Frugal Living Tips From The Great Depression

the Great Depression was a worldwide economic disaster that happened in the 1930s times were extremely hard and this led to a lot of people finding creative ways just to keep food on the table and to stretch money and really just live more frugally so today we're gonna go over some of the tips and life lessons that we should really be taking away from this so the first thing that they learned to do was to not waste anything now this might seem pretty simple but especially when it comes to food using every last scrap can make a huge difference so right now the average American household wastes over 30% of their food and most people that they pulled waste between 20% and 50% of the food that they obtain but that just means that people are wasting a lot of food so the first way to save money and really be more frugal and just more like efficient in general is just to eat everything that you bring into the house now this is actually harder than it seems so most of the time what happens is we go out to the store we buy some food that we think might be good for the next few meals and then we see this that looks good and that look that looks good and we end up buying a bunch of different stuff we bring it home we end up using half maybe more of it and then some stuff will end up rotting because we forgot to use it we didn't go to as for us out in the back of the fridge and up growing mold and then Weaver with this stuff that we do make we cook food to make this huge big batch of stuff and then we eat it for one meal we sits in the back of the fridge it starts to mold and it starts to grow random things coming out of it and smell and then you have to clean out the whole refrigerator and you throw out ten pounds worth of food I'm definitely not speaking from experience but this happens to everybody right and when that continues to happen when your food is ten to fifteen percent of your budget and you're wasting 30 percent of your food and that's adding a lot to your budget and that's a consistent thing that happens every single month another thing that they learned to do was cook from homes cook from scratch and really make their food stretch that they do have so I absolutely just got finished shooting a video here where I did $1 meals and it's really like illuminating that once you can have a $1 meal something that might cost five ten fifteen or twenty dollars depending on where you go out to eat and you can have that same thing for one or two dollars then that just opens up a whole world of possibilities so if your home right now now is a great time to learn how to cook if you want to go check out that video I'll put a link wherever people put links on these things oh there it is and it's pretty much learning how to use really the bare basics of food so when everything was missing in the stores all the meat was missing and eggs and beans and just weird stuff that just happened to go missing when everybody made a run for it you can learn to cook with a lot of vegetables vegetables have always been around you can grow them outside if you have a place for it you can grow them in little pots you can make broccoli sprouts in little pots and you can grow those I'm just really learning to be creative like the recipes I did last week it was all leftover foods leftover rice leftover chicken so just taking all your leftovers transforming it into something that is delicious and that's gonna be all that wasted food is now an awesome meal that's gonna be just as good as if you went out and it can take five to ten minutes so you don't have to be this crazy cook you don't have to know how to cook even those now's a good time to learn it's not all that hard if I can do it you could do it it's also really important to nail down the basics of cooking so learning how to use flour a bunch of different ways that you can have a really really cheap and a really really good loaves of bread that you can make yourself you can give to family even if you're gluten free you can do a ton of things with brown rice you can grind it up turn it into flour or you can just learn to cook all these different meals in it it can be soups it can be main dishes it can be fried rice like we did there's so many different ways to eat cheap and it's not like junky beans and rice oh that's disgusting so I don't know I'm a fan of by the way if you're enjoying this please remember to Like and subscribe they had to get creative with their housing so that can mean that if you're in a place that is just too big maybe there's two people living in a three-bedroom place that might have been fine when everything was going great but when things are getting difficult you might be time to downsize to move to something more reasonable or even do something like I did which is house hacking where you move to a multi-family you live in one unit you rent the other one's out and depending on how you're doing this you can save anywhere from fifty percent to a hundred percent of your housing costs and that can make a big difference but even if you don't want to move they did things like getting a roommate so maybe you're renting out that extra room to a friend or a family member or on Airbnb even though a lot of that shut down right now but there's definitely ways that you can reduce your housing expenses and usually that's people's biggest expense so if you're able to chop that down by a huge amount by doing one little thing that can make things a lot easier for you they also only bought things if they had money for so a lot of times they wouldn't use anything but cash they wouldn't use credit they would try to avoid debt and that's just definitely a thing that we should all be focused on even if you don't use cash maybe use a debit card for right now so that you're not getting into bad debt high interest 20% debt trying to just make sure that you're only buying things if you have the money for it if you don't figure out another way to do it try to use cash as much as possible now debt isn't all bad and credit cards aren't all bad so like you can have a good debt with an investment or you