…to a reasonable degree, at least.
Wrapping paper and bows/ribbons. THey’re just gonna get torn up anyway, no reason to spent a ton of money to make it fancy
Gotta love the wrapping paper so thin you can see the gift under it
I just use brown kraft paper and some basic ribbon in a color appropriate for the occasion. I think maybe $15 in materials has given me a solid decade of gift wrapping and I haven’t even gone through half of it yet. Costs basically nothing on a per gift basis, and I get way more compliments on my wrap jobs than I did before I switched to using brown paper.
I had a friend wrapping gifts in the free maps you could grab at the post office and library. Those always looked cool.
My grandfather used to wrap our presents in the comics pages from newspapers when I was a kid. I loved it.
Same for me. It was easy for him to spot which gifts were from him when bringing them to our house and putting them together with the other gifts too, so that was another win in his book :)
I had some older relatives who would use the Sunday comics as wrapping paper, and I’d open the gifts carefully so I could read the comics when I was done.
Generic medicines
Water
Weddings.
Yes, It IS a big day. It’s not such a big day that you spend your entire life savings, and have no future.
Get a DJ, get a cake, get a hall, get a photographer…forget the doves, forget the ice sculptures, forget the wedding planner, forget the genocidial mimes, forget the big limo, keep it small. Do you really need to invite your great aunt, who you’ve seen 3 times in your life?
You should NOT be spending like $20,000 on a wedding.
Mine cost $150. $70 for the license and $80 for the JP to do their thing.
I’m sure JP stands for something reasonable, and that makes sense, but my mind struggles against itself, and all I can imagine is it stands for “Japanese” and also my brain things “Jurassic Park”.
So even though I’m 100% confident that this DIDN’T happen, I’m just imagining your wedding, with people sitting down, waiting for the bride to walk the isle…meanwhile, over by the other side of the room are bunch of Japanese cosplayers all recreating scenes from Jurassic Park. Complete with inflatable dinosaurs and .wav files of dinosaur sounds.
All the while your guest list is like “WTF is even happening over there???”
I’m sorry. I don’t know what ACTUALLY happened at your wedding, but it would have been a HUGE upgrade if you had dinosaur fights, and Japanese cosplayers.
A friend of mine donned his nicest clothes and went down to the courthouse with his fiance and a couple of witnesses. I mentioned this to my sister, and she mentioned that in retrospect, she wished she’d done something similar when she got married.
Did the same, then went out for a nice meal, weddings are a complete waste of money.
Don’t take a loan either.
My wife and I spent $350 altogether for the paperwork and an officiant. We eloped beneath a tree in a park with her family present, and afterward I returned my dress shirt to Walmart for a refund. I will never regret how low-class that was.
We’ve been married now for ten years.
The genocidal mimes are non negotiable
out of the loop, what are genocidal mimes?
It’s right there on the tin
I know right…we HAVE to have standards
Spent less than 1k, no real honeymoon…but we bought our first house with the money we saved. 0 regrets.
This. This right here.
Couple goals.
My brother’s father-in-law had offered to pay up to $15,000 for his daughter’s wedding. He gave them the option of taking it all in cash and then getting a courthouse wedding so they could have a nest egg to grow, or spend it all on the wedding of his fiancée’s dreams, or anywhere in between.
She opted to spend it all on the wedding. 😒 My gawd did that piss me off.
I’m in agreement except for the wedding planner. Whether they help with the planning from day one or are just the day-of coordinator, a good wedding planner is worth their weight in gold. I’d rather plug an old mp3 player into a portable speaker and skip the DJ before I recommend skipping out on the planner.
Oh, by DJ, yeah, thats all he’d be doing is controlling the winamp playlist basically.
And a wedding planner I don’t see as being needed.
Step 1) rent local venue.
Step 2) ask cousin to be DJ.
Step 3) pick up cake from dairy queen.
Step 4) Flowers??? I’m sure the florist can figure something out.
Thats about it.
eh, as a photographer that works weddings, any wedding without a planner is hell for me. i might actually just say no if that’s the case.
if you hire people to work it you should have a person who can be their go to while you are getting married.
if you go for an event like you describe people will be unhappy at the lack of food and leave after not long. if that’s what you want, good for you. go for it. if you want people to stick around and have a good time, you need to feed them. that’s expensive, even if you somehow make it all yourself with food from the farmers market, it’s still going to be over a thousand dollars for most people. again, unless you only invite like five people, but most people care about more than 5 people. throwing a big party of any kind isn’t cheap unless you throw a terrible party.
you don’t have to have a traditional wedding at all though. my sister got married during COVID in her backyard on video call. it was lovely. a big beautiful wedding with lots of people is also lovely and uniquely fun. just don’t let you relatives pressure you into things you don’t want. there’s where it always goes wrong.
