Featured Image Credit: The Good Brigade via Getty Images
Topics: TikTok
Rachael Davis
An Airbnb cleaner from Florida, USA, has shared an ingenious method of saving money on food whilst working for the holiday letting app.
Posting in 2023, Diana Cruz had been working as a professional cleaner for five years at the time, and had been saving thousands of dollars each year thanks to her money-saving hack.
It all comes down to food and household items left by renters, covering everything from eggs to washing detergent.
Not only does this leftover stuff save money for Cruz, it also helps to prevent needless waste. A double win!
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Sharing her cleaning exploits on TikTok, the 2023 video in question shared some highlights from one clean-up haul.
Cruz had pulled in a set of diet sodas, some butter, tomatoes, black beans and garlic. That wasn’t all: in the freezer she found pizza rolls, two tubs of ice cream, a pizza and mozzarella sticks. All unopened!
Sadly we’ll never know why these particular guests saw fit to stock up so heavily!
"Not bad at all," she said in the video.
In another video shared to her TikTok page, Cruz was able to get her hands on two unopened boxes of high-end burgers - which retail at $30 each at Walmart - as well as some beers and wine.
Among her regular finds, Cruz says eggs are “the last thing I have to worry about when grocery shopping”.
Other cleaners have chimed in with their own waste-saving finds.
"I clean short-term rentals and at one point I had six pounds of bacon and four pounds of butter in my freezer," said one commenter.
"I clean Airbnbs too.. I have a life supply of butter and eggs," said another.
Speaking to Insider, Cruz said she can save as much as $200 a month by intercepting Airbnb leftovers on their way to the bin.
"Let me tell you, eggs are still kind of expensive, but when everything was going crazy with eggs, that helped us so much because we never had to buy them," she said.
She also gifts many of her finds to family and friends, especially the booze as she says she’s not much of a drinker.
It seems her family and friends keep an eye on those videos, as they “literally call dibs” on what they’d like from her hauls.