1) My best buy of the week is a book of vouchers that I’ve been hearing about for ages now in our local area. The book costs £24.99 and is basically filled with over 400 vouchers for local businesses (mainly foodie, days out and activities but with some health and beauty too) offering buy one get one free or 50% off. I bought it from our local shop but I’ve seen them around in lots of local businesses – I’ve just never taken the time to actually look at a copy because of the initial price.
Who doesn’t love half price bowling!
Each company has three vouchers in the book that can be used anytime up until the end of January when the book is replaced with the next edition. The local bowling alley is in there, as is Pizza Hut, McDonalds and KFC along with local days out like Lightwater valley. The there’s things like free swimming and half price go karting – all genuine savings that will definitely save us money over the year!
If you live in the Tees Valley area then you can find out more about the book here if you’re interested. I wish I’d looked it up on the internet sooner as I can see we’re going to save a fortune with it!
2) I’m not sure if this counts as being frugal but the kids have been asking and asking for months now if they could have a hamster. I always said no but they’ve had such a hard week this week with SATs and exams that I relented and said that if they wrote me a mini report about hamsters and everything they needed then I would think about it. The following day, I was presented with a six page Powerpoint presentation that was pretty amazing to be fair so we had a good talk about what was involved and agreed that they could have a hamster each.
We arrived at the pet shop the following day with excitement levels at fever pitch and they spent a couple of minutes aaawing at the hamsters and trying to choose one each but then we turned to look at the cages and found the adoption corner for the pets that no-one wanted. There were two hamsters in there which had little sad faces next to the cages and a sticker saying ‘no-one wanted us’. Obviously that was our decision made – we wanted the rejects. I checked that they were actually OK and that there was no good reason for them being left and there wasn’t – they were just the last of their respective litters. We got them for free as long as we made a donation to the adoption charity which we did but it still cost less than half what a pair of hamsters would normally cost.
So, now I can introduce Casper….
And Juninho, who is much too fast for me to get a photo of….
3) I found out this week that you can share Amazon Prime with a family member and this would give you both access to the Prime delivery, the Kindle lending library and the Amazon video service. Amazon Prime always seemed like a huge amount to pay in one you just need to go to Manage Your Content and Devices and under the Settings tab, select Invite an Adult under Households and Family Library. I actually chose to pay monthly rather than pay the annual £79.99 as I want to see if I will actually get my money’s worth although I think the Amazon video may possibly be a cheaper alternative to Netflix as it costs about the same per month but with the other benefits thrown in.
4) I made a complaint this week to a large company as I felt that they were trying to con me but they didn’t seem overly interested. I often just let things lie rather than push but this week I decided to try again to get my money back and I emailed the CEO of the company. I won’t name names but I will say that within an hour of emailing, I had a response to acknowledge my complaint and within 24 hours I had an apology and all of my money back. I don’t complain often but when I do and it’s a valid issue, I like to know that it’s been resolved.
5) Last week our local Tesco had a huge stack of boxes of blueberries reduced to 39p each so I bought about six of them as we love blueberries. We had one between us after tea (with bananas, apples and yoghurt) and I froze the rest for smoothies. Imagine my delight last night when, after a very long day at work, I was presented with a glass of blueberry and lime cider (Mmmmmm) with some of my frozen bargain blueberries in the place of ice cubes!
What frugal or thrifty things have you done this week?
Don’t forget to follow the ‘Five Frugal Things’ Pinterest board as I’ll be pinning all of our five frugal things photos on there. You can find it here if you want a quick peek….
Follow Cass bailey’s board 5 Frugal Things I’ve done…. on Pinterest.
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