wasnt actually skint at the time but was poor
i got mugged...
Laughed
Walked off £80 richer with a rather blunt kitchen knife and proceeded to go get rather drunk.
What can i say? I was about a foot taller than him and probably about a foot broader aswell, what a dumbarse.
(Voidedge, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 16:27, Reply)

Winds from Brussels

Day before pay day, big bowl of sprouts with bisto were all that was left. Scary visit to the toilet the next day.
(Yellow Car is now red, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 15:54, Reply)

As a grad student
I am currently subsisting off of a diet of nothing but Marathon bars and coffee. It's mostly destitution, but it has more to do with being dead out of time.
Edit: Have been staving off scurvy with vitamin-C tablets. Handy things, those.
(notcarlos, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 15:47, Reply)

what all poor people do.....
sex. non-stop sex. it's the only thing that was free. luckily we had enough durex to last until the next payday.
(travbot, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 15:14, Reply)

went carol singing........
would have been ok if i wasn't 17 amd 6' 2'' at the time.
my mate little brother would come in handy at times, cos then it looked like we were takng him.
we could go round a different area of the town each night, raise about £40, get lashed on stella and jump a taxi home from wherever we were.
(away in a manger doesnt count as payment to the local taxi firm)
(45thgenerationroman, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 15:09, Reply)

Smash Carnivale
My brother is an aspiring bon vivant, despite being a poor student. So he invented a dish called Smash carnivale, for all his wing-ding parties. It's Smash (instant mash potatoes for non-Brits) wixed with tomato ketchup, drizzled with hundreds and thousands. Classy.
( Flapjack I spay a little mare for you, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 14:00, Reply)

'Wok Bread'
My brother has a mate who invented a delightful dish called wok bread when they were squatters in Manchester. It's kind of like fondue - fill a wok with oil, heat it up, dip stale bread in it. Actually he couldn't be bothered to wait until it was hot, and so dipped rock-hard bread into barely tepid oil - nice dinner. He also invented salt sandwiches - and brussells sprout curry.
( Monty Boyce, My cheese game is strong, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 13:26, Reply)

i was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar....
.....and didn't have a pot to piss in as all pay as going towards paying moho-sive rent arrears. Finished work at 11pm and couldn't even muster £1 for the peasent wagon home. co-worker was a big aussie bloke with fingers like sausages who offered me £1 for t'bus only if i showed him one of my rather large norks. needless to say i showed him both the puppies in question and got the bus into work the next day to boot...
( ting, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 11:47, Reply)

Piss poor
Never try begging for nightbus money when you've lost your wallet, reek of spirits and have somehow managed to piss all over your trousers. Londoners can be so judgemental. I needed 2 quid - one to get me to Camden, another for the final leg. Managed to scrounge the first one and made it to Camden. The second one was a struggle though. Then I found my travel card in my back pocket. Twat.
(oRb A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 11:18, Reply)

Beer and pizza
Another time I was skint as a student my mate suggested we went for a job interview with Compuserve (Yes, I'm that old) as they gave out free beer and pizza as they tried to drum up enough poor students to get them to work in the call centre. After our beer and pizza we would have a chat with the staff and be given an "Internet quiz" to see if we knew enough about the internet. The questions were quite stupid such as "What is a newsgroup? Please give an example." to which we game examples such as alt.sex.animals and alt.religeon.satanism. Oddly enough we didn't get the job but we did try again a few months later for more beer and pizza. And no, they didn't check to see if we'd been last time.
(Khaine, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 11:14, Reply)

Oh and I attempted suicide by
eating nothing but cheese until i was shitting yellow goo.*



*may not be true at all
(That guy with a hat., Mon 11 Oct 2004, 11:07, Reply)

Lunchtimes at college..
I was always skint and never had anything to eat, so I had a few tricks up my sleeve to get food. The most honest was to offer to go to the shop for a few people and keep a bit of the change from each.
My favourite (and more successful) was to wait until someone was tucking into their food and then put them off. Ususally by telling a story that got more and more disgusting as it went along. To give you an idea, My favourite tale was one about going to visit my dear old granny in the chest ward of the hospital. I would go into graphic detail about how the old dears would all be gradually filling their spitboxes with their finest chest butter and rounding it off with the mad old codge who would go round and empty them. If you're sqeamish turn away now. He would empty them by filling a bucket, getting to the bin which was full and end up drinking it.
It never failed. Even as people got wise to my tricks, I got more inventive and vile. It got to the point where sometimes someone would take a bite of their pie, I'd say 'I went to the hospital to see my gran' and they'd just hand it over.
(boukha, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 11:03, Reply)

Beer
When I was a student, at the end of the term my mate and me would delve down the back of the sofa until we had enough loose change to afford a half of bitter. We would make the bitter last all evening and make an evening meal out of the free peanuts they served.

Bad enough but worse when you realise that my mate's dad is a peer of the realm....
(Khaine, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 10:55, Reply)

When I Needed Some Cash
I just sold my pilot's license to terrorists

hey- nice clothes don't buy themselves. . .
(le renard, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 10:49, Reply)

Pizza-go-go
I offered my housemate a blowjob in return for a slice of pizza.

