One of the best ideas from the Depression is to grow your own food. Start a garden, learn about preserving and canning, and find ways to stretch your grocery budget further.
Travel by freight train instead of by air.
Why use cash? I use a card that gives me 1.5% back and pay it off weekly.
I get back hundreds.
I buy trail walking shoes. When I buy regular runners, they will often be beyond repair within a year. But my trail walking shoes have been going strong for 18 months and they still look half decent.
26. Raise ze bugs.
28. Eat ze bugs.
Bread, donuts or cakes replace about half the flour with potato. You can grow potatoes in your garden.
They will actually taste better and cut down on your grocery bill.
Re: #4. I already have few sewing skills...
1. The time it takes to do some of these things would be better spent working a second job.
2. For many commonly used household items, it costs MORE to fix it than replace it.
In my Michigan, you can legally tag and harvest up to 10 white tail deer in many areas of that state. Hunter numbers have been declining and milder winters have increased the population in many counties. Plus is if you learn to process the meat yourself, rather than pay the $70.00 or so per deer to have it processed and handed to you in packages to freeze.
In 1929-'39, most people's refrigerators had an extremely small freezer compartment INSIDE of it, so people shopped for food daily or every other day or two.
Candle light instead of electricity? NO! But they did shut of the lights when they left a room and never left light on for no reason, as anyone who grew up with a parent/parents who had been kids during that time, well knows!
People of every class, had forever, darned socks, repaired slight tears in clothing, turned men's shirts collars and cuffs when they began to fray, or had a servant do it for them and yes, some people still had servants during the Depression.
And there was DEFLATION during that time, so prices, for EVERYTHING, was lower than they had been ! So while people, even very well off ones, cut back, there were many things that people continued to do, that saved money, that had been done before the Great Depression hit!
Use it up,
Wear it out,
Make it do
Or do without.
My parents and grandparents made it through the Depression and then won World War 2.
But like many such young couples they gradually worked their way into the middle class and provided a comfortable and secure life for their kids and themselves.
28. Mine bitcoin using your neighbor’s electricity line.
I just got back from a grocery trip. One lady had a “hack”. After she rang up her groceries at the self-checkout, she pressed pay now, and grabbed the bags and left without inserting a card or any money. I tried calling her attention to it, thinking she was an honest person, but she kept right on walking out the door! I alerted the attendant, but all she did was clear the register for the next customer. She said she has to do this pretty often, but didn’t specify how often. Anyone want to guess why prices keep going up? It’s because of dishonest folks like that woman, and crooks like Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
Anybody with a couple hundred square feet of yard to spare can raise chickens (for eggs, no rooster needed), rabbits (for meat), and Jerusalem artichokes*/sunchokes for carbs for very little money/effort and dramatically reduce your food bill (not to mention your dependence on Piggly Wiggly). No skill and very little money needed.
*Parboil before cooking or they’ll give you “the wind.”
11. Eat less meat? In the depression meat was the cheapest thing on the market. People had STEAK for morning, noon and night! That is how cheap it was! But many had no job to buy that cheap meat.
Then FDR decided to get the price up by buying up millions of head of cattle and hogs, shooting and burying them.
Ten years later the Dems were begging ranchers and farmers to increase beef and hog production for the war effort.
https://footnote.wordpress.ncsu.edu/2020/08/14/plowing-under-cotton-and-killing-pigs-8-14-2020/
https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farming-in-the-1930s/crops/culling-the-herds/
Hmmmm, already do 95% of those.
Go back to the tax rates and immigration standards and NEVER have a democrat in office.
28. Never go grocery shopping while you are hungry.
H/t to Dave Ramsey.