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, I do want to 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 – we’re frugal so we can afford to do nice things together.
1) I’m not sure if you’ve ever read my post about how I never used to check my bank statements but I’ve come a long way since then and these days I have my bank’s app on my phone and I check it pretty regularly which means that I can catch any rogue payments that come through.
It’s a good job I do because this week I noticed a random charge from Currys PC World for £4.49! After some digging and an email to their complaints team, it turned out that they’d charged us for some sort of support plan which we’d absolutely said no to at the time. They agreed to refund it back and look into it which was the best I could hope for I guess but at the same time, I found some articles on money sites that indicate that this is pretty common and there are lots of cases where this has happened so it really annoyed me that they’re not doing something more to stop this happening as lots of people might not notice.
I know it’s not a huge amount but if I hadn’t noticed then it would have been another amount next month and then another, and another.
2) I finally got my hands on a jar of the Lacura Q10 Day cream which is an absolute bargain at £1.45 from Aldi. I’ve read so much about the Lacura range lately but I was still using up my Elizabeth Arden cream which I got for my Birthday. That ran out last week so at the weekend, I was straight to Aldi to see if this cream really was as good as people say it is!
I couldn’t see how it would be as it’s so cheap but I’ve been using it since Sunday and I haven’t noticed a difference at all from the way my skin was when I was using the Elizabeth Arden cream. Don’t get me wrong, it hasn’t made me look 10 years younger or anything and I don’t feel like it’s any better than the cream I was using before but I don’t feel like it’s any worse either so I’ll definitely be buying it again when this one runs out!
3) I feel like I have so much to catch up on with everything that’s been happening lately – number one being the state of the house. I just haven’t been keeping up with housework lately so whilst the house is tidy, little things like the skirting boards needing a good wipe are getting on my nerves.
Mr Frugal has had a week off this week so we decided to do one room a day and give it a good clean so we made a batch of my homemade cleaning spray last weekend, got a big pile of microfibre cloths and my feather duster at the ready and we’ve gradually worked our way through the house. I know that Mrs Hinch has taken the world by storm with her cleaning but honestly, you don’t need a million and one expensive cleaning products to clean your house. Yes, there are certain things that you might want a bit of extra cleaning power on (I only use Domestos in my toilets for example) and that’s totally OK but please don’t feel tempted to buy half the cleaning aisle.
Because I’ve been keeping on top of the tidying, it wasn’t a huge job to get back on top of things so we got a bit of a system going where Mr Frugal has done the ceiling with the feather duster and the skirting boards of the room we were tackling that day and then one of the kids polish and dust windowsills and surfaces and the other hoover when they get in from school. That meant that when I got home at half four, it’s been a quick job for me to just whip around and do anything else that needs doing. I love that everyone has helped out and also that my house smells so minty fresh right now thanks to the peppermint essential oil that I added into the cleaning spray.
4) My DIY herb garden is definitely done with for the year now so until Spring, I’m going to have to move the herb growing indoors because I really don’t want to not have fresh herbs again after getting used to having a supply of them over the last few months.
As you might have seen from my kitchen shelfie post on Sunday, I’ve had a move about in my kitchen and I now have four plant pots on one of my kitchen picture shelves. I have thyme, basil and two pots of mint on there at the moment as they’re the ones I use the most and so far they’ve come in really handy. I’ve made mint tea with the mint, added some thyme to my roasted veggies last night and added the basil to my gorgeous speedy sausage pasta on Sunday.
5) Is it me or are Advent Calendars getting more luxurious and more expensive every year? I’ve seen a few reviews of various different ones on YouTube over the last week or so and as fascinated as I seem to be with watching the videos, I’ve been absolutely astounded by the costs of them. We definitely won’t be investing in an expensive calendar but I have been inspired to start working on my advent calendar.
For the last few years, we’ve made an alternative advent calendar which has a family activity for us to do together every day in December tucked away in an envelope. I’m working on a slightly upgraded version this year which I’ll update you on soon but as a clue, it involves brown paper bags this year instead of envelopes.
As usual, we’ve been having some really good discussions this week over in our Live Well, Spend Less Facebook group. We’d love to welcome you to our little community if you fancy popping in.
As always, we’d love you to join in with us by sharing your five frugal things from your week – whether it’s an Instagram picture (#5frugalthings), a blog post or even a video. Just add your link to the linky at the bottom of this post.
You don’t have to share five things you’ve done, anything thrifty or frugal that you’ve been doing is perfect.
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 ‘Five Frugal things I’ve done this week’ linky.
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