I spent 2 weeks
living off of a can of Baked Beans and a packet of Rich Tea biscuits when I was between jobs. Seeing as I'm now between jobs again, I reckon history may repeat itself...
( mcdoof fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 19:55, Reply)

Go into any McDonalds or other resturant...
and nick loads of the free milk, ketchup, mayonaise, mustard, sugar and salt salt sachets. Get them home as quick as possible and put in fridge. They still taste of drainpipes though. (Not that I have ever tasted drainpipes).
(I Want Billy, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 19:47, Reply)

Currency converter
Basic background; Dutch Mum who had a purse in her draw of Dutch guilders for when she went home. Me, in dire need of money when going into town with friends. SOLUTION: Take money from said purse and go into town via a bank where currency could be exchanged for local £££££s!!!
Never caught, RESULT!!

Sorry, but needs must.
(Studentken is looking for motivation on, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 19:07, Reply)

Well...........
When i was younger and had no money i used to sell my brothers toys to finance my confectionary addiction (was hooked on milky way for a little while).

In my school days i became a prefect. One of the perks of the job was skipping the lunch queue. I would offer to skip the queue to buy someones lunch for them, as long as i could keep the change. I collected a significant sum of money buy doing this. Absolute power corrupts absolutly. Nuff said !
(spookyfish, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 18:11, Reply)

So hungry for chocolate spread
and having no money I thickly spread butter and mixed in stale capachino chocolate speinkles...it kinda worked.
( Blobcat Less Jaffacakes this year, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 17:06, Reply)

My brother volunteered himself for medical testing to get paid.
Coincidence or not, but he now struggles to sleep and his hair is receeding faster than that car that broke some land speed record. He's only 23.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 15:44, Reply)

As a kid
My sister used to be really mean.
She'd pay me 20p to put my foot down the loo and once made me pay her to let me buy soapy water.
When I was about 9 she said shed give me £5 to eat half a bar of soap which I did...bubble burps all night.
( Blobcat Less Jaffacakes this year, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 15:25, Reply)

I'm so skint at the mo that i have to*
download games instead of buying them.

*read,don't have to
(That guy with a hat., Sun 10 Oct 2004, 15:19, Reply)

while my mates,friends brother
was skint and out of coke(ain),he got pepper and salt from maccas and a resteraunt nearby and,you guessed it,snooted it.he said it feels like snooting fire.and this is the guy who tried to sell a jar of his piss,saying it was elvis's,on ebay.
(That guy with a hat., Sun 10 Oct 2004, 14:37, Reply)

I sucked a man's penis.


ok, maybe not. but I thought someone should say they had.
( zog why change it now?, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 14:18, Reply)

Retail Specialist
Whilst young I've indulged in many neat little tricks to earn money.
In Year 6 I composed a short comical poem (now long forgotten and sold copies for 25p. I also leeched money off the rich Chinese loner in our class by letting him play Tetris on my Databank for £1 a go.
Between Years 7 and 9 I managed to sell off large portions of my PC game collection for anywhere between a half and a sixth of their actual value.
My parents also used to offer me 1p per dandelion head I picked. This worked fine in our suburban house with a tiny garden but when we moved to a new house in the country I hoovered up every single dandelion I saw and for two years could bank on a summer income of £50. But then they all died out, and they're showing no signs of coming back.
And then of course, there's the stalwart fallback when all else fails: scrounging off people at school like some cheap pikey bastard.
I've also been known to join the group of hopefuls who scrounge around under vending machines in search of lost coinage. Ah, those were the days.
(The Mysterious ., Sun 10 Oct 2004, 14:10, Reply)

entrepreneur
a few years ago i was living in france, working in a bar, but making far too little money to enjoy the finer things in life.

i got a local dealer to lay me on 10 ecstasy pilss, and sold them to som foreign students for a double the price. This continued at an ever increasing pace until one day, six months later, I'd save about £4000. so i pissed of to latin america for several months to do a michael palin. Bonza
(globalloon, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 13:33, Reply)

