I fall squarely on the frugal end of the spectrum when it comes to money matters. However, I am by no means a square and know how to have a good time—but on a budget, of course!

Here are some of my tried-and-true methods to keep my alcohol spending roughly in between some of life’s other necessities, like air (free) and international plane tickets (getting prohibitively more expensive by the day):

Drink less
The less you drink, the less you spend (duh). I have gotten better at this as I’ve gotten older and am less excited to spend the next day hungover and watching reality show marathons (sometimes I’m astonished at my maturity). I make plans with friends that don’t involve bars or restaurants, and have gotten really good at nursing one drink all night or drinking copious amounts of water (something I should do anyways). Of course, just a few years ago these suggestions would be anathema to me, which is why you can then employ any of the following:

Pre-game
Beloved by college students everywhere, I have often utilized this technique to save some dough at concert venues, major league baseball games, and New York City bars. Living the post-college dream of residing in Manhattan, I developed the perfect method to kill time on my subway ride and arrive at my destination with a slight buzz. The Subway Drinking Game was quite simple:

(1) Fill water bottle with alcoholic beverage of choice
(2) Board train at 181st St
(3) Take one sip when subway doors open

Repeat step (3) until final destination. This could get dangerous if I ended up on the local subway, which stopped every 10 blocks for the entire length of Manhattan. But, inevitably, I’d wind up at my friend’s doorstep in Greenwich Village at the ideal state of inebriation and desperately having to pee. Variations of the game are endless, like on road trips through Nebraska (but, not if you’re driving!).

BYO…
Beer, wine, champagne, Bloody Marys. Obviously, this is a no-brainer for potlucks, picnics and restaurants that charge nominal corkage fees. But if you’re really stingy and don’t mind being just a little bit sketchy, you can also bring your own alcohol to bars, restaurants, music festivals that charge exorbitant amounts of money for a Coors Light, etc. Remember—flasks are your friends—to doctor up a soda purchased at said locale or to take furtive nips in the bathroom. I even had a roommate who brought mini-bottles of coffee liqueur for his cup of joe to the dive bar that served $2 breakfasts. Brilliant.

Drink (cheap) beer at the bar
If there is a drink in front of me, I drink it and then want to keep drinking (social crutch, probably). Which is why I eschew mixed drinks, in favor of beer. And often, cheap beer. Hipsters have made PBR cool (or ironic, or both), but there are plenty of decent yellow water varieties (I’m partial to Hamm’s) plus an ever-growing list of microbrews. Almost always, beer is cheaper than wine or cocktails, and you get more of it! That’s value, people. However, I’m a sucker for libations with ginger beer or infused liquor—I’m all for splurging on one of those, but that’s when I follow the first tip (drink less, in case you forgot).

Cash only
Whether you’re following all or none of the above tips, this one comes in handy. It’s been said before, but pay for drinks in cash, round by round. And, if possible, bring a set amount of cash ($20 is usually my set amount). You will be less tempted to buy the entire bar tequila shots and you’ll know exactly how much you’ve spent. When the cash is gone, order a water and revel in your maturity—your bank balance and your liver will thank you.

Dana Beck likes cheap beer and treehouses. She lives in Oregon, where she has learned to re-wash plastic sandwich bags. Photo: Shutterstock/piyato

I realize it’s morning, but let’s talk about booze for a second. Lam Thuy Vo has been doing a bang up job illustrating how Americans spend on things like food, and this time, Vo is taking a look at booze. Apparently, $1 out of every $100 we spend goes to booze, and that hasn’t changed in 30 years, except booze has gotten cheaper at the store, but more expensive at bars and restaurants.

That’s a shame for social drinkers like me, because I’d say 95 percent of my boozing happens at a bar or restaurant. I’m not the sort of person who drinks at home, and I never drink alone. I do keep liquor at home for guests, but a lot of it is bottom shelf stuff because of this experiment I did for The Awl. I’d like to say it’d be cheaper to invite friends over for drinks instead of going out to a bar, but knowing me, I’d spend a lot of money on snacks, and worry too much about whether or not everyone was having a good time. So, to the bar it is! Who wants to go after work?

Prior to the invention of refrigeration, a shrub syrup was a means of preserving fruit long past its picking. Shrubs were popular in Colonial America, mixed with cool water to provide a pick-me-up on hot summer days.

A proper shrub has a flavor that’s both tart and sweet, so it stimulates the appetite while quenching thirst. The advent of industrially processed foods and home refrigeration combined to nearly eliminate the shrub from American foodways. Only family traditions, Colonial-themed establishments (such as City Tavern in Philadelphia), and a few holdout farms (Tait Farms, for one) have helped the shrub survive.

—Shrubs! Not just tiny bushes, it turns out. Also fruity and tart syrups you can make at home. This primer from Michael Dietsch at Serious Eats seems super simple and also super delicious and did I mention super simple? It seems within the realm of my skill and energy level, and I find making coffee cumbersome. Ingredients: Berries, sugar, vinegar, love (JK, you can skip the love).

