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on a shoestring
With very limited financial means, as in The newlyweds were living on a shoestring. The precise allusion in this term is unclear. One fanciful theory is that debtors in British prisons would lower a shoe by its laces from a window so as to collect funds from visitors or passers-by. A more likely theory is that it alludes to the slender shape of a shoelace, likening it to slender resources. [Late 1800s]
Example Sentences
“We can’t do it on a shoestring budget and be competitive and win at the level that we have won and want to win. It’s something that we’ve been ramping up.”
When you stop making middle-class movies — movies with a moderate budget, as opposed to ones made on a shoestring or ones that cost $200 million — you’re hollowing out a middle class of people who make them.
“We’re working on a shoestring now,” McDonnell said.
Yet for beginning drivers from L.A. and Orange County, who are struggling to race on a shoestring budget, that track might just as well be on another planet.
Though the ceremony recently lifted its $35 million budget cap for eligible contenders, its nominating juries, which are mostly made up of a handful of film journalists, still tend to favor movies that were made on a shoestring.
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