10 Dumbass Money Saving Tips (People Are Actually Trying)

10 Sleep in the Airport

Here's a sticky situation. You want to take a dream vacation but you're the cheapest son of a bitch you know. How can you enjoy an exotic getaway while at the same time living like the Hobo King you've long aspired to be?

The answer is to do away with all the frills normal people take on vacations; things like solid gold hookers, lobster stuffed lobsters and those snooty "accommodations" the kids are always raving about. Who needs a hotel when the airport you land in has its own roof?

Hooker with an entire body of gold.

There's an entire website out there dedicated to letting your "cheap enough to pick food out of the garbage" ass find the comfiest airports to snuggle up in for a night. That way you can be rested for your vacation, which will no doubt consist of walking tours of factories, free samples at local supermarkets and visiting libraries, parks and communal outhouses around the globe.

Really, if you can put up with not having a bed, a shower, a kitchen, privacy or thousands of people not looking at you all night, then this is the money saving tip for you. Oh, and in an ironic twist, Sleepinginairports.net offers up a list of the worst airports with Charles de Galle in Paris coming in at number one.

Why? Because of the number of bums who sleep there.

9 Separate the Two Ply

Inexplicably, there are sites out there that offer up this tip to save a buck at the cost of dignity, pride and hundreds of hours of your time. And that's with us carefully avoiding the too-gross-to-mention consequences of having your fingers tear through the whisper-thin shit ticket you're working the crevasse with. Wait, we guess we did mention it after all.

One site even does the calculations for you, based on a 100 sheet per day scenario--which we can only assume is accurate as who the fuck counts sheets of toilet paper--and comes up with a whopping savings of nearly $10 a year. Ten whole dollars!

When they repossess your house, you'll still be swimming in toilet paper.

With that extra cash in your pocket, you can afford to go out to a movie or something, though you won't have time for that sort of thing because you'll be too busy devoting about eight hours a day to unspooling toilet paper, separating the layers, then re-spooling each onto separate rolls, and presumably taping the squares back together after they separate from all this handling.

So really it's a worthwhile exercise as long as your time is worth absolutely nothing.

8 Make Your Own Cat Food

Undoubtedly, you've noticed how close having a cat takes you to the poverty line. Before you brought Fluffer into your life, you were living large in a sweet penthouse apartment and drinking Cristal from the shoes of high class escorts. Now you live in a one bedroom shithole and drink Lysol from your own boot, all because of that cat and its high-priced food. Where do supermarkets get off charging upwards of 70 cents a can?

Cats are assholes.

Well now you can stick it to big cat food by making your own repulsive, meaty sludge at home. Numerous sites offer up recipes and tips for making what amounts to bile-flavored liver and chicken for your special kitty. Imagine the thrill of finely slicing spinach and carrot, parboiling some ground turkey (for a "gravy-like appeal"), vegetable baby food and assorted other fillers, mixing the sludge together with dietary supplements and then serving your cat.

Though we have to admit this works out well for the cat, as you're skipping the factory ingredients that likely include powderized roadkill, fur and the occasional missing homeless dude.

7 Don't Eat on Monday

We're about to blow your fucking mind with the simplicity of this idea. Are you ready?

So a big chunk of your budget goes to food, right? Well did you know that if you simply stop eating for one day a week, you'll save one-seventh of your food budget? It's in a book and everything!

The plan is pretty simple: Just look over your schedule for the week and find that one 24 hour period of time you're pretty sure you don't actually need to have any nutrients and are willing to let your body feed off of your liver and some muscle tissue for fuel.

During which time you'll doubtlessly be irritable and feel slightly loopy, so we're suggesting Monday. You'll have just one more reason to give human resources when they ask why you bludgeoned a coworker that day, and you'll be secure in the knowledge that you were too weak to cause serious injury when you did it.

6 Wallow in Your Filth

One of the greatest scams ever perpetrated on mankind has clearly been the scam of cleanliness. Honestly, if living in shit was good enough for our cavemen-ancestors what makes us so high and mighty? Just because you wore those clothes outside, got them covered in crotch sweat, farts, burrito juice and angry hobo spittle, doesn't mean they can't hold out for a couple more wearings before firing up the washer.

That's the advice being handed out by visionaries who want to leapfrog steps like washing in cold and using energy efficient appliances, or even hanging your clothes to dry. All of those are going to cost you more than simply not washing them. It's time to push the envelope, people!

The assumption seems to be that your own natural musk and the various filthy substances you come across from day to day aren't so intolerable as to ruin an outfit after a single day's use. And this may very well be the case if you're an exceptionally clean person or, at the other end of the scale, spend a lot of time around hippies.

