Living cheaply

[Broomstick]

Rubbing alcohol (isopropol alcohol) kills them on contact, so for hard surfaces you can use it to eliminate them. 50 C heat kills them, so IF you can launder something fabric at that high, or higher, temperature that will kill them (remember the old days when laundry used to be boiled? My mother did, and told me about it.) If you can keep an item below freezing (0 C) for two weeks that will also kill them.

However, some items such as mattresses, are impractical to treat and simply should not be obtained via dumpster diving.

Of course, one of the problem with bugs - of any sort - is that the bastards can hide in the tiniest cracks and you have to get them ALL.

[salm]

Hell no, rubbing poison on the surfaces of furniture won´t do shit because they sit inside cracks and gaps. The only thing you could to is put the piece of furniture inside your room spray poison around it and sleep in the same room. You´d have to keep the poison around the object for 4 or so weeks.
You see, bed bug eggs are even more resistant than the bed bugs themselves and rubbing them with poison doesn´t work. And it takes two or so weeks for them to hatch.
You have to wait until they hatch. After they hatch they have to have a reason to come out of their hiding spot. This reason is a human. Since they only come out during night times you have to sleep in the same room as your poisoned piece of furniture and act as live bait. After walking over the posion they die after a while if you´re lucky.

I think this bed bug episode has destroyed all my interest in second hand furniture, especially furniture from dumpsters.

Washing stuff at 50 degrees is fine and dandy but some stuff shrinks and if there´s somethig printed on the shirt the print will die. I lost a whole bunch of shirts that way.
Acutally i still boil some stuff like bed sheets every once in a while in the washing machine but that kills printed stuff on t-shirts.

The freezing option is also risky because the damn eggs don´t die off. Or so my exterminator tells me. Note my 1000+ bed bug cost was only for the exterminator. I have no idea how much I lost because I had to throw out furniture, books, comic books, video games, mattresses and similar stuff.

[Elheru Aran]

Hongi, if you have a lot of books and other media, consider perhaps selling some of them off to get some quick cash. I used to live fairly close to a large used-book store that would purchase your books for either store credit or cash, and we got some pretty decent money that way. You'll get rid of books that you only read once and then put away on the shelves, movies you don't really give a shit about, that kind of thing, and have some extra money in pocket...

[Broomstick]

Hell no, rubbing poison on the surfaces of furniture won´t do shit because they sit inside cracks and gaps.

Yes, as I said, they hide in the smallest damned places. You have to apply enough to soak into the cracks.

And it takes two or so weeks for them to hatch.

That's why, if you use the freezing method, you have to keep the object frozen at least two weeks - to outlast the length of time for the eggs to hatch.

Washing stuff at 50 degrees is fine and dandy but some stuff shrinks and if there´s somethig printed on the shirt the print will die. I lost a whole bunch of shirts that way.
Acutally i still boil some stuff like bed sheets every once in a while in the washing machine but that kills printed stuff on t-shirts.

Yes, well, some stuff can't be decontaminated safely. Never denied that.

The freezing option is also risky because the damn eggs don´t die off. Or so my exterminator tells me.

Parking stuff outside during a Chicago winter does kill off all the bugs, of all sorts - I know this from experience. But you have to keep it cold - not once during that time can the temperature rise above freezing. That also means the interior of a large object has to get and remain that cold for two weeks.

Then again, in my area there's a portion of the winter where the temperature might never rise above -15 C for a couple of weeks, much less above freezing - maybe that's sufficiently cold to do the job for sure.

And, of course, your exterminator has no motivation to tell you low cost options when he can make 1,000 per infestation. Some are that nice, but not all of them.

[Dalton]

Okay. The only time I actually have beers during the week is while eating steaks at the local pub.

Unless steaks are insanely cheap there, you should cut back on that habit and cook your own meat at home.

[aieeegrunt]

...and unless you are an insanely bad cook, it'll taste and be nutritionally a hundred times better too. I absolutely hate eating out, because I've had one restaurant meal that tasted better than what I can make at home, and I could probably make at least half a dozen meals for the cost of one night out.

[Phantasee]

My dream is to go to Argentina some day soon. Steak dinner for two comes in under C$15. Might be less now, actually.

[Korto]

Your living arrangements are a shame, in a way, as they reduce chances of improvement. You probably can't get any more people in (or would want to) to share the rent, and it would be hard to significantly affect your water and power bills. Either everyone in the house has to be on board, or you need to be able to seperate out individual usage. Otherwise you're doing all the work and only getting 1/4 the benefit.

You could of course toss your mobile, go onto a landline deal that includes unlimited* broadband and landline phone calls, and, other splitting the bill between the household be paying perhaps $20 a month yourself (depending upon your deal, of course), but that might seem a bit drastic.

FInally, sometimes you have fruit trees either growing wild in empty lots, or on the edge of a fenceline in someone's yard and therefore overhanging. If so, take advantage.

And remember, if you can plan for an expense (eg a regular bill), do so.

*"Unlimited" - You can use it as much as you want! Until we decide you've hit a wobbly limit we don't actually want to tell you about, all under our cutely named "Fair Use Policy".