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) Guess what? I’m starting this post in my favourite way…
I bought a bunch of flowers from the reduced flower section which was super cheap because they were looking very worse for wear with a good third of the stems in there were dead. I paid my 49p and brought them home and discover that they were such a feeble bunch once I’d removed the pathetic looking ones that I didn’t have a suitable vase to the put them in.
An empty cooking sauce jar with some lace tied round it was perfect though and looks super pretty!
2) Most of the time, when I’m on my laptop I’m doing something blogging related but every now and again, I do take a little bit of time to do some random things to make a little extra money – mainly things like surveys and doing random things on Swagbucks and Oh My Dosh to earn points which are converted into cash. I also use Quidco and Top Cashback when I make purchases online so that money adds up too.
Because I don’t spend too much time doing this, the rewards don’t build up as quickly as they would if I had more time but this week I did go into each of the sites I use to see if I’d hit the payout thresholds on any of them. I had a surprise payout on Top Cashback of £40 as a couple of people had signed up using my referral link, another £11.50 on Oh My Dosh, £5 on Quidco and I’ve got enough Swagbucks in my account to convert to a £75 Amazon voucher but I’m saving that for a couple of Xbox games that I know Master Frugal is going to ask for at some point.
3) I did some more overtime at work to earn some extra pennies for our fast-approaching trip to New York just before Christmas. I’ve set up a little savings account to move money into but it’s not looking particularly healthy at the moment thanks to everything else that we have to pay for over the next few months so I figured I’d best do something to boost the balance.
I’m planning to do a little bit more over the next few weeks so hopefully we’ll be looking a bit healthier soon in the holiday spends department.
4) This is a boring grown-up one but I found out that there’s a government website to help you track down old pensions so I finally did something that’s been on my to-do list for a good few years.
Before I started in my current job, I worked in a small local travel agency and paid into their pension fund pretty much from the start (I think). I don’t have any paperwork or details but a few years ago, I tried to transfer it to PensionBee (a company who manage pensions – I’ll tell you more soon hopefully) so I could keep track of it and take even that small amount into account with my overall pension calculations.
Because I had so little information though, PensionBee struggled to locate it – possibly because the business was taken over several times and I was so bad with the information I gave them and when they asked me for more information to help them, I just never got around to putting the work in to actually finding what they needed.
I filled in the form here on the .gov.uk website and they’ve given me the address that I need to contact so the ball is definitely rolling. 😉
4.5 This isn’t one of my five today but I’m sharing it because the last two are a bit boring today and I don’t really have photos to share. Cake photos always go down well so here’s my amazing coconut cake – I made a batch of this earlier in the week and it went down a storm!
5) For as long as I can remember while I’ve been blogging, I’ve had a subscription to a photo editing website that I’ve used a lot to edit my blog photos and make my Pinterest images. It’s always been well worth the money to me at around $24 a year and I really think I’ve got my money’s worth out of it. This week though, I got an email to say that the ‘legacy pricing’ was ending and the price was going up to around $72 for the year which is a huge increase and on principle, I really didn’t want to renew.
I ended up going with Adobe Lightroom which is a teeny bit more expensive (not much though) but I get a lot more for my money so I’m actually really happy. I almost just accepted the price increase of the first company just because I know how to use it but the fact that it’s increased by three times the cost really annoyed me. Ultimately though, I now have a better system to use for not much more so if nothing else the greedy price increase encouraged me to look at what else was out there.
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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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