Good liquor is expensive. But there is an easy, cheap way to elevate bottom shelf booze: infuse it with something. Way better than the running-Zelko-through-multiple-Brita-filters trap, and definitely better tasting than MD 20/20.

The Things You Need:

1. A sealable container of some kind (like a large flour jar, $3)

2. Booze (like a handle of Seagram’s, $14)

3. Something to put in the booze (like strawberries and cilantro, $3 and $1, respectively)

4. Patience (free)

The Steps:

1. Prepare the subjects of infusion. Here, that means slicing the strawberries into quarters and cutting the roots of the cilantro bundle. Place into container.

2. Pour chosen alcohol into container and seal.

3. Leave it alone, out of direct light, for as long as you want. It’s really up to you. A bartender I know leaves walnuts in vodka for months at a time to make homemade nocino, but I’m not that patient. Start tasting it after three days. Once you think it tastes perfect…leave it one more day. Five usually does the trick for me.

4. Drink! Cocktail umbrellas are not optional.

How many drinks are there in 750ml? Fifteen? Add in a bottle of tonic water ($1) and it comes out to $1.47/drink. What would you pay for a strawberry cilantro-infused g&t at your local bar? (A LOT.)

Here are some suggestions to get you started. We’ve made all of these over the years, and they’re all fantastic.

• pear ginger gin
• strawberry pineapple gin
• beet gin
• mint cucumber vodka
• swedish coffee vanilla vodka
• vanilla pear vodka
• rosemary vodka
• pineapple chili tequila
• bacon or pork belly bourbon
• apple cinnamon whiskey
• mint whiskey
• raspberry mint whiskey
• blackberry St Germain
• cucumber gin (bastardized Hendrick’s!)

One tip, though: that stuff that’s been soaking? DO NOT EAT IT. It is not nearly as tasty as it smells. That goes double for anything in tequila.

Victoria Johnson is the patron saint of easy culinary pursuits. 

I have a drinking problem.

Not in that jokey-jokey, I-wouldn’t-call-my-drinking-every-day-”a problem” way. Quite the opposite, actually. Like that “every day” part, that’s no joke. It’s often heavily, and before noon on weekends. That’s not why it’s a problem, though. And it’s not a problem based on obvious actualities. Like the frequent 24-hour hangovers, the unsafe hook-ups, the avoidable physical altercations, the weight gain, the lost jobs, the arrest and conviction, the detainments, or the immediate family member currently serving a stint for DUIs and our multi-generational history of alcohol abuse.

For some self-hating reason, I consider those issues to be simply part and partial to good training for a heavy drinker, like building stamina and endurance for a marathon, or practicing how to correctly fall in judo. All jokes aside, it’s actually a bit depressing. I know. Truly heavy drinking usually is. My dad ran a halfway house. I’ve seen what real drinking does to people. It’s actually nothing like a marathon. It’s more like suicide, or trying to do judo while drunk. Rather, I know I have a drinking problem because my bank account has a drinking problem. It’s there in black-n-white. I try not to look at it, always declining to print a paper receipt because it’s quite, well, sobering.

Last month, I made about $500 dollars, about $250 of which went toward booze. Around the same time last year, I was making about $1,800. I spent about half of that income on alcohol, too. No matter what my expenses, I’m somehow manage to blow the rest of it on drinking. The precision of booze-buying  vs. other necessities is actually kind of impressive, although not as impressive as the $600 I just spent in a 72-hour period, most of which was spent in a poorly-lit room.

I currently have $63.17 to my name and despite just losing my job — our family-owned newspaper went the way of many family-owned newspapers — and no foreseeable income, my last purchase was beer. Two sixers of High Life to be precise. In fact, I’m getting drunk as I write this.

This lack of money and income should be a cause for concern. Like most problem drinkers, though, I may be in denial (ignoring for a moment, of course, this here widening gyre of Wallacian self-reflective analysis, to which the author himself was susceptible, along with alcohol abuse). My continuous problems with both money and booze began at the same time, so I long ago dismissed any debate about causality vs. correlation as both trifling and beside the point.

You see, the great thing about being an 18-year-old sahib traveling alone in Tibet and Nepal is that you drink with impunity and anyone will take your white dollars — the restaurants, the liquor stores, the Kathmandu whore houses, even the dry-state black markets. Unfortunately, that’s also the worst thing — anyone will take your white dollars, including thieving whites. I strongly suspect it was the crazy Russian girl, who first conned her way into my room — “to split” the cost — before gobbling up all my diarrhea pills behind my back because she thought they were fun drugs and later said she was pregnant when I asked her to leave me be.

The whole story is hi-larious.