B*stard declined saying he really was THAT hungry...
(spacecowgirl, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 9:55, Reply)

Smoking bangers
Having no money for fags, and already having gone through the existing butts to fashion a cigarette, a mate and I decided that perhaps herbs would be a suitable alternative to tobacco.

One rolled up "herbs de provence" fag later we gave it a go. I swear it's like smoking sausages, right up until you're violently sick.
(aneraseroflove excuse me...i have to go to space now, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 9:33, Reply)

love is blind
unable to raise the coin for a flight to visit a girlfriend, whilst at her ma's in the south of france, i improvised. and hitched.

i was only a day and a half late.

didn't stop me getting a face full of front door.

blinding.
(chives, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 8:05, Reply)

Airport tax
I had to give the manager of Pochentong airport in Phnom Penh my watch because I had no money. Good thing I kept my shoes because I had to walk in from the airport in Bangkok.
(junglejim, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 7:28, Reply)

hurricane.
Okay, I guess this isn't an "I survived for three months on ramen and ketchup packets" story. But still.

We're twenty-four hours from Andrew: big, big hurricane that struck south Florida in the early nineties. Catergory five. People's roofs got blown off, houses got flattened, etc.

So we see this thing coming. Oh my, what do we do? Why, the only thing we can do: Duct taped the windows.

Because shutters are expensive. We'd just moved in, we didn't have the money.

The good thing about ducttaping your windows is, unlike with proper hurricane shutters, you can look outside and see your neighborhood get destroyed.

Amazingly, not one window was broken. A lot of other stuff, trees and things, were destroyed, but not one window got blown out.
(fantastic german, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 4:11, Reply)

took my friend's violin...
and walked around the lunchyard playing it awfully and got .25 cents, a bag of pretzel sticks, a marshmallow crisp treat, and a roast beef sandwich with a bite taken out of it. Oh, and I don't play violin....
(TeenageJesusSuperstar, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 2:03, Reply)

last week i hosted a party
i bought a few cans, between a few onf my mates, and invited people round, the usual - the following day i realised i have more beer in my fridge than i had bought, more spirits left thani had bought, and i also found a £5 of resin left on my kitchen table - bonus - suffice to say the 20 or so mates that turned up had already been smashed and hadnt realised that they'd drank so little of there own beer - i now dont have to go out for the next 3 weeks

man i'm cheap

i havent spent a penny of my student loan yet
(VashTheStampede http://www.b3ta.com/features/howtopoachanegg/, Mon 11 Oct 2004, 0:37, Reply)

Dog-end rollies.
No cash, late night, no 24 hour petrol stations close by, desperate for a ciggie.
Solution?
Scoure through the over full ashtray for dog ends with enough left in them to roll together a tastes-like-shit rollie.
( Yamon Benny Harvey. RIP., Mon 11 Oct 2004, 0:33, Reply)

Got stuck downtown one day without any money
for the subway. I had decided chocolate was more important than transportation home, so i had to find some way to get $5 fast. So i dirtied my face a little and sat outside the subway station with hat in hand begging. I had made $11.50 within 5 minutes, so i decided to keep it up for a while longer until the real homeless guys started massing across the street whispering to each other and pointing at me.
Made it home on time and bought a toblerone.
( cheesemaster a screaming naked asian man driving a semi, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 23:51, Reply)

Up at a mate's in Linconshire
We were staying in his caravan, and went to the one shop in the village, which had a cash machine outside. Unfortunatly, I didn't have my bank card, and no one else had any kind of account. We brought food and water for 6 teenagers for three days with £6.38. Big bottles of 30p lemonade, dirtcheap pasta and the worst crisps ever. I was damn happy with my meal when I got home.

Anyone who's ever gone to Reading skint- the Salvation Army tent. Fucking lifesaver.
( Whillow, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 22:33, Reply)

It's a good thing none of you know who I am
No money? A girl? (Or not so finicky boy?) Simple! Blow jobs. They're fast, easy, no mess if you dodge at the last minute and flavoured condoms are a plus.

And you can plan out the rough draft of your next anthro paper while you're doing it, killing two birds with one stone.

I can't believe I admitted this.
(TDub Nunc id vides, nunc ne vides on, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 22:10, Reply)

Money
Four years ago, I wanted to do a degree but had very little money. Luckily, the government and a friendly high street bank lent me some and now I am unemployed and £16,000 in debt. Fucking magic.
( TomOz, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 22:10, Reply)

Screw you all
I'm a middle class 15 year old who sits at home and scrounges most things off my middle class teenage mates. I'll never go hungry....... Plus i live with my mum
(GiantSexySpaceMonkey is having a hat party........... with hats, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 21:54, Reply)

Some years back
in Cambridge (US, not UK) there was a city ordinance that bars and clubs had to have condom vending machines. For some reason, they were always in the gents never the ladies, but I'm not shy ; ). Anyway it seems there was one company supplying a lot of the places and they used free standing dispensers. You could easily pick these up and shake out all the coins and condoms. Kept me in pints, supplied me with laundrymat change and more than took care of my birth control needs for about a year until they wised up and started mounting them on the walls.

I guess putting them on the walls wasn't foolproof as one night I came out to my car to find one in the front seat. Never found out who put it there.
( sosumi, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 21:53, Reply)

Robbed someone
nuff said
(lifelikeandposeable, Sun 10 Oct 2004, 21:22, Reply)