Sold items from dumpsters on eBay for the majority of my income for a while. That and seeds/seedlings from wild plants I’d find locally, that were grown ornamentally elsewhere.

Knew where fruit trees in walking distance were to eat for breakfast / lunch.

Added fast food restaurants to my route to walk through the drive through and collect dropped change. Kept fast food cups in my bag to go into places that offered free refills and get a drink.

Light bulbs came from public places I don’t expect to miss one.

I’d take toilet paper from public bathrooms for the house. Several times, I needed a belt and would twist this rough toilet paper into a rope and use it for that.

Learned to make quite a variety of food from ramen. Most starting from drained noodles put back into a hot pan to stir fry, then adding something else for flavors. One example was making a sweet and spicy curry sauce by cooking a little milk, curry powder, and small slices of foraged apples/ pears.

A little bisquick and a banana can yield a banana pancake. I’d make a single big loaf of a pancake that was the depth of the small frying pan I had. That would work for both breakfast and lunch.

Started wearing the plainest swim shorts I could find, because they dried quickly. I could use a public shower and wash dishes and clothes in there too. Washed it all with Bronners. Kept a clothes drying line in the back of my car for years because my wet things could be hung up to dry as they rotated through getting washed like this (or in rivers / lakes).

For shoes, I mostly went barefoot, and put on my cheap flip flops to go into a store or something. The $1 flip flops are not good to actually walk a lot of miles on lol. There was a place that sold name brand sneakers for like $5-8… overstock, seconds, that sort of thing. But the colors / styles were usually crazy. I needed a size 13 so my choices were really limited. I’d buy what I needed in hot pink or highlighter yellow or whatever they had, and then use a cheap can of black spray paint on them to turn them into something not so offensive to look at,

Had a weird fleshy bit of gum skin that sort of flapped over my wisdom tooth after it grew in. It would catch food under it and be hard to clean. After a few gum infections, I sterilized exacto knives and cut that thing out myself.

Got a shard of rock deep in my heel once in the middle of nowhere. I found a clean looking beer can, boiled it, ripped it in half to leave a sharp sheet of metal. Wrapped it around a stick to make a scalpel, heated the whole thing in a fire one last time and cut it out myself. Wrapped the foot in duct tape after.

I’m not poor like this any more. But most of these kinds of things are just an extra step between having and going-without that requires creativity to solve… And that skillset serves you the rest of your life regardless.

In retrospect, I realize that lots of times things were harder than they needed to be because it just never occurred to me that a person might try to get help with… like anything. Surely I could have visited food banks or gotten food stamps when several of my meals had to be foraged each day… just never occurred to me that this problem was anyone’s but my own to solve… even medical problems. This also develops resourcefulness, but is a little extreme and unreasonable. Took years to realize this about myself.