Well funny this topic should come up...
... i sold my phone yesterday for £40 pound so i could buy some weed and booze.
(Valo, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 13:22, Reply)

alcohols whore
i needed a tenner to go to an 'all you can drink for 10 pound' night at some club but was pennyless after the pub.
i asked everyone that looked aproachable for a quid and managed to the full 10 20 mins before opening..then i kept going.
managed to get my chicken and chips afterwards and taxi home paid by doin this.
(Gargh, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 11:44, Reply)

Hair
When I was 'bout 14 I spent so much of my simgle-mother-pension+student-to-boot mother's money on a fancy haircut (complete with permed bits and bleached bits and shaved bits - hey, it was the eighties...) that she informed me that in the future I was to pay for my own haircuts. Her fault really - she left us kids in the hairdresser's while she went grocery shopping.

A couple of months later I lopped the withering permed bits with a pair of kitchen scissors and didn't have another haircut until I turned 22, by which time my hair reached my bum.

Oh. Yes, I am male.
( Udderbelly A tale of four titties, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 11:08, Reply)

Well....
I stole my brother's money...duh.
(Pixel, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 10:48, Reply)

Garlic Spagetti
When I was really down and could afford nothing but rent, a meal of boiled spagetti with a touch of oleo and garlic powder was a treat... for added exoticness I added a dash of tabasco... and pipe tabacco being a little cheaper then ciggies was an inexpensive rollup with zig zags... ahhh poverty.
(moongoddess, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 7:08, Reply)

While I was in the military
for a short time between commands I had gone broke and lived off of milk flavored w/Ovaltine.
( themaltesebippy uses a sonic screwdriver to remove unsightly hairs, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 6:04, Reply)

i once resorted to
digging around under the couches at my school for 25 cents for the pay phone. at least i found the 25 c, plus another two pennies and a paperclip to save for a rainy day :)
(sponch!, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 5:09, Reply)

It was all true
In my darkest hours I did

1. Existed solely on a diet of Spaghetti Curry or Rice Bolognase, with ingedients frankensteined out of whatever was left in the cupboard. My lowest point was a tomato-and-water sauce and bread substiting for meat. Or starving myself all dayand then having a Pot Noodle sandwich in two loaves of bread. Which is even sadder than it sounds.

2. Cleaned out all my childhood bank accounts, which provided the tidy sum of £1.43. As I said "I'd like to withdraw one fourty three please", the woman behind the counter said "One hundred and forty three pounds?". I wish. Such a figure was a virtual paradise.

3. In order to get into gigs I'd make up imaginary fanzines, ring up the press office, get guestlist tickets, then forget to send in a copy of my non-existent 'zine.

4. A friend of mine used to order CD's off a well-known Internet Retailer in it's infancy. He'd claim the CD wasn't delivered, and they'd send a second one. He'd rotate addresses, names, credit cards, and so forth, and Bingo! Free CD's, off to Ebay for cash. The numbskull. They are considerably wiser now, I hope. He certainly is.

5. When doing The Great Indie Band Tours of 1991-92, friends of mine would find and sleep with a good looking bloke in the crowd so they didn't have to pay for hotels, or get the blokes to buy them drinks at the dodgy nightclub so they didn't have to sleep anywhere and get the 5am train. I was perpetual Mr-Hanger-On The-Girls-Knew who got the sofa, everytime.
(domesticterrorist, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 3:34, Reply)

I have known the tightest fucker.....
....who has not necesseraly been short for cash but is such a tight wad it's no true....

I know of a guy who used to, before waiting on his lady friend, would order her a Southern Comfort and orange.......upon asking if she wanted 'fresh ' or 'dilutin', he would reply , " dilutin, fresh is too expensive!'