Absolutely! Making it memorable and fun does not mean making it expensive. Cut whatever you can’t afford, do not take out a loan to cover anything. Then cut anything that isn’t meaningful to you and your partner.
A wedding planner is helpful if you don’t have a trusted and naturally organized friend who volunteers to handle details for you.
I’d also recommend taking a local honeymoon.
Here’s my pro tip.
You want a unique picturesque wedding on a budget?
National Parks in the US. If you keep your guest list under 50 people, you can get married anywhere in the park, provided you don’t block access, put up decorations, or damage the park, and it’s free! If you have more than 50 people, you need a permit, and those are raffled off per day, and almost no one uses them.
I got married on the bluffs overlooking Little Hunter’s Beach in Acadia National Park. The drive, food, and lodging for my wedding there cost less than the first payment for the venue of my “local” ceremony in my home city, which we ended up canceling anyway.
If you do get a permit, are you allowed to put up decorations?
I laugh when I hear some couple spent $20k on their wedding but can’t buy a house. Dude, that could have been your down payment wtf.
I mean…yes and no. A down payment for a single family home in today’s market is many orders of magnitude more expensive than $20k. But I agree that weddings are too expensive. Just have a small party and use that money elsewhere.
We bought a house, had the wedding in backyard for $10K, we put it all on credit cards for the sign up bonuses and had a 2 week honeymoon to Europe staying in 5 star hotels and first class flights all for $1,300 in signup fees.
Go, and preach this gospel to SE asian families, I beg you.
Getting away with a wedding for under 80k sometimes is considered “cheap” by those standards. And you absolutely must invite your third cousin once removed and your nextdoor neighbor who you hate. You see him every day afterall!
We spent less than 10k on our wedding and only invited close family. Did most of it ourselves. It was the best day ever!
Our wedding was under 5k, excluding dress and suit. Immediate family and close friends only, less than 40 people. Major expenses were the photographer, food and booze. We rented a cheap, small place in the countryside, we planned and did everything else ourselves, having a kanban board in the kitchen for a year was fun! My wife even did the cakes herself because she’s an amazing amateur pastry chef. No DJ, but I spent months on and off curating a playlist with a good flow and steadily increasing intensity.
It was the perfect wedding. Huge amount of work but 100% worth it.
We had our wedding at our house in the backyard, no DJ, a discounted cake from my wife’s work (a bakery), catering from a BBQ place. Still ended up costing just about 2k, after food, flowers, and rented tables and chairs.
$20k?
Damn dude, all my friends getting married are spending a minimum of $50k. $15k gets you the venue for the night without anything else included or factored in (food, music, fucking chairs or tables or lights, etc)
Weddings are a predatory business.
We got out cheap at about $25… we had a smaller (100 person) wedding, went budget on the food, had a DJ, cake, etc. (basically just what the OP said), and we were still hand crafting stuff to reduce the cost. Shit is fucking expensive.
$25 is cheap, imagine one that costs a whole fifty dollars /s
I can get a venue for like $200. What are you guys renting??? The Royal Palace???
Venues (and other services) usually jack the prices way up when the word Wedding is involved. Which makes sense since weddings typically don’t have a lot of room for errors.
It varies a LOT regionally.
Look for a venue in Maryland, you know, with DC right there.
I have a friend who’s entire wedding was the same price as a venue in Maryland.
We got married in DC and saved so much money on locations. We booked the Jefferson memorial 6 months in advance for like $50 (saved a couple thousand), and a boathouse on the Potomac for $800 (saved 8-20 grand) because we knew someone - wedding still cost like 33k. We were so cognizant of cost too - no flowers at all, DJ instead of a band, bought our own booze, etc.
I think people don’t realize how much more expensive cities are, and also do a terrible job accounting for all the true costs of things. Food was obviously the bulk of it and other big things like booze, rings… But I kept impeccable records, and what really added up was the little $100 here, $300 there things. Hotel and plane tickets for destitute father-in-law, all the meals at restaurants you’re taste testing to see if you wanna have the rehearsal dinner there, tips, food while the bridal party is getting ready, gifts for bridal party, the officiant, etc etc.
I wouldn’t trade it for the money back because I’m notoriously cheap, so I pinched and saved and was super proud of our wedding’s price to quality ratio, but I’d be lying if I said the final tally wasn’t super painful and didn’t delay our house a bit. It worked out in the end, though. Thanks interest rates!
