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) For the third week running, I’ve done some overtime at work which if you know me, you’ll know that that’s practically unheard of. I usually turn down any overtime as I’d rather be at home but I’m really conscious that we have an expensive few months ahead and I want to do everything I can to earn some extra money to help us out so my name’s been top of the list.
I’ve probably said a few times recently that we’ve got an expensive few months ahead but I don’t think I’ve ever said where the expenses are coming from. Basically, I have the last of Master Frugal’s school ski trip to pay for, a trip to New York to finish paying for and to sort spending money for and obviously we have Christmas coming up. We also have Miss Frugal learning to drive which is not cheap at all!
2) Last weekend, instead of our usual Instant Pot chicken and rice Saturday night tea we mixed it up a bit thanks to some bargain meatballs that Mr Frugal picked up on his way home from work when he stopped off to get some dog food.
I made a pasta bake using the meatballs, some of our batch-cooked homemade tomato sauce from the freezer with some pasta we had in and some cheese that we bought on offer that Mr Frugal kindly grated for us.
The rest of the cheese was used for macaroni cheese and to top the quesadillas we ended up having this week instead of the planned fajitas.
3) Did I mention that I was going to New York the week before Christmas? I’ve decided that as well as my usual saving, I’m going to buy $20 every week when I do my weekly shopping – more if I can afford a bit more if I’ve got some bargains when I’m shopping and spent less than I thought.
It won’t add up to a huge amount but the 9 weeks we have left will give me at least $180 extra in my holiday spending money purse which is an extra $36 a day on top of whatever else we end up taking.
4) If you follow me on Instagram then you might have seen these tomatoes that I bought from Morrisons last night – they cost me 70p for a huge box labelled as ‘too good too waste’.
I did ask on my Insta Stories what I should do with them and I got all kinds of suggestions – thanks very much if you made one of them. 😉 I decided to go with my own garlic roasted cherry tomatoes recipe which I haven’t made in ages.
5) I’ll share more info closer to the time but I’ve been having a think about Christmas and I’ve made a decision – for personal reasons but it has the added benefit that it’s going to save money and waste. 😉
This Christmas is going to be much more traditional for us with homemade treats, gifts and decorations. I’m even thinking that we may not get our traditional decorations down from the loft and go with the less is more approach using more handmade decorations.
I’m starting to have a good think about it over the next couple of weeks with plans to read the piles of Christmas magazines that I’ve accumulated over the years and study Pinterest for handmade Christmas inspiration.
Also, if you’re interested, I’ve revamped my Frugal Christmas page so it now has ALL of my Christmas posts in one place – I’ll add all of this year’s post to the post too so you can have a read of all my posts without faffing about. Please go and have a little look – it took me way longer than it should have done to do this. 😉
Come over and join our fab Facebook group – Spend Less, Live Better!
As always, we’d love you to join in with us by sharing anything you’ve done that’s been thrifty or frugal from your week – whether it’s an Instagram picture (#5frugalthings), a blog post or even a video. Just add your link to the Frugal Friday linky at the bottom of this post.
You’re more than welcome to copy and paste the badge above but it would be even better if you could let your readers know that you’re linking up with the five frugal things linky by adding a little line to the bottom of your post like this one:
I’m linking up with this Cass, Emma and Becky in this week’s ‘Frugal Friday’ linky.
Don’t miss out on future posts like this – receive updates directly to your inbox by email by adding your email address here and hitting subscribe. You can also follow me on Twitter, BlogLovin or Networked Blogs and I’d love to see you over on my Facebook page and on Instagram.
