Ways to have fun when you're broke

[Mahi27]

Money is really tight for me right now. At the same time, I still want to play with my tanks. Normally for me that's been buying new fish, plants, or decor. Well, that's not really an option right now, but I know if I don't find something equally entertaining, I'll probably spend money I don't have on some awesome fish.

Anybody else ever find themselves in this position? What did you do to keep yourself busy until cashflow eased up, or maybe just as a new way to enjoy your tanks without throwing more money at them?

Some things I've been thinking of:

• Breeding a new type of spawner (e.g. egg scatterers instead of livebearers, I have some really nice rainbow emperor tetras I could try this with)
• Cleaning up some of my more neglected 'aquascapes' (at this point really just scraggles of plants here and there)
• Maybe even paring down my collection a bit so that I can focus on the fish I enjoy the most right now

Curious to hear other ideas!

[Fish Folk]

Fish can fast several times each week without health hinderance. That saves a penny here and there. Many species are fine without a heater, which sits electric bill costs down. I like keeping NANF for this reason -- I never need to add a heater.

What sorts of fish are you interested in if you could afford them? What kind of tank spaces do you have to work with right now? Have you ever kept Rainbow Shiners before?

[Odd Duck]

Have you kept blue eyed lemon bristlenose plecostomus before?  These babies don’t look very “lemony” but they eventually grow up to this.  Ignore the cloudy water in the last pic but if you keep bristlenose plecos, don’t use a dirt bottom layer.  Ask me how I know.  😆 

 

 

[Galabar]

Go to your local pet store, and get a bunch of "feeder" guppies (usually wild type Endler's).  Let them take over your tank with 1000 babies... 😉

[nabokovfan87]

On 10/7/2023 at 6:31 PM, Mahi27 said:

Anybody else ever find themselves in this position? What did you do to keep yourself busy until cashflow eased up, or maybe just as a new way to enjoy your tanks without throwing more money at them?

Honestly, I started breeding shrimp because it seemed like the lowest risk choice to potentially help keep the tanks going in future.  I changed from a few tanks down to 1, added a shrimp colony to the side.  (at most, in this house I have avg'd 3-4 tanks, working on breaking down the last one now)

There are a lot of great people on the forum here.  I would recommend making a journal, post about the things you enjoy and what you like about your tanks.  Focus on the good.  Plenty of people are willing and have absolutely donated things to me for the sake of helping out!  It's an amazing thing when someone goes out of their way for the sake of others, and it's one of the cool things in this community and hobby. 🙂

Do you have a LFS or just big box stores near you?

[Guppysnail]

Since you have thought on cleaning up the neglected aquascapes…

Trim down plants and save clippings. Those can be grown out on a windowsill in a dish. Propagate mosses you like in current setups that way as well. 
 

Once they are grown out you can sell them and make a few Pennie’s or redo a current scape you don’t truly love. 

[Tanked]

Other than a thorough cleaning of some of the equipment, I will spend some time observing the aquarium up close.  Before lights out I used to spend time watching the MTS rise up out of the substrate.  It is interesting to watch behavioal changes at different times of the day.  In @nabokovfan87s  Lets have a good fishy day topic I described one 10 minute session.  That evening the tank would become quite active.  Sometimes it is fun just to look for tiny changes in the aquarium.

[mynameisnobody]

Collect a jar of water, sand, plants, etc from any clean waterways around you. There’s a few YouTubers that take you through the process. Seems quite interesting if you’re near water and it’s clean and not frozen. Just thinking outside the box a bit. 

[BlueLineAquaticsSC]

Yes to being too broke to buy things. I really enjoy the scaping aspect and I have a stash of tanks I got for free from friends or off the side of the road. A thrift store even gave me 2 30g for free once.

I keep a container of substrate mix I use in my tanks which is gravel, aragonite, BDBS, all purpose sand, and sand from my yard. You can buy an 8’ x 4’ pink 2” styrofoam insulation board at the hardware store for about $20 and a gallon of drylok for $15 and be able to make 3D backgrounds for a ton of tanks. 
 

Collecting from nature is free. I have gone to my local river and got a 5 gallon bucket of muck to use as substrate, which came with lots of little critters, local plants and fish can be fun to keep, decor like drift wood (I’ve had a lot of success getting cool pieces by digging up the rootball of dead bushes, which is what spider wood is) and rocks are easy to find. 
 

If you have a LFS that will buy fish from you you can start an easy breeding project and trade fish for store credit/$ for your hobby. 
 

My best advice is to stay off Aquabid or you’ll wind up having to explain to your wife how you accidentally bought more fish…

[Mahi27]

Thank you everybody for your replies!!!! I was going to respond individually but everyone was so generous in their advice that it's too much 🤣

I really like the idea of doing a thorough cleaning of the tanks and equipment...good idea to take good care of what I already have before I go get new stuff. 

Also I think someone mentioned keeping NANF and other coolwater species to cut down on electricity costs? This is definitely a move I'm interested in making. Tbh a lot of NANF are not that attractive to me--looking at you, sunfish and chubs--but for example mountain redbelly dace are basically everything I could ask for in a cyprinid!!