20 Household Budgeting Tricks From History That Actually Worked

In 1904, Motoko Hani, Japan’s first woman newspaper reporter, invented a household account book, the kakeibo, for housewives given a cash allowance each month by their husbands, but with no accounting system in place. Appearing in her publication, Katei no Tomo, it prompted women to consider four questions each month: How much money do you have? How much do you want to save? How much do you spend? How can you improve next month? This wasn’t an ancient practice handed down through many generations. The kakeibo was a new creation, and there were no budgeting apps until decades later.

In 1926, an American publisher called George Clason produced a sequence of short, bank-funded parables, which took place in a made-up version of ancient Babylon and were later compiled under the title The Richest Man in Babylon. The book contained a single lesson: take 10% of every pay packet, as soon as you receive it, and save it rather than trying to squeeze it out at the end of the month once you have paid for everything else. It wasn’t a translation of ancient Babylonian writings but a promotional device for American banks in the 1920s.

When Blacks migrated northward in the 1920s, they were charged 40% to 50% more in Harlem than white New Yorkers would pay for comparable apartments. House-rent parties were born. Hosts printed invitation cards, hired stride pianists such as Fats Waller, charged a dime or quarter at the door, and sold home-cooked food and bootleg liquor. The night’s earnings went straight toward that month’s rent, keeping eviction at bay.

Prior to general literacy, medieval and early modern European households kept their own financial accounts using a split tally stick, typically hazel or willow wood. To record debt to a local baker or butcher, the merchant would carve a notch in a stick, then break the stick down the middle. The customer retained one half, while the merchant held onto the other. On payday, both halves were presented. If the notches aligned perfectly, it proved that no additional notches had been carved or removed by either party. This particular household version was a method of private accounting between neighbors, separate from the government’s own tax tallies.

World War II’s military needs and transportation rationing put strain on civilian food sources. In response, the U.S. government encouraged citizens to grow Victory Gardens. Families planted approximately 20 million gardens during the war in backyards and empty lots. They produced approximately 8 million tons of vegetables, providing nearly 40% of the fresh vegetables consumed by civilians in 1944. Though Victory Gardens did not replace farms, they stretched grocery bills and ration cards for millions of families.

Back in 1844, a group of 28 working-class weavers and other craftsmen from Rochdale, England, opened a cooperative grocery on Toad Lane as a means of evading the gouging prices of “truck shops,” stores owned and operated by their employers. Their key innovation was the Divi: the store meticulously recorded how much each family spent, then redistributed a portion of the store’s profits back to the families every quarter, according to the amount they had spent. The more you bought, the more you got back.

From the 1870s to the 1930s in industrial Britain and North America, working families could not get small loans from banks. So the housewife created her own form of credit. Each Monday morning, she laundered the family’s “Sunday best” garments and took them to the local pawnbroker in exchange for the money needed to buy food and coal until the week’s end. After payday on Saturday, the family paid back the loan plus interest, and the suit was returned for Sunday worship and the weekend. Then they started all over again.

With wartime shipping losses and fabric shortages leading Britain to tightly ration clothing during World War II, the Board of Trade published an official pamphlet in 1943 entitled “Make Do and Mend.” For 3 pence, the guide taught housewives to rip apart old sweaters and re-knit them into new ones, and to turn “worn-out bed-sheets sides-to-middle” to lengthen their useful life. It also showed them how to patch holes with decorative sewing and cut down grown-up coats for kids. The tips spread quickly through neighborhood mending circles.

Cash was king. With no checking accounts or credit cards, working- and middle-class families from the 19th century to the Great Depression had to practice strict discipline with cash. Every week, when the wages came home, they allocated specific amounts of money for different expenses into envelopes or jars for rent, for the butcher, for coal, and for savings. Once the money in a particular jar or envelope was gone, they couldn’t spend anything more in that category until the next week’s wages arrived.

On December 1, 1909, Merkel Landis, treasurer at the Carlisle Trust Company, a small Pennsylvania bank, started the first bank-run Christmas Savings Club. Depositors put as little as 25 cents a week in a special account, and the bank refused to allow them to withdraw it until December. During the first season, 350 depositors averaged $28 each in the accounts. The plan caught on throughout the country. The accounts didn’t earn much interest, but the whole point was that they were frozen in place, not growing.

