20 Signs That You Were Raised By TRUE Money-Savers

more like poor parents than frugal ones...the list is misnamed.

I was amazed when I got to college and realized how much the "normal" kids eat takeout... We rarely went out to eat when I was a kid, or got takeout food. It was all groceries, coupons, leftovers. Since I took those attitudes with me to school, I ate a lot better than most college kids.

I grew up in a very frugal household, my mom grew up in the Depression. She once made us kids sugar and butter sandwiches. There better than you would think they would be. Think of them as cinnamon toast without the cinnamon or the toasting.

I heard things such as "just put on another layer" and "there's still have a tissue left there! Save it until you need to blow your nose again". I grew up in Wisconsin, and the house was set at 63 degrees in the dead of winter. We didn't freeze to death, but some days it felt like we would.

I have: grown, peeled, and canned nearly every veg and fruit known to man; eaten squirrel and rabbit that my father shot or trapped; been forced into trespassing to harvest wild fruit; learned to cook myself when I was 7 rather than be forced into eating cold cabbage again (it was on my plate, and I had to eat every scrap. To this day, 25 years later, cabbage still makes me want to throw up).

I think I can could on one hand the amount of times we ate out growing up. We never, ever took a vacation. Ever.

Even when my parents got more on their feet financially, they kept to their thrifty ways. I guess that's probably why they own their home and business outright, have never had a credit card (nor needed one), and have toys like ATVs and Harleys that they paid for in cash.

My parents were raised by parents who grew up in the depression and a lot of the frugal habits that allowed my grandparents to survive (and survive well for the most part) were passed to my parents and were then, to some extent, passed to me (and my sister, although my sister hasn't embraced them nearly as much as I have).

I was a proud member of the Clean Plate Club when I was a kid.

I've eaten butter and sugar sandwiches (although they taste better toasted and with brown sugar. And it's more of a dessert for me than a main dish.).

I've put BBQ sauce on many things to make them taste better (I don't do ketchup, but BBQ on rice isn't half bad.).

"Use by" and "expiration" dates are really just suggestions to me (although if it's changed color, texture, smell or taste, it's thrown out rather than eaten). I've only sick off bad leftovers once (and that's not confirmed) and that was because I violated the previously state rule.

I did the math and know the break even point where powered milk is cheaper than "real" milk. When liquid milk hits that point,

I use powdered for cooking, baking and sometimes to drink
(although that's more rare).

I have a little contest with myself to see how long I can go before turning on the heat and air conditioning each year and how soon I can turn it off.

Black beans, brown rice and leftover meat and vegetables make up a reasonable portion of my diet (and I'm happy about it because it tastes good. Especially with a bit of cheap salsa to bind it all together. Maybe topped with some cheese. Mmmmmm....)

Mac and Cheese with just a pinch of cayenne pepper (or a packet of red peppers leftover from the pizza that was ordered at the youth event from which I got to bring home the leftovers) is just amazing.

And people wonder why I'm 10 years ahead on my mortgage, pay cash for my vehicles and support a whole lot of missionaries.

I'm a little disappointed by this list because I can't relate to anything on it. A lot of these things are unhealthy, and my mom managed to feed us well without breaking the budget.

Signs that my parents really were savers:

1) I didn't know there was such a thing as credit card debt until I hit university. (My parents only used a credit card when the money was already in the bank).

2) "Homemade" was a regular feature -- including food (including preserves and baked goods), furniture, toys and clothing.

3) My first savings account coincided with my first allowance.

4) When I got my first "real jobs" (baby-sitting and paper route), I also got my first savings bonds to save for university.

5) There was seldom panic when something major broke. If the fridge died, it was an inconvenience but not a financial crisis.

6) Eating out or ordering in was a huge treat.

7) "Vacations" never involved airplanes or long distance travel.

8) Cars seemed to stay around forever.

I vaguely remember things like my mother saving the ends of soap bars to make hand soap for camping, but that's nothing compared to years of being trained to "save for a rainy day" and set financial priorities.

I was just thrilled last night to fry up some bacon for dinner so we could put the leftover grease in my special container in the fridge -- we were out! And now I know why my dad puts ketchup on EVERYTHING.

