Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Some more things I learned about saving money

I would like to thank everyone who gave me financial advice!

My friend Jie recommended the following blogs:
From these blogs I learned that there are many online coupons.

I also came up with some more ideas for saving money*:
  • Subsist mainly on free food, such as that broadcast over MIT's vultures mailing list for free leftovers in Stata. (I have friends who actually do this.)
  • Befriend the admins in your building so that they text you about free food before they send out the free food announcements.
  • To fill in other gaps, join as many research groups as possible. Many of these are likely to provide a free lunch or snack. Tangentially collaborating with research groups in other departments will keep the level of suspicion low.
  • To fill in the rest of the gaps, meet a succession of older people with jobs to date on sites like OKCupid* and go on 1+ dates with each of them. Act very poor but charming during the whole dinner; if you are lucky they will pay. (This assumes that these sites contain a large number of people willing to take me to dinner, and that these people do not communicate with each other.)
  • Invest in a sewing kit and a set of patterns. Attend corporate talks and get as many free t-shirts as possible. Stay after the talks to get the leftover XL's that nobody wanted to collect fabric for making pants, dresses, handbags, etc.
  • Hang out in each T stop and befriend the T operators so that you can get free public transportation. ("Sorry, X--I can meet you in Porter Square, but I'll have to leave there between 9 and 12. If you want to stay later, we can meet at Government Center.")
  • Sell your furniture and move out of your apartment. During the week, sleep on a cot in your office. On the weekends, spend the night with hard-partying friends who think you're staying over just because the T stopped running. If this is unsatisfying and you would like a bed to sleep on, date a couple of people at once and spend your time between their apartments. (Befriending some empty nesters with spare rooms/beds should also work.) Either that, or convince your advisor to buy a group bed for one of the offices.
  • Become friends with freegans.
The conclusion is that living in the Stata Center cannot fail you, since it will also let you save on heat, hot water, and electric bills. :P

* Most of these are untested.
** Thanks to Eugene's peer pressure and my own curiosity I had an OKCupid account for 2-3 days (not for this reason!!), during which time I met some colorful people and decided it was best to leave the site.

1 comment:

Claire said...

I have had great success with the Boston bus driver's refusal to give change - in my experience, if you get on a bus and tell them you only have a 20, they'll wave you on instead of bothering to charge. Probably won't work if you try to pull it on the same route regularly, though. :-)

Also, I'm reading your blog a lot today.