Lived on beans, rice, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. If I wanted to splurge, I’d get Tofu, vegetables, and soy sauce.
Reused cooking oil over and over. Walked through my employer’s building daily picking up cans and recycling them on my lunch break. Forged a dead man’s name to get electricity after not paying the bill. I kept the dead man’s credit good, though.
Created an auto policy out of nothing, at Kinko’s and used that to register my car, which cost $500, while bribing a shop owner to make it pass smog test.
Then when I registered the car, I used old paperwork from the State, that had lower fees on it than I was supposed to pay. I figured they’d be so swamped they’d process it anyway. And it worked.
I wasn’t trying to cheat the system to be a rebel or a thief. I was just doing what needed to be done to get by without going homeless or jobless. There were no buses to my work at the time. None at all. And it was 55 miles away. Because the rent near work was not affordable, since it was near a horse racetrack. Eventually I moved into a motorhome I bought for $2000 using a loan, and paid a woman $5.00 a week to park in her driveway, and that was a great decision at the time, so I could get caught up with money. At one point, I paid $60 a month to live in a fairly large but obviously porous treehouse. One day a county building inspector showed up. Luckily the building inspector was attracted to my landlord and my landlord did what it took for my treehouse to pass inspection. My treehouse had cable TV (stolen from the neighbor’s signal with his permission), a cold room lined in plastic sheets with a small AC in there, and 3 stories of small space living.
And lots of this stuff took place prior to massive computerization of state agencies. I’d do it all again, if I had to, but it’s not as easily doable now.