A meal that still makes me cringe is my dad's old "john-ben-getti." (No, I have no idea what that means.) We wouldn't BUY Hamburger Helper - way too pricey! Just throw together some ground beef, spaghetti, ketchup and frozen peas & corn and you got yourself a meal.

My favorite stylish sweater in 3rd grade (ca. 1980) was one of those off white, button-front fake Irish sweaters with a sailor-type collar. Mom and Dad wouldn't buy me one. But luckily, Grandpa, with his eagle eyes, pulled over on the side of the highway and dashed across three lanes of traffic to retrieve the sweater someone had lost from the inside shoulder. A wash and it was good as new! And luckily, Grandpa survived.

Hey, I come by it honestly.

My mom just spent the night at the hospital for some tests. When they brought her one of her meals there was a very thick, plush disposable napkin on the tray. She said "put that in your purse and take it home. It would be perfect for use in the kitchen. Don't waste it as a dinner napkin!" Then she made me get up and get a paper towel from the restroom for her to use as her napkin.

Gotta love it!

Ahh the memories :)
I remember how it snowed almost all winter long in my home town but the heat was never turned on in the house – except on holidays. We used electric place heaters and the fireplace. Other than that we had plenty of blankets and thick PJs. Before going to bed (bedrooms had no heat) we’d stand beside the fireplace until we felt the ‘burn’ and ran to our beds before our clothes cooled down.
Things, financially, are a lot better now but the heat never ever goes over 68 degrees. Old habits die hard, I guess…
As for “A little mold won’t hurt you. Just cut that piece off.” Well my parents would tell us the story about how mold is really penicillin and that it’s really good for you… so eat it up kiddo, you should be thankful you got that piece
If we left some food in our plate, it was saved to be eaten next meal or we were told horror stories about how people in other parts of the world are dying of hunger and that God is looking down on us all disappointed
We of course planted enough vegetables and fruits to make jam, vinegar, frozen vegetables and dried vegetables to last us most of the year. It made me appreciate earth, Mother Nature, and the joy of planting and picking my own food. I live in apartment now and I truly miss the joy of having a sunny yard.

I can only relate to #10 Sugar and butter do taste good together, gosh I'm craving one of those right now... I'm off to make on xD

I can relate to many things on this list, the deer one really had me laughing because my dad once hit one with a car he just bought and it didn't go to waste.

But I don't know what they have to do with saving, seems like its just poor as Beth and Stephanie have pointed out. I don't know why people have such a hard time coming to terms with it, but being poor was pretty common especially in the depression and for a long time in America. Still a lot of poor people.

There are plenty of good foods that were darn cheap. Take rice for instance, you can't get much cheaper than rice especially in 10 to 50 lb bags. I think we had rice nearly every day growing up. Sure we had things like the bacon grease container, but my mom made some pretty cheap meals that were still healthy for us and she had a ridiculously small budget.

Signs of savers:
1) My parents were mortgage free on our house before I got to high school
2) My dad ran his cars into the ground before he bought a new one
3) Virtually nothing was wasted in my mom's kitchen
4) I don't remember a single vacation where we stayed in anything more than a 2 star hotel, but we had some great vacations. Most of the time we spent in an old camper.
5) My mom opened a savings account for us before I got to first grade
6) We ate out maybe once a month, maybe less and it was a big treat. My dad always paid in cash.
7) We never hired anything out although we could have: no gardeners, housekeepers, snow removal - - that's what kids were for

Not to all, but to a lot, the mold, about a dozen ways to eat mac and cheese, the deer.... It wasn't about growing up poor though, that is a misconception. Frugal people may seem like poor people in some regards, but it is often a choice so they can use their money to pursue other things.

Was my family the only one to have corn syrup sandwiches? Sort of like pancakes to go, but on cheap bread and corn syrup was cheaper than the other kind. They were a little sticky unless you squished all the edges closed.

The first time I read the list I agreed with Stephanie. But the second time, I had to admit that my mother, who wasn't poor at the time I was growing up, did many of those things including reheating coffee (but not for days), cutting off mold, and getting free soup bones from the butcher. She never pretended they were for the dog.
The thing about the mayonnaise, hamburger helper or buttter/sugar sandwiches would never have happened in my house. The food was always good quality, it was just never thrown out.
Most people wouldn't serve mayo or sugar/butter sandwiches just to save money on a regular basis. Only if they couldn't afford nutritious food.