In the hard times of the 1920s and 1930s, many women living on farms in the United States and Canada simply couldn’t afford to buy fabric from stores, so they would unpick, wash, and sew cotton flour and feed sacks into dresses, diapers, and curtains. The milling companies caught on to their ingenuity and started printing flower patterns on the feed sacks and putting labels that washed off easily on them, so they could be sewn without having to spend a lot of time scrubbing out a brand name. This continued until the 1950s, when paper sacks replaced the cloth ones.

From the 18th century into the early 1900s, married women in Europe and North America typically didn’t have their own bank accounts or legal claims to family property. In the country, wives earned their own money, known as “egg money,” from selling extra eggs, poultry, and dairy products, separate from the grain or cattle money their husbands used to pay down farm debts. Similarly, husbands provided urban wives with regular “pin money” allowances to cover groceries and child care costs. Historians consider these funds important economic security for wives rather than disposable income for baubles.

Traditional savings banks required a shilling or a dollar to start an account, thus excluding most working-class families. In 1847, Scottish bank founder John Shirreffs opened the Greenock Penny Bank, which accepted deposits as low as 1 penny. This system spread rapidly throughout Britain and North America. Volunteers kept track of deposits in a passbook, and once the balance reached approximately a pound, they transferred it to a regular savings account earning interest. Every penny belonged to the depositors, not a form of handout.

Before there was any government-provided health insurance, a family whose breadwinner fell ill or died could easily find itself sent to the workhouse. Between the 1850s and 1910s, many working-class families in Britain, Australia and the United States paid a few pennies a week to a Friendly Society lodge, a member-controlled mutual aid society like the Independent Order of Oddfellows. These weekly payments created a fund that provided sickness benefits or helped with burial expenses when members were in need. It was a workers’ organization for workers, by workers.

During the 1800s through to the 1950s, many industrial cities in Europe and North America had little to no formal trash collection system. Mills, on the other hand, were willing to pay real cash for recycled cotton rags and bones. Homemakers saved up worn clothes, bones, fat drippings and scrap metal, which they would sell to the traveling “rag-and-bone men” who went door to door for a small sum of money, a bar of soap, some crockery or even sewing pins.

From about the 1880s until the 1940s, before the advent of liquid detergent, families across North America and Europe all had a little problem: soap slivers, so small you couldn’t quite grab them, but still too precious to toss out. To solve this, they used what were called “soap savers,” mesh wire cages attached to long handles. They’d hold the soap pieces inside the cage and swish them around in a basin of hot water or dishwater. This created suds and kept all the soap from running down the drain.

Heating coal was one of the biggest expenses in urban households between the 1850s and 1930s in Britain and North America, so it was crucial not to waste it. Each morning, housewives passed the contents of the ash pan through a wire mesh screen known as a cinder sifter. Any remaining dust was thrown out, but unburnt lumps of coal, known as breeze, were collected and placed back on the fire. This simple daily task could result in savings of 15% to 25% of coal use, according to Victorian home economics manuals.

In 18th- and 19th-century Britain and North America, import duties were so high that tea was a true luxury, well beyond the reach of a day’s wages. Housewives recycled the leaves from the morning brew by drying them on tin trays and re-steeping them later, occasionally stirring in a bit of baking soda to deepen the color if the second infusion seemed too pale. This little hack enabled households to drink tea each day, yet not pay for fresh leaves each day.

For 18th- and 19th-century people living in northern parts of Europe and North America, winter travel routes could become frozen solid or impassable, leading to a shortage of food and high food costs in those critical months. Every autumn, folks used their harvest earnings to buy whole barrels of flour, sacks of salt pork, sugar, root vegetables, and coal, which they stored down in the basement, salting or drying what needed it. It wasn’t a case of panic buying. It was the way of life.

When the stock market crashed in 1929 and banks froze credit, many working-class families simply could not afford to buy expensive items such as a winter coat or a stove. The solution was layaway. A customer chose an item and made a down payment. Then she returned each week to make another payment. Until she’d paid off her entire debt, the item would remain in the store’s back room. There was no charge for interest, unlike store credit, which allowed a customer to take an item home immediately.

This content was created with the help of AI.