Learn how to do stuff for yourself.
As Mr Loon says, learn how to fix your car. It's not hard. One of the most profitable jobs that garages do is replace the front brake pads and discs. You can do this yourself, in your driveway or even sitting at the kerb on a quiet street, with simple tools, in an afternoon. A very tea-breaky afternoon, at that. Well, unless you've got a newish Mercedes, when you need the diagnostic computer to release the brakes so you can work on them. But you bought an old car so you could fix it yourself, right? *And* running an old car is better for the environment.

Learn how to cook. Seriously. Stir-in sauces may be quick and easy but they are sugary salty crap. You can make far better stuff yourself. They're mosty just some sort of gloopy sauce base and flavourings anyway. How hard do you think it is to chop up an onion and some garlic, blast it in a pan, chuck some meat in and cook that, pour passata over it and stick it on some pasta?

Don't use a breadmaker. Learn how to make bread. Mix up most of a bag of bread flour, a sachet of quick-acting yeast (the really fine dusty stuff), a biggish pinch of salt, a wee drop of veg oil and enough water to make it doughy. Chuck the rest of the flour onto a clean worktop and then knead it until it's all smooth and stretchy - you'll see the change happen really quickly after a couple of minutes. Let it rise in the bowl somewhere warm with a clean dishcloth over it, then punch it in the middle and it'll sink. Split it into greased loaf tins and bung it in the oven for half an hour. You can do everything up to the oven bit last thing at night then switch the oven on in the morning, and it'll still work. You can add stuff like cheese or seeds or chopped onions and peppers to your dough, to make groovy speciality bread that costs a fortune in Waitrose.

You know the best bit about home-made bread? When you take it out of the oven, leave it for a minute or two to settle, then slice off the end, slather it in butter, and eat it with a nice hot cup of tea.

Like beer? Brew beer. Beer kits are cheap. Bottles are cheap, and reusable. Bottle capping tools are not especially cheap but last forever. It takes two weeks to be drinkable, and anything up to a couple of months to be *really* good.

Learn how to fix stuff. Fix your PC, fix your TV, fix your satellite dish. The great thing about that is people will actually pay you to do all this, in cash or possibly just pay you in beer. It's easy and you just need some fairly simple tools, a bit of ability - and you need to be able to sit down and read the instructions, or hit Google.

Grow your own veg! Even if you haven't got a garden, you can grow herbs in pots. Tomatoes grow well in south-facing windows, and taste much nicer than shop-bought ones. They don't need a lot of looking after, but remember to nip out the tiny little leaves that grow up otherwise you won't get much fruit.

Do you know what saves you the most money of all?

By the time you've done all this, you're too knackered to spend any.
(gordonjcp, Thu 10 Nov 2011, 18:40, 9 replies)

Get a job,
hippy.
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Thu 10 Nov 2011, 18:59, closed)

pmsl
*click
(Greencloud Wanted to go fishing on, Thu 10 Nov 2011, 19:28, closed)

Old cars are not necessarily better for the environment
Dependent on age of vehicle, construction materials, fuel efficiency, your annual mileage and loads of other bollocks I can't be bothered to list.

Home grown tomatoes are great though.
( Fucking hell Jeff I am not a robot, Thu 10 Nov 2011, 20:05, closed)

True. But when I try to park my home grown tomatoes on a hill, they tend to roll down and get squashed, rendering them very hard to drive again.
(BeatsWork, Thu 10 Nov 2011, 21:26, closed)

Not really...
Under pretty much all combinations of circumstances, new cars are a lot dirtier since it takes so much more energy to make them. No car will ever use as much energy during its lifetime as it took to make in the first place.

Furthermore, new cars are almost impossible to recycle due to the amount of nasty plastic crap. Old cars can be recycled by using the good bits in other old cars and weighing in the rest.

They're also not really any dirtier in terms of emissions. Having a catalytic converter basically just means that your car puts out less carbon monoxide (which isn't environmentally that nasty, but you don't want to breath it) at the expense of lots of hydrogen sulphide and nitrogen oxides.
(gordonjcp, Thu 10 Nov 2011, 23:40, closed)

Clicks for the last line
It's so true!
(Roopy all is not what it seams, Thu 10 Nov 2011, 20:10, closed)

How
delightfully middle class.
(Speshal, Fri 11 Nov 2011, 23:31, closed)

I'm with you
on most of it, but I do use a bread maker as I just don't have time to do it the hard way. On the cooking sauces, I do agree with one exception. When I make a curry I buy the spice mixes from the Indian grocers. Not sauces, but they contain all the spices you need without having to buy lots of separate spices, which often go off for lack of use.
(ianisme, Mon 14 Nov 2011, 2:55, closed)

The spice pastes are awesome. I buy lots of stuff from the asian and chinese supermarkets, where you can get massive jars of spices for the same kind of price as a tiny little one in a "big box" supermarket.
(gordonjcp, Mon 14 Nov 2011, 17:22, closed)