I can't help but find it funny when someone discusses how unhealthy or nasty these things are, how their parents were "frugal", and in the same breath mentions family vacations. I guess that point may be the same that others are making. Some of you had parents that were frugal by choice, others of us had parents who were frugal because they couldn't make it any other way.

My family went camping once, when I was 14. That was the only vacation we ever had.

As far as food is concerned, I still clean my plate. I enjoy food, and never put something on my plate that I won't eat. I also try everything at least once.

I saved bacon grease for the first time in years, just last week. I had forgotten how good it is to flavor certain foods.

Gardens, hunting, and fishing provided alot of food for our table. Outside of that, we ate alot of cheap meals, almost always accompanied with slaw, and biscuits. Both of which were cheap. My family ate though 60-70 quarts of canned green beans each year, which came from my grandfathers garden.

Our heat was always on 65, and AC never happened.

While I am now frugal by choice, and have a much easier life then my very hardworking parents did at my age, I do still enjoy many of these same things. I eat much healthier than I did as a kid, but anytime food can be acquired from a garden, farmers market, or from the wild, I'm all for it. (All healthy ways)

OP--Congratulations, your family out-frugled mine! I didn't think that was possible. It sounds as if you grew up in a farm family, or at least in a farm community, because many of the things you did were foreign to us (egg money and the 4H club).

That being said, some of the frugal things we did growing up did have an impact. Now when we make french fries, we save the vegetable oil for the next time we make french fries. It takes a lot of oil to make french fries, and oil isn't cheap, so we figure it isn't a problem to reuse it for the same function. Not about the bacon grease thing...no way, sorry!

I still ignore expiration dates, because 1. They are probably sooner than they should be to avoid legal entanglements, and 2. There is only one person in the world with enough information to decide if the carton of milk in my hand has gone bad, and that person is me, not some robot box-stamper three weeks ago.

Also, it might interest people to know this: The Food Bank in my area keeps cans that are 7 years past the date (they don't keep them that long, but some people donate expired stuff) but if soup or sauce in one of those tetra boxes is past the date, they toss it right away. (They're not heat-sealed)

So remember that when you're donating old food or cleaning out your own pantry.

I remember butter and sugar sandwiches for breakfast.  Mmm, very tasty.

And saving bacon grease is a foodie's secret weapon -- not just a frugal tactic.  Great for cooking up scrambled eggs!  Mmm, tasty.

I'm enjoying a lot of these comments :)

I should add that we ate a lot of "clean out the fridge or freezer" meals. I still eat a lot of "throw everything in" salads and stir fried vegetables :)

I still save real bacon grease in the freezer. I use it for flavor in dishes-in little bits. Delicious! We eat real bacon so rarely we love to have the flavor in foods. turkey bacon just doesn't cut it for flavor!
My husband's family grew up during the Depression and those habits got ingrained into him. He and now my 23 & 27 year old sons have a habit I just shudder at- when dinner is done and there is extra gravy, they put a slice of bread on the plate and cover it with gravy. They call it either 'quick stuffing' or 'bread gravy'. Bleah. I make delicious gravy (and stuffing, for that matter) but I am not a bread eater.
My family when I was growing up grew every vegetable known to man in our little back yard. I didn't know that salad wasn't a dessert until I got a job in a restaurant when I was 18 and 'salad' was always the first course:) In my house salad was the reward for eating everything on your plate. We ate a lot of pasta primavera (spaghetti with whatever vegetable was in season in the garden and olive oil). Since we lived in Southern California, it was served several times a week year round. We also ate a lot of baked potatoes stuffed with vegetables and topped with homemade cheese sauce. You don't need a lot of cheese,and more flour and oil stretches the roux :) We ate meat when it was inexpensive- like giant pack of chicken legs.

I got a good chuckle out of this article. It brought back memories of eating home-canned fruits and vegetables, checking the jars for mold first, catching the pigs/rabbits/chickens when they escaped, joking with each other over breakfast sausage "Which pig do you this is we're eating? The delicious one." We composted, spread manure, weeded, hunted, shot firecrackers at coyotes, picked vegetables and berries, and burned wood when the power went out. Our water came from a well, so it tasted extremely chalky. There were calcium deposits all over the showers and sinks. And it was quiet. Stone cold quiet. Strange times, though good for the most part.