can use a credit card wisely and earn huge rewards if you're doing travel hacking but as a rule if you're trying to save money and you're trying to look really frugally using cash and having to exchange something physical for another good is a good way to reduce how much you spend and also make sure that you're not getting into death a lot of times they would buy everything used and nothing new so this is actually kind of hard to do right now because pretty much all the stores are closed so it's hard to get things that are used but you can definitely do this on like the Facebook marketplace or anything like that like online Craigslist where you can buy a lot of use stuff and you can also sell a lot of use stuff but it doesn't just apply to clothes and things like that can also apply to cars when you buy a new car that's gonna be a huge expense that saddles you for such a long time and if you just waited til it was one year old and somebody else drove it off the lot you could save thousands and thousands of dollars and also those first few years it depreciates about 10% per year so at 10% when you drive it off the lot 10% the next to your 10% the next year so if you're willing to buy something that's five years old depending on the price of the car that could save you tens of thousands of dollars just on your car but kind of going along with that they also didn't waste anything and they use things till they were no longer usable so this is what I've been trying to do with a lot of my stuff I'm wearing jeans until they completely rip out and I actually have only one pair of jeans that don't have holes right now but that's not something you need to do wearing things until they're actually worn out not till they go out of style you get sick of them or you find something better just wearing it until it's actually gone and that means also being very particular about what you will spend your money on and only find things that you will be okay with wearing for the next couple of years and if you buy things that you're only gonna wear every single day and everything that you have is your favorite and you're gonna wear it for the next few years even if you spend more money on them it's still gonna be cheaper than if you went out and you continually go through the cycle of buying new clothes and then getting rid of them and sitting in your closet so what I've been trying to do personally for this is to have two or three pairs of pants without holes on them and then once they get holes in them they turn into work pants because I do a lot of construction II stuff and then for shirts I have cut shirts which are like really nice they're a little bit more expensive but I really enjoy them and cool with wearing them every single day until they get holes in them which that hasn't happened yet and then all my other shirts turned into work shirts so I'm just trying to make sure that everything I have I absolutely love or I will not buy it if I it's not gonna be my favorite thing that I've ever worn I refuse to buy it so even though you can spend a little more on clothes up front it can end up saving you an insane amount of money if you're getting out of the habit of going to the stores all the time so they also need the difference between wants and needs so coffee would be a want but is it a need I would say yes actually but a lot of things are simply once and with everything closed down right now we are finding out what is a watt and what does it need like 90% of the stores we were going to before it turns out they were all once because we're still surviving without them somehow in a verbal to continue this over into when things get good we'll end up saving an insane amount of money I think we're realizing that a lot of the things we're spending money on are once and they weren't really necessities we didn't need them in order to survive that doesn't mean that you shouldn't spend money on something unless it's necessary for survival but if it comes down to living paycheck to paycheck so you can buy a bunch of stuff that's not really important or you can save money live more frugally be less attached to material possessions and that can end up giving you more freedom and flexibility and less stress in the future then I think that's definitely a lesson we can learn from this they had to get creative with how they made money so for a lot of people that can be starting up aside hustles might have been sewing or construction or just learning a few different trades so that when things go bad and there's no jobs around you can figure out ways to make a little bit of extra income on the side and even when things aren't that it's great to have those extra things coming in so you could save up a lot more money so that when things do get that you have an emergency fund and you don't have to freak out and panic and also if it's something that you're passionate about you can really improve your life by making money at something that you love to do so really just trying to find out creative ways to make money on the side if you guys have gotten any tips from your parents or grandparents or just pick them up along the way I would love to hear them throw them down in the comments below and if you guys enjoyed this video please drop a like it does help the algorithm an insane and amount and thank you very much for taking your time to watch this and I will see you next week if you subscribe which you should because I'm trying to put out more videos like this hopefully you will enjoy [Music]

Channel: Gabe Bult

Views: 115,896

Rating: 4.9327145 out of 5

Keywords: frugal, frugal living, frugal tips, frugal living tips, frugal living tips 2020, the great depression, the great depression frugal tips, frugal tips from the great depression, frugal living hacks, frugal living ideas, frugal living tips and ideas, frugal hacks, frugal habits, great depression money, great depression money saving, frugal household tips, saving money, saving, saving money hacks, saving money tips, gabe bult, how to be frugal

Id: xQbJyvAo6iw

Length: 10min 48sec (648 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2020