Life, especially as an adult, can be hard, and it's nice to be able to feel like you're living on "Easy Mode" from time to time.
One of the best ways to experience this has to be when you feel like you've found a loophole in the system.
From special deals at stores and restaurants, to exceptions in terms of service, there are some good ones out there.
Ready to take notes, Redditor _ZoroX_ asked:
"What's the best loophole you've ever discovered?"
Free Parking
"My brother got free parking for pretty much his entire time at university."
"It was that golden period when the pay parking kiosks were able to accept credit cards, but before they were actually connected. They’d read a card and check it against a locally stored list of banned numbers, and once a month the meter maid would download the transactions, process them, and update the blacklist."
"My brother found that they’d accept those prepaid gift cards if they were backed by Visa or MasterCard, but couldn’t check the available balance, so he’d buy one, use the balance up on whatever, and then use the card for parking until the end of the month when it’d get processed, found to not have funds, and banned. Rinse and repeat."
"The guy saved probably $2500 over his degree."
- Chic_Femininee
Free Printing
"In university, I didn’t have my own printer. I had to swipe my student ID to pay to print anything on the library’s printer. They charged something like 10 cents per page."
"I would go and select the document name off of the touch screen, then swipe my card, and it would print as well as charge my account. I discovered that if I gave my document a really long name, the computer didn’t know what to do with it."
"So instead of going to the queue, it just bypassed the pay screen entirely and printed."
- Pilotx15
In-State Tuition
"Not mine but many years ago a woman was attending college in Texas and paying out-of-state tuition. She found out that if you were a business owner in the state you could get in-state tuition. She spent a few bucks to file for a business and saved gobs."
- hotbutteredtoast
"This is an actual loophole in a lot of states that anyone can take advantage of if their high school student is planning on going to college in a different state. Register a business with the state in their name (ranges by the state for as little as 50 dollars to upwards of 300), and then they will qualify for in-state tuition after one year of business in most states."
- DontWreckYoself
Hospital Parking
"The parking gate at the hospital the pay machine wasn't working so I drove to the barrier and pressed the button to speak to the attendant or security person... A few seconds later, without a word being exchanged in either direction, the barrier opened."
"This was early on in my dad's hospital stay of about nine months."
"I didn't try paying again, just pressed the button at the exit barrier..."
- TechStumbler
Low Expectations
"I discovered that my high school P.E. teacher graded on improvement. You took a skills test at the beginning of each unit, then one at the end of the unit, and your grade was based on how much you improved."
"I was not the most gifted athletically and always got C's in P.e. before this, so I would tank the opening test, then perform my usual mediocrity at the end, but my improvement was awesome, and I became an A student the last semester of high school P.E."
- LordBaranof
The Gift That Keeps On Giving
"I didn’t find this loophole myself but my friend did: A few years back, an online store had this promotion where whoever spent the most money over a month would get free round-trip airplane tickets to anywhere in the world."
"My friend (who’s a f**king genius) found that one thing you could buy on the site was a gift certificate. So he bought a $25 gift certificate and kept spending it on another $25 gift certificate. So he ended up spending $25 on round-trip tickets to Australia."
- Beautifull_Fairy
A Daily Allotment
"There was a drink machine in college that was $.75 for a juice. If you put a dollar in it gave you 5 quarters in change. I got a juice every day for months before they finally fixed it."
- Dreammy_Glitter
Buy One, Get Two Euros
"They caught on pretty quickly but a few years back, I managed to purchase some buy-one-get-one-free (BOGOF) meals from Tesco that were also yellow stickered."
"The system hadn’t been updated to remove the offer, which meant I ended up effectively being paid to take the food home."
"For example, I bought two ready meals that were originally priced at two euros each. Normally, they would have cost two euros total with the BOGOF offer, but since they were further reduced to something like 40 cents each, the full promotion still applied. When I scanned them, the total came to 80 cents, but the system also refunded me two euros."
- peanutbudderlover
Enthusiastic Play
"The ball machine at the driving range would give you a bucket of balls and your token back if you put enough backspin on the token when inserting it. Basically could go to the range for free whenever I wanted."
- milkxj
Tipped Food Only
"We figured out that on our country’s biggest website for takeout food that if you go all the way to the payment screen, then click the ‘back’ button on the browser, not the website, enter a tip for the driver and then proceed with the process you only pay the tip and the order still gets delivered."
"We did this twice, and then the glitch was patched."
- Cashewkaas
Free Cable TV
"Free cable TV."
"I once lived on a property in one of two homes that shared the same mailbox/address. One month I got behind on my cable bill and they came out to disconnect me and disconnected my neighbor's service instead. Neighbors soon called me to ask if my service was out and I said, no. There was a big football game on that day that they had planned to watch and they were bummed."
"A friend of theirs, who happened to work for a different cable company, was visiting and asked my permission to splice a cable between the two houses, so they could get service from mine and I agreed. Took him about 20 minutes and they were back in business in time to watch their game."
"Once I'd figured out the reason for the original disconnect, I explained it to my neighbors, who then stopped paying their cable bill on purpose. Cable company sent out a bucket truck only to discover that their cable was already disconnected and went away satisfied."
"We then had free cable in both houses for the next three years that I lived there, with both of us having been officially disconnected."
- Story_Man_75
Free Soda Guaranteed
"Back when soda companies would have promotions on the underside of the bottle caps, I could tilt the soda bottles just right so I could find winners."
"During many promotions, I paid for one initial bottle of soda, a 'get a free bottle' winning one, and then continually searched and found those, never having to pay for a soda."
- ihadtopickthisname
Milking The Clock
"I had two loopholes that I routinely exploit at work (and I recommend it to my employees, though none have the discipline). It lets me take 1 month of vacation each year, instead of just two weeks."
"Loophole One: All over time (OT) will be matched with PTO/Paid Vacation time."
"Loophole Two: Clocking in five minutes early and Clocking out five minutes late will count as OT, but not require manager approval."
"By Clocking in five minutes early to start my shift, out five minutes late for lunch, five minutes early to come back from lunch, and out five minutes late at the end of my shift, I got 20 minutes of paid OT and 20 minutes of Vacation time each day I worked."
"Each year, we get 80 hours of PTO, but with my scheme, I get an extra 83 hours and 20 minutes. And that's not counting any extra PTO I received when asked to work overtime."
- WatchingInSilence
Free Storage Space
"I have over 26 GB of free storage in my Dropbox account."
"Not sure if it still works this way, but like 15 years ago they would give you like +500 MB of space for each signup you referred, up to like 50 referrals (or maybe it was +1 GB and ~25 referrals?). But they had to actually install and activate the client for you to get the credit."
"I set up a little Linux VM and created a save point with just a browser and an un-activated Dropbox client install in it. Then I used a bunch of throwaway emails to send a crap-ton of referrals."
"For each one I would boot the VM, process the next referral in the list, then (and this was the key) shut the VM down and change its MAC ID. Rinse and repeat. As long as the MAC ID changed, Dropbox saw each one as a separate thing."
"I probably could have automated it, but I got the process down pretty good so I just spent an evening grinding through them while watching basketball or something. Took a couple hours total."
- cujojojo
Unlimited Tea
"I can’t remember when it happened, but it was years ago. I think it was Nestea, or some other canned tea, but if you bought a case of tea then there was a coupon on the box for a free case... except it was on every case, so now you have case #2 and another free case coupon. All the tea could be had."
- Gigglyy_Queen
From super-clever loopholes to keep making purchases to free printing and parking, there were countless ways to save ample money here. Fortunately for the companies, they weren't huge losses to the companies, either.
