human being used meat before wannabe nobles deciding to ape their betters normalized a meal with over 50% of the plate being some kind of meat.

Dayum! Meat culture summed up in one sentence.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I remember 50% vegetables, 30% carbs, 15% protein, 5% other from somewhere.

Another place (especially USA) we're falling down is snacking foods, like prepackaged chips. They're designed to make you consume more while not providing anything of value to our diets. And not so surprising, the wanting to snack constantly goes away when I'm able to cook and consume food made with real whole ingredients. Even jarred sauces or canned vegetables are lacking /something/ vital.

Frozen veg and a bag of potatoes has become a cornerstone of my cooking.

Certain produce like tomatoes I try to buy the multicolored heritage versions. Even produce is suffering from enshitification with the modern versions losing flavor and nutrition in favor of appearance, shelf life, ship ability, etc.

Anyway, I went on a high rambling rant. Sorry, I'll go hit my pipe again before i start some aluminum origami

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have had a crackpot theory since my 20s that the grand obesity epidemic of the Americas was caused by industrial food production, even of the supposed "fresh" foods. My mother has always been a gardener. When we lived in a nice bungalow in Edmonton she grew vegetables and flowers. When we lived in a short row house in Inuvik, she would garden in the very short summer and then take everything indoors using grow lamps and humidifiers to keep as much alive as she could. When we lived in an apartment block in Germany she'd purchased a bunch of planter boxes that hung on both sides of the railing to continue.

I lived my life with fresh, homegrown veg, in short. Until I left home and bought groceries from a grocery store.

What struck me most were the tomatoes. My mother's tomatoes were smaller than grocery store "fresh" produce, but were a deep, blood red. The red continued to the inside where the grocery store ones were more yellow/orange on the interior. My mother's tasted rich and flavourful. We'd cut them almost paper-thin to put on sandwiches and burgers, for example. The grocery store ones had almost no flavour at all. A bit sweet. A bit starchy. A hint of tartness. And that was it. To get even a ghost of the same impact my mother's thinly-sliced ones had on things, I needed huge slices, 5mm or more thick. It was crazy.

And that's when I got my crackpot theory that the techniques used to make large, even-looking, produce in huge quantities leached flavours out of things. The raw caloric content was roughly the same, but all the flavours were dilute. And since we evolved to desire required micronutrients by flavour, colour, aroma, etc. (lacking the ability to measure them in our bodies) the lost flavour, et al makes us eat more to get the same feeling of satisfaction.

And what happens when you eat more…?

(Now note: I identify this as a "crackpot theory". As in I'm not saying it's the truth simply because I lack the scientific evidence to support it and lack the time or energy to find said. I'm sticking with actual fresh, not factory fresh, produce and other foods because they taste better. I just think the issue might be a lot deeper than taste.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I've watched documentaries where they touched on it. I don't think it's a crackpot theory at all.

I used to have a friend that gardened (tbh it was weed) and he did a lot with mixing nutrients for his babies, commercial fertilizer doesn't put nutrition back into the soil or the plants in ways we can benefit. They're only designed to benefit the plants in ways that are profitable for them.

The most satisfying food I've had came from my relatives gardens that had healthy compost piles. On our own, my parents used chemical fertilizers and the results were lacking.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I got a twist for the fellas! Look at women's clothes at the thrift. There's far more variety than in the men's section and it's stupid cheap. Also, if you're non-fat, women's tops tend to cut in subtly at the waist, trés chic. Imagine, clothes that don't look like they used a whiskey barrel for a mannequin.

A good chunk of my shoes are from the female section. Got several jackets and other winter tops that look dead sexy. Used to pay way too much for white linen to wear at the beach or river. Here's the top I wore yesterday. (Boat's too small for 4, even though we're all tiny. Kids took turns getting towed.) Pulled two white tops at the thrift and my wife was shaking her head, "No! Those are for girls!" Yesterday she thought I looked hot and tried to give me told-you-so that the tops would look great on me. Whatever.

Here's one of those tops with a woman's vest, $4 for both. Just noticed, that's a woman's watch, $2 plus a new battery. Wish I had more pics handy, but you get the idea.

CAVEAT: The buttons and zippers are ass backwards.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Nice! Slick info, and suave looking dude! Thanks man!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Shirts and shoes are pretty much the only women's things I don't bother with as they're the only ones that are sized/cut in ways that don't feel comfortable/fit on me. I've never found women's shoes big enough for my men size 13 feet and shirts have too much material in the front that makes the whole thing hang weirdly.

The shoe thing annoys me so much because the ONLY shoes for men seem to be white, black or brown in 3 flavors of style (work boot, loafer, or sneaker). Meanwhile the women's shoe section is 3 times bigger and has all kinds of cool shit too small for my feet.

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