I grew up eating gravy on bread, beans and puffed wheat cereal. That cereal usually came in big plastic bags. Once in a blue moon, I was fed puffed rice cereal.

We never ate out. When we visted relatives up north, my parents would stop at the local butcher shop and usually bought sausage to bring to their homes.

My mom would only buy clothes off the clearance rack. When I grew out of my clothes, she would mail them to my cousins up north on a farm.

We always had a garden and my parents always canned or froze food. If I was hungry between meal, I was told to have crackers or bread with butter.

I still can't stand the sight of puffed wheat cereal. My kids wanted that sugar bear cereal that looks like puffed wheat cereal. I wouldn't buy it no matter how much it was on sale. I won't let that nasty stuff anywhere near my house.

Sometimes we would go to a drive in movie and my parents always brought their own popcorn.

The "barbecue sauce sandwich" - one of my favorites.

Or, Arby's Soup - Made with packets of Arby's sauce and hot water.

Extreme Frugality: Twenty Memories of My Mother

It's interesting that you can tell which generation posters above grew up in by their frugal food choices.

I was the child of hippies, growing up in the 70s, so I identify with the "brown rice" school of frugality.

For my grandparents, the ultimate was getting convenience foods on sale with double coupon. The "Helper" meal is one that would have appealed to them.

I forgot to mention surprise eggs. They'd take out the center of the slice of bread (which we then balled up so we could eat our bread marbles). Butter or mayonnaise would be melted in the pan, then the bread went down and an egg was cracked into the hole of the egg. Fry both sides, serve. Yum. We ate these all the time when we were kids.

I remember the weekly stew or boiled dinner. We lived out of the best invention ever made ... the Crock Pot. Left overs were never thrown or even given a chance to be thrown out. They would go into the soups, stews and chli.

Ahh ... ketchup sandwiches

Thanks for the article, made me laugh.

I'm only 31 but I can relate to 1/2 these including no. 18 :( I forgot about how poor we were and how much my mother tried to make things work for us. I guess I know where my frugailty comes from and why I am content with just enough vs a consumerist mindthought of more, better, more, better.

Growing up we used to hang all our clothes out to dry on the tree in our backyard. Using the dryer ran up the gas bill I guess. I still use a clothesline to this day... even though I could afford to use my dryer, I can't see spending the money on it.

And now that I'm a grown up, I make my own "candy" by blending sugar and butter. Brown sugar almost makes butterscotch. Yummy and cheap!

However I do have others. My mom and both my maternal and paternal grandmothers were able to cook quite well on a budget. They brought in bulk alot. They shopped at discounted grocery stores like Audi's. I hardly remember having brand named cereal, my mom always brought the sore brand, or that knockoff brand that came in the bag. We also ate beans alot. Most of my clothes came from the clearance rack or discount stores.

Boy, do these comments bring back memories. Both my parents were adults during the Great Depression (I was a late in life baby) and both knew how bad things could be. Our house was the one my Dad grew up in and was totally debt free. My mom was a stay at home homemaker (and that is exactly what her job was -- making a home for Dad and me). We always had a large garden (a half acre) We dug dandoline greens in nearby cow pastures and picked crab apples from wild trees. We had a camp (and it really was a camp not a cottage) and we spent the summer fishing (and digging the free worms to use as bait!) most of which we froze for the winter. We picked wild berries by the gallon and froze those too. I hated the garden because it was my job to pick the green beans every morning after the dew had dried up. I think we ate beans every meal (besides the ones we froze). Sundays we always had a "big" dinner after church and supper was always bread and milk or St.Johnsbury crakers and milk. We ate gravy on our bread but usually the gravy wasn't thickened. Once a week we had American chop suey made with a box of macaroni, a can of tomato soup, onions, and hamburg (the cheap kind). One of my favorite meals was Salmon P. Wiggle over toast. The can of bacon grease was always in the frig along with a slab of salt pork that was usd to flavor everything. My mom made the best oorn chowder with browned bits of salt pork and onion. I sure miss those days!! Maybe, corn chowder for supper.......