Suffice it to say that just as I was about to pay for a beach-side beer in Goa, India, I found myself without both passport and money. All of it. Gone. I’m pretty sure it was that commie who stole my shit. What’s worse, I was piss drunk, and it’s doubtful any of it would have happened had I been sober. The incident still bugs me. At the moment of “oh shit”-ness, I was drinking with a nice, old Aussie (he was about 24). When we couldn’t find my must-haves, that drunk geezer did a couple things I’ll never forget. First, he gave me a lotta rupees for a bus back to the consulate in Bombay. Then he bought a few more rounds.

And that’s been the general tenor of life for the past eight years.

Being poor and/or in the hole is quite educational. Not in that
I-have-student-loans-because-I-got-a-liberal-arts-degree-instead-of-a-free-library-card-and-still-live-in-the-big-city kind of way. I mean, genuinely poor and in the hole. Like having to ask friends for money to get through next month’s rent in that slum house with its dual-use sink/shitter of which the garbage disposal is broken. Or quickly memorizing area codes so you recognize and avoid bill collectors calling because of an uninsured ambulance ride. Or not being able to afford either a phone or insurance. Or helping to solicit funds for your friend’s procedure because the only thing she could possibly afford are booze,”all natural supplements” and other drastic self-inducing abortion remedies.

Mind you, these examples are purely hypothetical.

What’s not hypothetical is all the petty borrowing I’ve done, usually because I couldn’t balance either my checkbook or my drinking. Like the $500 dollars I still owe a friend four years later. I know I’m going to hit him back just as soon as that big freelance check comes in. Sometimes, I feel slightly guilty for not settling that debt. Other times, I remember how I thoughtlessly got in his passenger seat while he drunkenly drove around the city one night. He’d just had a very ugly fight with his girlfriend and was trying to “cool off.” I’d preferred he’d die with an equally wasted friend than perhaps died alone. Anyway, at 70 m.p.h. downtown D.C. is surprisingly beautiful.

Then there’s the friend who just paid me back the $200 I gave him years ago. I first met him at the local bowling alley. It was a drug deal. Since our first meeting, he’s been kicked out of at least three bars, caused thousands of dollars in property damage and broken his foot by … well, no one’s quite sure; blacking out can have that effect. We lived together once and he smashed our mirror with his fist, although to be fair, that was long after I’d shot arrows into the living room walls, “Hunger Games” style. After all the booze, we barely had enough for food, let alone rent. That hasn’t changed much. I’d trust him with my life. I never once asked about the money, not even when we using our paychecks’ last few dollars on booze. After he gave me the cash, I immediately bought us a few rounds.

Asking to borrow money is a very personal interaction. It can be humiliating. And humbling. And it’s often haunted by a stigma. Call it begging if you want, because that’s essentially what it is. When I get asked, it’s often a similar situation and I’m pretty sure I can see my friends’ pride getting stuck at the base of their sternohyoid. That’s why, as opposed to parents or payday loaners or the officemates, our lot tends to ask one another for a dime or two.

You can ask one of those healthy friends who’s got money and is, at best, a “social” drinker. But the feeling of mutual understanding is nonexist. One of you has the upper, moral (and perhaps steady) hand. Reformed drunks can be great. Often, they know exactly where you’re coming from and because they’re not spending every night drinking their income, they have plenty of cash-on-hand. Just watch out for the baptised-in-firewater born-againer. They’ll drive you to the bottle faster than anything.

Maybe my friends are not problem drinkers, I certainly wouldn’t want to insult them by labelling them as such over their objections. But almost every person I’ve borrowed significant funds from — and vice versa — has been on the wrong-end of substance self-control, at one time or another. Some may call this “justifying.” I prefer to call it camaraderie. Or, maybe, shame-raderie.

We’re smart. Nothing like that old drunk on the corner who’s been forced into AA and doesn’t even know what “Sub Pop Records” is. We’re all in our mid-twenties, drinking heavily and coming of age during the recession. We all feel as if we’re teetering on some troubling lines. Or, at least, I do. None of us is really a disease-model “alcoholic” and we all get jobs, however menial, when we need them. Still, it could go either way in the near future. I’m somewhat fearful of those very real possibilities. While facing those realities, I’d love nothing more than to clasp the hands of my fellow strugglers, except we’re all holding our drinks.

So instead, I’m comforted by the fact that when struggling financially because of my own self-destructive behavior (shoot, I’m not gonna to just stop) I know to whom I can turn for help — others in the same boat. It’s like what Wavy Gravy said: “… You’re sinking but you reach down to help somebody who’s sinking worse than you are. And everybody gets high.” Granted, he was technically talking about acid, but you get the point.

And I certainly hope my friends understand this exchange is a two-way street. After all, when we loan each other cash, it’s not like the person is some unrelatable stranger. We know each other’s habits. All of them. In the long run, we’re all “good for it.” And anyway, it’s not like any of us can really hide. We know where to find one another most nights of the week.

Jeff Winkler lives in Arkansas. He’ll humbly accept a proffered drink, if you insist. Photo Credit: Flickr/crizzirc