Yeah, people definitely don’t understand that you can cut so much and bargain hunt the whole thing and still spend 15-20k. That’s a"cheap" wedding. The average in my area is 33k. That’s not because people are just spending frivolously and don’t budget, that’s because every single aspect of a wedding is expensive. Hell, tipping out the bar staff and photographer alone is expensive.
Skip it if you want, but even as a very frugal person, I’m very happy we had a huge party with lots of food and an open bar. It’s worth it to spend money on life rites. Life rites are like half the point of being human!
If you don’t care about celebrating with friends and family, don’t spend the money, but for us sharing the day with the people we love and merging our families was important.
Headphones. Once you get to the $300 range, the more expensive ones sound different, not necessarily better. I have some electrostatics that have great extension, but the “real” sound is so harsh after a few hours.
Yeah, I’ve noticed this too. I’m not an audiophile, but I do enjoy quality audio. Everything seems to plateu around the 300$ price point. At that level, the sound is reproduced with as much accuracy as reasonably possible, and the build quality is pretty good. Anything beyond that point is basically added “features” and does not reflect improvement in sound reproduction.
I don’t want “Tripple bass rumbler”, or “Crisp treble supercharger”. I want my headset to reproduce the audio as perfectly as possible, without altering it.
Come to think of it, adjusted for inflation, the Roland headsets I’ve had for the past 20 years have all been around 300$
I mostly agree with that, I would even go as far as saying that the reproduction quality starts to plateu with good $100 devices. A vast majority of the audio recordings isn’t just good enough in quality for a good headset too make much of a difference. All of the music if you’re using spotify xD.
That said, I don’t have a lot of things, but I consider the outrageusly expensive Sennheise IE 600, I typically wear 10h+ daily, worth it.
How can you reasonably enjoy Subwoofer: The Movie without the $1600 triple bass rumbler?!
Yeah, I’m in pretty much the same agreement. As long as it’s tuned well, comfort takes top priority for me. Sometimes though, the right combination of things can cost a bit more.
I’m not sure you should “cheap out” on headphones per se. The really cheap ones are usually horrible, both in terms of sound quality, usability and comfort (well, except for wired Apple ones, allegedly, though they never fit me right). It’s just that it makes no sense to go for really expensive ones, unless you’re really into audio and love hearing the tiny sound reproduction differences between them, or enjoying the different tech etc. The middle ground of $50-$100 for in-ears and $100-300 for over-ears will often offer you good/great/excellent sound quality and the same usability&comfort as more expensive ones.
Former chef: Knives. My most expensive knife is $80 with a lifetime warrantee. Most are $10-$20. Instead, learn how to use and take care of a knife.
Good advice but I wouldnt really call that ‘cheaping out’. You can buy kitchen knives for 2$ which you definitely shouldnt do
Disagree. My favourite paring knife came from a discount bin at a dollar store in a pack of five. You can find decent knives at a dump if to you look hard enough, depending on your definition of cheap.
If the handle falls apart then the average person cant do shit about it even if blade quality is the same as a nice one.
I have hope for the average person.
I think you should get expensive knives as a convenience, or you are pushing the limits of the steel. I cook a lot, and do lots and lots of chopping to cook food for the family. There have been times I’ve fine diced 10lbs of onions in one go, on top of cabbage, tomatoes, peppers etc.
With that much chopping, anything that can’t shave like a razor is dull. That’s why I use a really nice knife, thinned, sharpened and tuned it to my preferences.
TLDR most people are fine to use any generic knife (if you lack self respect) but if those aren’t cutting it for you, get something better. No pun intended
I work in a restaurant and 10 lbs of onions lasts 36 hours. We buy the shittiest chef knife Ed Don has to offer and it’s fine. I like nice knives on a hobby level, but they’re not necessary on a personal or professional level.
Yup. I learnt that the price tag doesn’t make much of a difference. Sharpening tools do.
I’ve been sharpening my knives for a year or so now, but last week i bought this piece of plastic with the angles for different knives on them and it leveled up my sharpening game significantly
Got a picture?
You’ve been sharpening your knives for a year? Is there anything left of them?
I can pay a little more for a nice forged knife, folded steel, but anything you buy at walmart or amazon is the same quality regardless of price.
Handles make a huge difference but they rarely impact price.
I refuse to get a forged knife, I demand the real thing.
Great Grampa was supposed to be buried with that joke.
