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) What have I done this week to help future us enjoy their retirement?
Not much if I’m honest but because I realised I hadn’t done much when I started to write this post, I just got out my phone and transferred £10 from our current account to our mortgage.
Again, just like last time when I did this, it’s not a huge saving and not one I’d feel the benefit of if this was just a one-off but this is the second time in as many weeks that I’ve just paid a small amount off in addition to our usual overpayments so hopefully, all these extra little payments are going to end up making a difference.
Also, how good is it that I feel accountable to these weekly posts enough that I actually transferred some money so I could say I’d actually done something – no matter how small.
2) I’m slowly starting to accept the fact that I am NOT a gardener! Honestly, no matter how much I try to grow things, it’s like I look at a plant and it starts to shrivel up and die. It’s really annoying me actually but I’ll keep trying. 😉
In the meantime, I managed to harvest this little lot…
Nothing too impressive but it’s something! I still have a few plants left that haven’t completely withered away so watch this space to see if I can keep them alive long enough to actually grow something else edible this Summer.
I have no idea what I’m doing wrong but it’s quite disheartening and I really don’t know if I’ll bother next year. If I do, I need to have some green-fingered coaching before I put the effort in again. 😉
3) I don’t know if you saw my Eco Egg review a few weeks ago (I was kindly sent one to review) but I’ve had a couple of messages about it so I just wanted to let you know that I’m still loving it! It’s doing a great job with my clothes and there’s only been a couple of stains that it hasn’t been able to lift and they’re stains that even my regular detergent might have struggled with (tomato sauce and Iron Bru of all things) so I’m still happy to call it a success. I just rewashed those in the next wash and used my usual detergent which I still have plenty left of and it was all good.
Mine is the 720 wash version but there’s also a 54 wash version and a 210 wash version if you’d rather spend a little less until you see how you feel about it. The 54 wash version is £4.99 which puts it at around the same price as you might pay for your usual detergent so I thought you might think that was a better option to see how you feel about the Eco Egg.
This week I decided to try using some essential oils in the wash to fragrance it a little bit and the first thing I experimented on was our bedsheets. I mixed 15 drops of lavender essential oil in with a couple of tablespoons of water and added it to the fabric softener section of the washing machine drawer.
The sheets came out smelling of lavender slightly but the smell didn’t last for too long if I’m honest so I might double the drops next time as I do like my washing to smell fresh and clean. It works out much cheaper than fabric softener as well as reducing packaging which is definitely something I set out to do when I started using the eco egg!
4) This last couple of weeks I’ve been really good at drinking more water (sometimes squash) and I’ve even tried to take a water bottle with me whenever I’ve gone out for more than just a quick trip.
My bottle was a bargain at just £2 but even more of a bargain as Miss Frugal chose and bought it for me when we went to Manchester last week.
5) I forgot to share this with you last week but hopefully, you’ll forgive me. 😉
Basically, when we got home from Manchester last week, we had nothing in the fridge but I wasn’t ready to do our weekly shop as I hadn’t written our meal plan out at that point. I went to the shop to get some bread and something for sandwiches and saw this little lot…
I bought the potatoes (45p) and spring onions (25p) with a plan of making some sort of potato soup and the plums (45p) for pudding. I made the loveliest soup which I’ll share with you soon and it bought me some time to write my meal plan and a proper shopping list.
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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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