one of the things i picked up from my mom is that you prioritize what to spend your money on. even if you are not poor, it may be important for you to own horses, for example. mom made that possible by scrimping on other things so we could support the horses. for example, she made our own clothes, and when we were old enough, she taught us how to make our own. both mom and stepmom taught me how to darn socks. mom made her own soap from bacon drippings and lye. she used a grater on it to use the same soap for laundry detergent. at one time we had a washing machine that did not spin the clothes dry - it had a roller and you rolled the clothes through that, and then line dried them. speaking of that, you can save all kinds of electricity by line drying clothes. we grew a lot of the food we ate. mom was always collecting seeds and cuttings so we would not have to buy the plants. we constructed a graywater system to water the plants using a firehose mom scrounged from the fire station for free. we moved the fire hose all around the garden so the gray water from the kitchen sink did not all drain in one place. dad now has a gray water system in the kitchen sink, but he has to use buckets to spread it around his garden. mom and i used to scrounge grass clippings from town and put it on our garden. we had the richest soil around. firewood heated our homes, and we never bought any. we scrounged for wood that fell off of trees. we found a hardware store that gave away broken pallets, and we cut those up for firewood. mom built many of the homes we lived in from scratch. it was not all new building materials. sometimes we scrounged stuff other people threw away. yes, i am a dumpster diver.