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Lived beyond my means and rack up substantial debt over a decade

and just live off that for a week (using the same oil to fry them in throughout)

I spent my last three months at university eating those noodles (they were 10p in my day though). Not sure how I'm still alive. Still had to cash in a jar of pennies so I could pay for printing and binding my dissertation.

no self checkout. Felt pretty awkward.

and garnished it with brown/tomato sauce my housemate stole from wetherspoons. Had to do this for about 5/6 days

with about 30 people and one toilet. Too many tales to tell. Not a very nice time in my life.

...with pages ripped out of the Thompson Directory

"Piles, Doctor? B-b-but... how?"

*shudders*

I had about £10 to my name and so managed the following:

- Bought the super cheap tescos own speghetti for 27p and tins of ratatouille - pretty good pasta and sauce for under a pound.

- Managed to blag a few free bus rides by producing just under £1.30 (the price of a bus ticket back then) and saying I had no more money.

- Bet a guy in the office over something I knew I would win, winner got lunch bought for them for the week.

- Went into hair salons and offered to be a hair model a few times, got free haircuts that way.

- Ashamedly went on a few dates with a guy just so I could eat a meal that wasn't Tescos own pasta. He even bought me my first oyster card. Poor guy didn't even get a kiss.

I was so poor and all I had left in the kitchen was onions, garlic, beef mince, tinned tomatoes, red wine, herbs and spices, and some spaghetti.

I literally had no choice but to throw them all together and see what happened, and eat whatever the result of it was.

Never again!!1

Due to this, I once ate an entire black bin bag of 'dill pickle' flavoured popcorn that my housemate had brought back from the shop he worked in as no one was buying it. I also once helped eat an entire black bin bag of gone-off pink nougat bars. Fun times.

- didn't have money for the magic bus so showed the driver a 'code' on my phone and said it was an e-ticket (worked)

- didn't want to buy a student card (€10) so for six months I carried about a crumpled up letter from the university and my passport so that I would get student discounts

- asked a man in a kebab shop to buy me chips (which he did)

- regularly take my own cans in to the pub

-

;)

being poor seems like great fun. I don't know what impoverished people are bothered about.

due to lack of power, and sauce.

Thank fuck I'm not a student anymore

that was pretty grim.

Never ever getting Taxis ever
Buying half lager shandies
Not going on dates
making my own pack lunch every morning
Only buying meat for meals about twice a week
Running and exercising outdoors rather that @ a gym

Because I couldn't afford the extra 30p for a Guinness.

Just once, though. After that if I only had enough money left for a Tennents I'd just call it a night.

when staying on my own in a student house over summer

piled all my clothes onto the bed to sleep under

for when they threw out their out-of-date sandwiches.

Aside from that I was living on pasta and jarred sauce, which I would stock up on like crazy whenever it was half price.

Student days.

so I can save 50p on the bus fare. I haven't gone as far as to ask for a "three stop hop" for a quid though. I walk a lot to save even more of said bus fare.

I always take a packed lunch to work, often leftovers. Picnics if we are out in the day. I save leftover rice from takeaways, freeze them, and add that to homemade dishes. That is assuming I have bought rice with the takeaway, I have been known to cook my own and just pay for the curry if I am forced to take part in a takeaway. I ate the prawns out of a thai green curry recently and there was a load of leftover sauce. That went in the freezer, ready to be added to some salmon or chicken I cook up one day.

I go out of my way to visit different shops, supermarkets and the like to get the cheapest of various items.

Is 7 years old.

Farm foods with my housemate. Had two a day. Repeated.

I've never been so poor as to had to resort to most of this stuff. When I was at university I was boringly careful with money. My parents gave me £200 a month to top my loan up but didn't exactly burn through it. Since then I've always made sure I've had savings in case shit got real.

My favourite poverty story was from that bloke from the Stranglers who was saying when he first moved to London he lived in the back of a van and ate nothing but Paxo for about 3 months. His shits must've been horrendous. Like curling out a lump of coal or something.

Using teabags that I'm not sure are communal - but fuck it it's tea

Brought a 4 pack of Tesco Everyday Lager to a BBQ
Found and ate a tin of Mackerel for dinner on the way back from a night out
Swapped washing powder for value washing up liquid figuring it's pretty much the same thing. It isn't.

we've been reduced to renting out one of the parking spaces, and i've made the 46 incher the principal television set instead of the 75er. to save on the leccy bill.

:(

it absolutely wrecked my anus

when i could finally afford nice toilet paper it felt like i was wiping with fine linen.

I would buy the cheapest, shittest bread and use anything as a filling that I could find in the communal cupboards. Spam of course, I found tinned fish like sardines worked quite well. Anchovies was a nadir, I didn't realise what they were., I thought it was just another tinned fish rather than weird salty things.

It was only in my later years I realised you can live off lentils, beans and the like for absolutely fuck all. I even baked my own bread for a bit.

and rather than pay for a hostel I've just wandered round and round all night until the morning bus home.

I had zero money, and I made a pot of porridge with water and sugar, and I kept it in the fridge and had one small bowl of it a day for about 2 weeks. Didn't even heat it up. That was mainly cause I spent my money on drugs and going out to Jilly's rockworld.

that I hadn't eaten in about 8 days because I had needed to waste the only tiny bit of money I had left paying a police fine. After that I lived on a diet of sainsburys basics noodles (they've now gone up to 20p within the last year, how scandalous is that?!) bought for by them for about a month until the christmas break.

- Sleeping in 4 layers of clothes every night during a particularly harsh winter because we couldn't afford our heating bill.
- Getting our friend who worked at the Students Union to steal us a couple of bottles of vodka every now and then.
- I have never paid for the food on a date in my life. Consequently, I have never been on a second date in my life.

things like tights and knickers. would be well smug while have a scrub thinking i'm cheating life by washing my clothes and self at the same time.

used to karate kick the big fuck off toilet roll holders in the uni toilets and rob the massive toilet rolls - house mates would cheer as i strutted through the front door and held the roll up above my arms like simba.

haha when i was working for £4.60 an hour as a waitress and i was on the shop floor and some one would order a toastie i'd be like "one toastie for you one toastie for me, one slice of ham for you, one slice of ham for my mouth" as i was making them and then RAVISH it before my boss could come down from upstairs

in fact, wait, i'm still poor now . fuck.

i went with my friend to visit her dad as her parent's had split up a few months before. he lived in a bedsit. offered us some 'spaghetti on toast' for dinner, which we accepted. he then proceeded to heat up the tin by putting the unopened tin in the kettle (filled with water) and turning it on. amazing.

when i was a student i used to eat pasta with mayonnaise.

i still do a few 'cheapskate' things now because, y'know, recession and all that. self scan checkouts - most expensive veg through as carrots because they're the cheapest. often take my own beers or gin to the pub / gigs. growing our own veg as well now, which is pretty cool.

my grandpa used to work in a shoe factory and his work pals would deliberately make mistakes on the stitching so me and my sisters could get free shoes.