Festivals are wallet-wateringly expensive. But not if you’re savvy. Here’s how to do one on a tight budget and, warning, the tips are mainly food-and-booze-based because, let’s face it, that’s where the money goes. You can’t go furniture shopping at V Festival.
Don’t get the train/official festival shuttlebus
Everyone knows official coaches are for losers and the train is for The Queen. Instead, scope out potential lifts at GoCarShare, or do some intense Googling for other (reputable) festival transport options – National Express often run cheap coaches if you get in there early enough – that don’t include dropping £70 for a rail ticket.
One year, I travelled with a theatre company my mate ran after putting out a ‘Can anyone give me a lift to Latitude’ call-out on Facebook. Sure, I was in the back of the van with the props, but it was free and they gave me a half-hour break to stretch my legs/buy a sandwich.
BYOFAB AKA Bring Your Own Food And Booze
If you turn up with nothing more than a bottle of water and some softmints, you’re going to spent £100k over the course of a weekend. It’s just maths. What with stalls charging £8 for a sandwich (more for sandwiches that are actually edible) and up to and including £8 for a pint, you’ll find yourself caught in a circle of Fuck Its – from ‘Fuck it, I’ll get chips with my burger’ to ‘Fuck it, I’ll buy a round for my mates and remortgage the house I can’t afford to mortgage anyway because I am 26 and unable to get on the property ladder’.
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Additional BYOFAB tip
If you’ve got a camping stove, then my mate discovered a revolutionary festival food technique called ‘freezer bagging’ which involves pre-cooking food and freezing it in bags.
‘Basically you make dry meals beforehand in freezer bags, then just boil water on your fire/camp stove, add it to the bag, seal it and put it in a cozy for 10 minutes. Boom – hot meal. Slightly weird, but undeniably cheap,’ she says. Check out more info on freezerbagging (heh, sounds rude) right here.
Go halves with a mate
If you absolutely have to buy that £50 burrito, then lessen the blow by sharing the financial burden with someone else who’s equally poor. A friend found out about this money-saving technique the hard way, but it paid off in the end: ‘My first Glasto, someone opened my tent when I was sleeping and said, “Dave? Dave?” while they stole £100 from me. Avoid this,’ she advises.
‘So I went halvesies with mates on stall food like giant burritos, giant pies, had cereal bars and drank so much I didn't notice I was hungry.’
Budgeting aside, if someone comes in your tent and says, “Dave? Dave?” then attack them before they make it to your purse. Unless your name is Dave or you’re sharing a tent with a man called Dave.
BYOB
AKA Bring Your Own Bumbag. If you’re the sort of person who can’t pull off a bumbag, then get one of those little across-the-body bags so you can transport food and water around with you to kick those, ‘Fuck it, I can’t be arsed going back to the campsite, I’ll just buy a hog roast’ moments right in the tits.
You’ll probably be drunk, so your resolve will be at its weakest – repeat after me: CEREAL BARS ARE GODS. You don’t have to buy rabbitfood ones if you’re not a health freak – get a really honeyish oaty one covered in chocolate. That’ll sort your hunger pangs out for a good few hours, enabling you to move away from the chip stands and into heavily wooded regions/the music venues.
In terms of alcohol, my mate Danielle responded with the best, and most succinct advice I’ve come across so far, simply saying: ‘Water bottles full of wine stuffed down your wellies.’ Well, I think we’ve all learned something today.
Blag your way into the press tent
The press tent will have free drinks at some point and usually a constant supply of bottled water/cider/beer in a fridge. I only managed this once (I’m awful at blagging) because I told them I’d left my USB stick in a laptop while running at full pelt towards the entrance so they didn’t have time to check my pass. I was off my tits – which probably helps when blagging – but if you’re not as worldly/battered as I was, then befriend someone who looks like a photographer/journalist and get them to smuggle you some.
Walking backstage with purpose works too (or latching on to a large group who all have the correct lanyards) because, especially at smaller festivals, security will just presume you’re supposed to be there. Each performer will have an allocation of free crisps and drinks, so once you’re in there, it’s like that bit in Aladdin where the Genie shows him two columns and both the columns are made of food and then Aladdin slides down the one made of fruit. I watched Aladdin recently, sorry.
Anyway, the last time I went to a festival I accidentally walked around the back of the comedy tent and came out with three bottles of wine and a bottle of Jack Daniels. Just like Aladdin.
Work there!
My pal Matt just got back from Glasto £50 up having worked the bar and hey, it wasn’t even that bad. ‘Before the festival got started, the shifts were 8.5 hours, which was gruelling, but after that they were 5 hours. 10am- 3pm,’ he says. ‘Luckily, the girl organising the shifts was on our team so we could choose to work when things were on that we weren’t too bothered about. I wasn’t that bothered about missing Metallica, for example.’
On top of being paid £8 an hour (thereby paying off the ticket in the first two shifts and getting £160 at the end), they got a special campsite complete with way nicer showers and free booze while working.
‘I bought myself a lobster when I finished my last shift. Just because I could.’ And because he’s proper fancy.
Leave your debit card at home
One for the truly disciplined, allocating yourself a certain amount of cash and leaving your debit card at home is a surefire way to make sure you don’t overspend. Because you physically can’t. If this sounds totally impossible, then you’re not trying hard enough – my mate Ian managed it at Green Man festival in 2009: ‘I lost my debit card in the car park when we arrived and survived the weekend on one loaf of Sainsbury’s Basics white bread and three tins of Basics baked beans.’ See? Totally doable.
Like this? Then you might also be interested in:
Shit-Covered Tents And Used Tampons: What It’s Really Like To Clean Up After Glastonbury
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.