Every week I share five frugal things that I’ve done during that week just to show you that the small things you do all add up to a great frugal lifestyle where you can learn to live a fabulously frugal life.
Before I start though, as always feel that I should say that being frugal to me is about getting the best value for our money – it’s not about doing without for us or about not having nice things. We all have different financial situations and we’re all frugal for different reasons. 😉
1) We won the lottery!
It wasn’t a huge amount but it was £135 which is definitely not to be sniffed at. Miss Frugal and I took £15 to do a cheeky charity shop haul but the rest of it was paid into the bank to go towards the mass of expenses that we have coming up over the next month or so.
2) So, I signed up for #SecondHandSeptember and pledged not to buy anything new for the month of September. Then this happened…
That’s my work shoes right there and one of the dogs (my money’s on Monty) decided to eat them! I don’t tend to wear the same style of shoes when I’m not at work though so I really didn’t have any other shoes that would be OK to wear for work.
Because I couldn’t buy a new pair of shoes, I decided to have a charity shop hunt and see if I could find some pre-loved ones in my size that would be nice enough and comfortable enough to wear for work. I found two pairs in one shop that were perfect for what I needed…
They were £4.99 each pair and they’re both great makes – the blue ones are K by Clarks and the lighter ones are Van Dal shoes which, although I’ve never heard of them, seem to sell online for £50+. I know they’re not the sexiest shoes around but honestly, they’re exactly what I was looking for. My drive is up to an hour each way to work and back and then there’s the time at work where I want to be comfortable in my shoes so I always go for practicality over style for my work shoes – out of work I have slightly different tastes but these are perfect for work!
3) I know I’ve finally admitted to myself that I don’t have green fingers but I’m still trying.
I helped myself to a couple of bags of these free coffee grounds last weekend to see if it helped my veggies! I think they’re past help personally but I’m not willing to completely give up just yet!
4) My sun-dried chillies are ready.
I basically bought some chillis from the reduced fruit and veg section in Tesco and put them in a container in the greenhouse for a couple of weeks. The red ones dried out amazingly and are now in a tub in my freezer ready to be used in recipes that need some spice. The green chilli didn’t turn out well at all though as you can see by the picture above so if I were you, I’d stick to red when it comes to sun-drying chillis.
5) I’ve probably mentioned before but our local Tesco has a cheap bookstall near the tills where you can buy books at 50p each. I love this for two reasons, (a) the charity is a local charity very close to my heart and (b) I am book obsessed and can read a couple of books each week.
So, I have a system now. I buy a book for 50p, enjoy reading it and in most cases, either drop it back off at the bookstall or let them build up for a couple of weeks and then drop a bag of books into the charity shop near my house.
Some books I keep, some I pass on to friends if I know someone else will love it but mostly I drop them back to the charity shop. That means I get to support my favourite local charity, feed my book habit for not very much money and then again, support my favourite charity again by giving the books back to them. To me, it’s a win, win situation.
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I’m linking up with this Cass, Emma and Becky in this week’s ‘Frugal Friday’ linky.
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