By the time you read this I'll be in New York with Miss Frugal enjoying (hopefully) our long awaited holiday so it's probably not going to come as a huge surprise that today's post is New York themed with each of my five frugal things having something to do with our trip. 1) First up we have toiletries!  Miss Frugal wanted to go and buy some of the cute little travel sized bottles of everything from deodorant to hair spray and from shampoo to toothpaste but they seemed very expensive compared to their larger sized versions.  To give you an idea of what I mean, Sure deodorant is £1.20 for a … [Read more...]

1) Honestly, excitement is at record levels in our house right now because this time next week Miss Frugal and I will be in New York!  Top of my list of things to sort this week was our mobile phones as we're both on monthly tariffs that are great value for money here in the UK but not so much for abroad and we really want to use them when we're away to keep in touch with home.  I had heard that Three were great for using your card abroad so I've had my phone unlocked and ordered a free sim from Three which I've topped up now and when I get to New York, I'll swap over the Sim and because Three … [Read more...]

1) My phone contract finally ended last week so I called EE to cancel it as I was planning to move over to Giff Gaff who do unlimited data (6GB at 4G and after that it's slower speed) for £20 and 4GB for £15.  We also wanted to cancel Mr Frugal's as he never got around to doing it last year - he says he forgot as I was unwell but I suspect its more to do with the fact that he wanted to stay with EE as the coverage with them is really good where we are.  Anyway, we cancelled them both, got our PAC codes to move over to Giff Gaff and ordered our new Giff Gaff sim cards.  Then we got a call from … [Read more...]

1) There's not long until Miss Frugal and I head off to New York and the other day I was having a quick double check of our flight times and I noticed that there was an option to register an British Airways Executive Club card to collect some Avios points on our booking.   I'd noticed this before but didn't do anything as we're not exactly frequent flyers but I just thought I'd have a look into it to see if the points were actually worth anything to us.  Surprisingly, it totally was worth registering as the points we earned from our booking can be spent on-board with BA for food and drinks so … [Read more...]

1) With our trip to New York fast approaching Miss Frugal has been wanting to watch more and more YouTube videos about everything from the flight to the sights and the food to the shopping. I'm taking advantage of every minute she wants to spend with me because I know that, at 14, it might not last too much longer so we've been watching YouTube instead of reading guidebooks like I remember doing about places we were travelling too when I was younger. Not only are we having fun spending time together watching them, we're saving money on guidebooks (it's OK, that's not the frugal link to this … [Read more...]

1) Did you see my post last week where I mentioned how we'd booked a cheeky little family trip to Milan for the May half term week? Don't worry, I'm not going to try and class that as something frugal (although it was an AMAZING deal costing us less than a few nights in London going on the train) but I did do something during the booking process that saved us a fair amount of money so I get to class that part as frugal, don't I? I didn't book any hold luggage as there were extra fees for that that would have bumped the price of our booking up.  Looking at the size of the cabin baggage allowed … [Read more...]