5 Use Your Lint

You may have noticed after a particularly robust load of pajamas, boxer shorts and bath robes that your dryer's lint trap is full to bursting with off color fuzz and a veritable forest of errant pubes. How many times have you peeled off that layer of fluffy nastiness and simply hucked it away without ever stopping to ponder just how many thousands of dollars you just tossed into the trash?

After all, why pay for things like expensive stuffed animal stuffing when you can stuff your own with lint and present little Johnny with his very own 45 percent pubic hair by volume Teddy Bear?

But wait, we're not just talking about slashing the 25 percent or more of the household income most families blow on bear stuffing. Maybe you live in an old, drafty house that has been improperly sealed against the elements, causing your heating and cooling bills to skyrocket.

A little dryer lint in the cracks and suddenly your wayward pubes and the stray pet hairs that had been clinging to your sweater are keeping you toasty all winter long!

Mattress sagging in the middle? Cram some lint in there! Need to stuff your crotch to impress the neighbors? Lint! Need fuel for your lint-powered time machine? Lint, motherfucker!

4 Make Dog Hair Sweaters

Just look at Old Navy, getting rich while you're headed to the poorhouse, laughing all the way at you and your cotton briefs. Do you know where cotton comes from? Of course not, no one does, and that's how they trick you.

But now you can fight back against those imperialist bastards and their precious textiles by simply making your own clothing out of the hair you brush out of your mangy pets each and every day.

With only minimal shame and an excessive amount of effort, you can buy a book that will show you how to spin your dog or cat's fur into yarn which you can then knit into sweaters, purses, thongs or whatever hideous thing you choose.

No longer will you be a slave to seasonal fashion trends. Instead you'll just be a slave to how long it takes your Shih Tzu to grow in a full coat so you can finish off those pants you've been working on. And the best of all, the finished product, well, totally looks like clothing made of dog hair.

3 Visit Mexican Dentists

Say, is that impacted wisdom tooth still bugging you? Don't fall victim to the dental industry's shenanigans with their crazy "you should see a dentist" bullshit. At least not in America. While dentists are happy to quickly and efficiently alleviate your pain, they like to tack on a hefty fee and really, what do you get for your money? The ability to eat and sleep and not be in excruciating agony? Pfft, that's clown shoes.

Why not take a road trip to Tijuana instead, if the pain doesn't make you veer off the highway, and visit a dentist who will work for about a quarter of the price? As an added bonus, you can take in a donkey show or get completely blitzed on low grade mescal and forget why you went to Mexico in the first place. How can you afford not to?

Now before we catch hell in the comments for painting Mexico as some kind of drug and taco-filled wasteland, we have nothing against the country and we're not actually questioning the credentials of Mexican dentists. But we will link to The Washington Post, who took it upon themselves to point out the occasional missed oral cancer diagnoses and rampant infections after Mexican dental work.

But hey, there were also free tacos.

2 DIY Feminine Hygiene

Now, we're all grown-ups here. Menstruation is an actual non-comedy function of the female body and we're only grossed out in the same way we're grossed out by any of the things that come oozing out of the male body.

So when, in the interest of saving Mother Earth and your bank account, some sites start showing us how to make reusable panty liners at home, we're hoping male and female readers alike will consider this a pretty disgusting step backward for humanity. Even if we evolve to a completely sustainable future where even our very farts are harnessed to power our laptops, we'll hopefully still be throwing away the damned Maxi Pads.

But, no, these sites boast that their pads last up to eight years, and they go out of their way to give their reusable pads festive designs, so you can slough your uterine lining all over SpongeBob or the cast of High School Musical. They also note that they make nice gifts...

OK, now they're fucking with us, right?

1 Rot

Open casket funerals are the Ponzi scheme of the death industry, without a doubt. All those morticians and funeral directors are probably taking lavish vacations to exotic places like Detroit at your expense, and all because we continue to want to have funerals in which the bereaved can view their dead loved one resting peacefully.

Embalming is the process we foolishly pay for to preserve the body after death and make open casket funerals both possible and not nightmare-inducing. But it can cost a few grand and, in many states, isn't even required!

So why not save a few bucks and let grandpa compost naturally in his casket? Just keep the lid firmly closed during the funeral and get a few Glade Plug-Ins going, and nobody'll notice the difference.

Make this a requirement in your Will and you can enter the afterlife secure in the knowledge that you've saved enough money for your kids to buy a nice television.

When not on Cracked, Ian saves money by writing cheap comedy over at www.scenicanemia.com.

Now check out how you can still drink yourself into a depressed stupor for next to nothing, in Nectar of the Broke: The World's 5 Worst Ways To Get Drunk. And be sure to bone up on all the warning signs that you're about to walk the line, in 6 Emails You Get When Your Company Is About to Go Under.

And visit recession-proof comedy at Cracked.com's Top Picks.