Highest round count in a single gun?

Who subsidizes your ammo?

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• In most places people can get TV at no charge over the air instead of paying for it by the month.
• A plain cell-phone with no data plan (talk & text only) will save money. A pre-paid phone for emergency use will save more.
  
• Fixing your own food (including making/taking your lunch to work) and making your own coffee instead of buying it ready-made can really save money.
  
• Drinking water instead of soft drinks, alcohol, etc. will save a surprising amount of money. Getting a water filter and using that instead of drinking bottled water can save more.
  
• Car buying decisions (used, finance options, down payments) and choosing to drive them until they actually become uneconomical to repair or start to be unreliable can be real money savers.
• Reloading/casting can be a money saver IF it's done properly--with the goal of saving money instead of as a hobby in itself.
• Avoiding unsecured debt (saving to buy large items and not spending money you don't have) is a big money saver because you don't burn money paying interest.
• Buying only the clothes/shoes one needs instead of filling the closet saves money.
• Buying used is an option that can save money. Most people tend to buy everything new these days, but there is a lot of used merchandise out there and often quite economically priced. Tools, clothes, guns, appliances, etc.
• Call up your utility company, internet, cell, home phone company and security company and ask them about deals. Sometimes, if you will sign a multi-year contract with them, and/or combine services they will give you a significant break on your monthly bill.
• Spend less on guns and more on ammo. Think about what guns you have vs. what you use. If the difference between the number of guns you own and the number of guns that go to the range on any sort of a regular basis is pretty significant that could be an opportunity. Sell some guns, and then use the money to buy ammo/reloading components, or to get a good reloading setup, etc. so you can spend a lot more time at the range.
  
• If you do your shooting at a range, look into memberships--they can save money for folks who shoot a lot. But pay attention, not all of them are good deals and some of them require a truly extraordinary amount of shooting before they pay off.
  
• Save up an emergency fund and maintain it. Then you can quit paying for extended warranties and you can increase your insurance deductibles for home/car.
• Think about your money in terms of what you want to do with it (shoot/buy ammo) instead of just in dollars and cents. It's not a quarter, it's a round or two of ammunition. It's not $20, it's a range fee. That will help you make spending decisions that align with your priorities. e.g. Do I want to give up a range fee for coffee over the course of a work-week or would I rather make my own coffee and then still have the range fee for a trip to the range?

Obviously everyone gets to make their own decisions how they want to spend their money--I'm not saying everyone should go to those lengths to shoot more. But if one's goal is to shoot a lot, and they make it a priority, they can probably free up a lot more money to do it than they initially think they can.

...150,000 down the pipe at let's say .10 cents a pop if you reload...that's $15000 ...and that's just one gun. I'd love to be able to afford that.

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The comment was made that by stopping smoking and drinking, one could finance their ammo needs.

The average smoker smokes 14 cigarettes a day, that's over $130 a month. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the average drinker spends $10 a week on alcohol. That's $40 a month. Combined, that gets us to $170 a month--we'd make our target of 150,000 rounds in 5 years and just under 2 months.

Well, let's say our theoretical shooter has no vices to give up and has to finance ammo in other ways.

5 days a week buying lunch will run $5-$7 a meal--let's call it $6. Should be pretty easy to make a simple lunch at home and take it to work for maybe $2 a day. That's $4 in savings per workday--$86 a month. In ammo, that's 1200 rounds a month--over 14,600 rounds a year, or 150,000 rounds in under 11 years.

Cook at home instead of eating out on the weekends. Save maybe $5 a day on the weekends and you're up to about $43 a month. Add that to the $86 from making/taking a lunch on workdays and the total is $129 a month. 1840 rounds a month, 22,000 rounds a year, or 150,000 rounds in 6 years, 10 months.

Again, everyone gets to make their own spending decisions and I'm not saying that we all need to be shooting that much--I certainly am not hitting anywhere near those numbers. Just pointing out that most people who want to make shooting more a priority can probably sit down and pretty easily find a way to pay for the ammo without getting a second job or winning the lottery.

Hah! Good catch.

In the process of making that post, I deleted part of it. About the time I made that post I had read a thread on THR where a couple of folks indicated they could reload 9mm for 6-7 cents a round. I was using 7 cents a round as the number for the calculations and that was explained in the post initially before I accidentally took it out.