I went out with the tight cunt previous to that experience, and I was as poor as a church mouse, whereas he worked for the council, the fat gravy-trained bawsack that he was!
(Foxy McClumpha, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 3:13, Reply)

It's fun to be in college
I've lived on the rice and Ramen diet before. This year I stoped buying sodas and only drink tap water. Today I found I had bread and tuna in the pantry. I was delighted I could make a tuna sandwich. I look in the fridge, and find no mayo, but I do find a half a can of cream of mushroom soup so I used some of that. It wasn't half bad.

Edit: This week there was a disasterous hail storm here (lemon to tennis ball sized). Most of the student's cars are ruined. I've noticed people with two by four bumpers and garbage bag windows. Some have gotten thick sheets of clear hard plastic and duct taped it where the windows used to be. I saw someone duct taping flashlights to their broken headlights so they could drive at night. One of my friends is gonna try and use dry ice to get the dents out of his car.
(evil_penguin_17 Robots of Doom... Attack!, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 2:45, Reply)

Mustard
I was starving and had no money, so I grabbed a couple packets of mustard at the fast-food place.

They gave me heartburn for the rest of the day, much worse than going hungry.
(tefu, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 1:58, Reply)

Hiking
Me and a few mates had been hiking and we were all starving so we made our way to the closest pub. It cost us 10 squid for a small plate of chips and 5 pints of coke... so we drank all their vinegar.

Bastards.
(Pimms'N'Lemonade thinks you are a twat, prove me wrong., Sun 10 Oct 2004, 1:30, Reply)

The money zero-line in my head seems to be wrongly calculated
About 6 months ago I accidentally went about £10 over the limit on my overdraft, I was going to put £10 cash in to cover it but there was something on the telly that was interesting so I did that instead. 10 weeks and 14 threatning letters later I paid up the £400 in interest, charges and court costs that had accrued

Lesson for you kids, if the bank shout at you, give them money, if you dont things just get worse
( --=| Daz |=-- has been masturbating over a picture of you since, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 1:24, Reply)

last time i ran out of coke(the drink) and money
i went around my room collecting the bottles from the coke and pouring out that skanky little bit thats always so hard to get into a cup.it tasted like wee.
(That guy with a hat., Sun 10 Oct 2004, 1:14, Reply)

I put on some gloves,
raided the "garden" behind the house and made some stinging nettle soup. It really works and tastes okay, but is a hell lot of work. If somebody e-mails me, maybe I can be arsed to think of the recipe.
( Wurst Puns Inc. Back in the future., Sun 10 Oct 2004, 0:50, Reply)

Asda smart price noodles
9p a packet. Comes in prawn flavour. nuff said
(donksta, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 0:27, Reply)

I and two others
would regulary stow onto this Golf Course which was near a bike path. We had a little hole cut in the wire to get in. Finding balls was quite difficult as this Golf Course was in Australia and the long grasses hid snakes as well as balls. Once my mate ended up face to face with a Silver Roo as the quest for golf balls took over.

So then we found an easier method, just sit at this specific short green where the tee was around the corner from the hole, then run out and grab the ball as it landed neatly on the green or just off it. By the time they walked up the ball was safely in our bucket. When the novelty of watching the old coots looking for their balls wore off and we had enough golf balls, we would proceed to the Surf Shop in town where the proprietor would give 50 cents a ball

Watching the roller coaster of emotions of the old guys suddenly stepping out quickly to the hole to see if it was a hole in one, and then discovering it was not, and then wondering where the ball was without giving away your position with laughter was an art in itself
( Bling Blong Bling Blong, Sat 9 Oct 2004, 23:22, Reply)

Tea - the great provider
I spent most of my last year at uni drinking nothing but black tea (Kwik Save own brand I believe) with at least 3 teaspoons of sugar in it.

Didn't go hungry (cheap fresh fruit thanks to a mate who'd actually got off his arse and got himself a parttime job in a grocers), had money for booze and fags - did cost my folks a packet the moment I got home and went to the dentist tho.....
(fatrapper, Sat 9 Oct 2004, 21:56, Reply)