In my experience the vast majority of cheap knives can’t hold an edge at all. The super budget stainless used is just too soft. At the same time I can find many in the $70-100 range that do considerably better in that regard - I sharpen them 3-4 times less frequently.
I prefer to spend a little more on the 1-2 that get the most use.
Knife handles are important. If you buy a cheap knife where the handle snaps while you’re using it, you’re going to get cut.
Sandwich baggies. They’re dispose anyway, no need to go for the name brand when there’s usually a cromulent generic at the store.
Uhhh actually you wanna stick with ziplock brand on those:
https://www.globalfoodconsumers.org/news/toxic-pfas-in-sandwich-baggies/
Notably, previous instances have occurred where regulators permitted high levels of PFAS in packaging, only to later discover adverse health effects on consumers. Brands such as Boulder, Complete Home, Great Value, If You Care, Lunchskins, Meijer, Target, and Walgreens were among those found to contain PFAS, while Ziploc emerged as the only brand without detectable levels of the chemicals.
TIL
Saline nasal spray. Just get the generic. It’s just freaking salt water.
Just make it yourself, 1g of salt in 100 mL of lukewarm water
For anyone reading this…
MAKE SURE YOU BOIL THE WATER FIRST
This really burned my sinuses, I do not recommend.
Would it be better to pressure sterilize it? Or would using distilled water be sufficient?
Not sure about pressure sterilization, I guess as long as it kills everything.
Distilled water is safe.
Does this recipe need high precision? Because maybe that is a no-no for people without a decent scale and some volumetric equipment. Sure, if you already have this stuff it’s fine, and probably you know good practices like using a properly treated volume of water. But if you don’t, it’s perhaps better to just buy the cheaper stuff.
Not at all. If you feel it burning, just water it down a bit more. No harm done.
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People are gonna pillory me for this, but flashlights.
First off, you want something that runs off two AAAs, regardless of price. If you can’t walk into any gas station, or any grocery store, or what have you, and buy batteries for your flashlight when it dies, it’s not gonna matter how bright it was before it died. You also don’t want anything brighter than ~200 lumens at the very most, unless you actually need one brighter, for some reason; they drain batteries way faster. You want something thin enough that you’re able to clip it inside your pocket and forget it’s there. You also want one that has an end switch that toggles between two modes: “full power” and “turned off.” If you have one that toggles between low and high settings, you will only use the high setting. If you have one that toggles between low and high settings, and strobe and SoS, you will only use the high setting. Every additional step in between “all the way off” and “all the way on” is just friction you don’t need, that will do nothing but piss you off every time you use the damned thing.
The features that make big, fancy flashlights expensive, are anti-features.
I’ve paid quite a lot for my second headlamp for hiking, but I am really happy with the purchase as it’s very light (35 g) compared to my first cheapo one (~120 g), while being the same 200 lm max. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough for me to not even notice it, while the heavy one was getting annoying after a while.
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For outdoor survival stuff (like my avalanche beacon) they say you should only use the disposable ones. It’s probably got to do with cold tolerance or lifetime.
For Avalanche beacons you’re supposed to replace the battery after it gets below 95% charge.
Do you have to replace things with broken, End of Life or dying cells often?
I notices a lot of things falling into planned obsolesence because “it’s rechargable” and you can’t replace the battery.
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Close, it’s 18650 cells which are super common. Even stuff like laptop and EV batteries may be composed of them.
Fun fact, the numbers indicate the physical size - 18mm diameter 65.0mm length. The same applies to those button cell batteries - CR2032 is 20mm diameter by 3.2mm thickness.
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You can almost always replace the battery, even when the manufacturer doesn’t want you to. As for flashlights, they typically come with easily user-replaceable ones, often even sold separately. Worst-case, you can get a AA or AAA flashlight and use rechargeable AA/AAAs.
I read this entire thread thinking we were talking about fleshlights and not flashlights.
AAA’s seem really common in my neck of the woods.
I got a Coast headlamp a couple years back that has a rechargeable battery pack, but can also take regular AAA’s, which is a handy feature if I happen to need an immediate recharge.
Down vote for AAA, the one battery size nobody ever seems to have laying around.
Toothbrush. Anything you’ll use comfortably will do the job.
I have to disagree. A good electric toothbrush makes a big difference, personally.
It can, yes, but even a cheap toothbrush used properly will do the job. No need to buy brand name when the store brand will do.
This is a miopic viewpoint. It may be good enough for you but not everyone’s gums/teeth are the same. Some people are predisposed to gum disease and using a good electric toothbrush helps immensely.
Electric toothbrushes with the rotating head collect germs behind the brush head. Enjoy your tasty germ colonies…
I always clean my brush after use. Take off the top rinse and completely dry whole brush
Sonicare might be expensive but it leaves my teeth feeling cleaner. It’s like having that perfectly smooth clean feeling after a dentist visit every day. No way I’ll ever go back to manual scrubbing like some sort of troglodyte.
My dentists visits improved dramatically after getting a sonicaire
Same goes for toothpaste, apparently. I asked my dentist once, and according to her the type or brand doesn’t matter that much as long as it has fluoride in it.
as long as it has fluoride in it.
that’s the standard dentist answer for that question, except when you ask the 10th one
I thought it was 4 out of 5? 😆
We’ve been brainwashed by advertising to think that the paste and mouthwash are what matter. They help, yes, but brushing is what matters most. The toothbrush is not just an applicator.
That said, I personally find Sensodyne to work better than other brand’s product for sensitive teeth.
Generally, medications. It’s pretty rare you have some sort of specific metabolic issue which calls for the branded version; the generic is usually just as good. I have a note in my medical records to NOT give me the branded version of my meds because there’s something in the expensive ones that gives me horrific reflux, while the others don’t.
Dollar store seasonal garland. By the time it’s up in your home, it looks about 2/3 as real and costs 1/10 the price.
As I also saw mentioned, medicine. Buy it purely on price by volume and disregard the brand entirely. The only medicine I buy name-brand is Flonaise, because most generic brands of fluticasone spray have the most low-functioning applicators I’ve ever seen.
Canned fruit salad, the ratio of ingredients is for some fuckdamn reason federally mandated so there’s little difference between brands.
(i) Peaches. Any firm yellow variety of the species Prunus persica L., excluding nectarine varieties, which are pitted, peeled, and diced, not less than 30 percent and not more than 50 percent.
(ii) Pears. Any variety, of the species Pyrus communis L. or Pyrus sinensis L., which are peeled, cored, and diced, not less than 25 percent and not more than 45 percent.
(iii) Pineapples. Any variety, of the species Ananas comosus L., which are peeled, cored, and cut into sectors or into dice, not less than 6 percent and not more than 16 percent.
(iv) Grapes. Any seedless variety, of the species Vitis vinifera L., or Vitis labrusca L., not less than 6 percent and not more than 20 percent.
(v) Cherries. Approximate halves or whole pitted cherries of the species Prunus cerasus L., not less than 2 percent and not more than 6 percent, of the following types:
(a ) Cherries of any light, sweet variety;
(b ) Cherries artificially colored red; or
(c ) Cherries artificially colored red and flavored, natural or artificial.
Provided, That each 127.5 grams (4 1/2 ounces avoirdupois) of the finished canned fruit cocktail and each fraction thereof greater than 56.7 grams (2 ounces avoirdupois) contain not less than 2 sectors or 3 dice of pineapple and not less than 1 approximate half of the optional cherry ingredient.
(3) Packing media. (i) The optional packing media referred to in paragraph (a)(1) of this section, as defined in § 145.3 are:
(a ) Water.
(b ) Fruit juice(s) and water.
(c ) Fruit juice(s).
From https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?fr=145.135
And not more than one square inch of peach peel per pound of salad!
This is amazing.
My default is to buy the grocery store’s house brand unless I can tell the difference.
A 26 ounce can of Morton’s iodized salt at my local grocery store costs $2.19. The Food Lion brand costs $0.79. Explain to me why I would pay more than twice the price for name brand salt?
Especially in goods where I know the complete chemical formula of the product like salt and sugar, until I encounter a serious problem with quality or unethical sourcing I’m not going to pay for the brand name.
This is especially true with generic medicines.
The cheapest I can get Claritin in my nearest supermarket is 50¢—$1.12/pill.
The store brand can be as low as 7¢—37¢/pill.)
The CostCo version is 2 or 3¢/pill.
All of them are the same. 10mg of loratadine, highly regulated by the FDA.
They can differ with inactive ingredients, so maybe you’d like a syrup or something from a name brand. But it legally has to be the same active ingredients, in the same amounts, in the same forms.
Air filters. For car, HVAC, etc. Branded or OEM stuff is usually overpriced.
One exception: I wouldn’t buy a noname filter claiming to e.g. be a hepa filter or haning high MERV rating - I wouldn’t trust a brand that might not be around long enough to be penalized for false advertising
Yeah, agreed. If I needed a filter for allergens I wouldn’t trust noname brand too
