By the time you read this I’ll be in New York with Miss Frugal enjoying (hopefully) our long awaited holiday so it’s probably not going to come as a huge surprise that today’s post is New York themed with each of my five frugal things having something to do with our trip.
1) First up we have toiletries! Miss Frugal wanted to go and buy some of the cute little travel sized bottles of everything from deodorant to hair spray and from shampoo to toothpaste but they seemed very expensive compared to their larger sized versions. To give you an idea of what I mean, Sure deodorant is £1.20 for a 35ml bottle whereas it’s £2.50 for a 250ml size – that’s the equivalent of £3.43 per 100ml for the travel sized version compared to £1.00 per 100ml in the larger size. Don#t worry, I won’t bore you with the rest of the calculations but do bear in mind that they’re all very similar.
She really loves the idea of the travel minis though so we compromised and she bought 3 for £3 from Asda and I bought this little travel set from Morrisons for £2.
She has travel face wipes, travel toothpaste (which we can both use) and travel sized talcum powder and I can decant our usual shampoo and shower gel into these little bottles.
2) I wrote Mr Frugal a meal plan last week to follow for while we’re away and on Wednesday before we left, I went shopping and stocked up on everything he would need to follow it! I know his limitations in the kitchen so I’ve tried to make the meal plan as simple as possible and have almost everything in that he needs. Everything he needs is in the house although he’ll need to do a top up shop for fruit and salad stuff I would think – I’ve even written him a little list for that though. There’s even a code for Dominoes on the meal plan that he can use for one night to have a takeaway as a treat. I’ve also made some packed lunch cake and some oatie cookies for them to snack on.
3) I know that I’ll probably see lots of things that I want to write about in one form or another when I get home so I’ve made myself a little notebook to use while I’m there to write things down in. I wanted one small enough to carry everywhere because I often think of an idea and instantly forget about it if I don’t write it down and I just couldn’t find what I wanted so I made it.
I got the inspiration from the Trimcraft Bloggers day where they showed us how to make one the right way. I did it the easy way today by simply cutting 4 A4 sheets into quarters and folding them all in half together to make the pages. Then I cut a piece of card to slightly bigger than my pages and added that to the pages as my cover. I didn’t have the fancy hole punch tool (although I really want one) so from the outside I just cut two little cuts through the cover and the paper and then used the pointy bit of the scissors to make them into holes. I threaded my string (which is actually leather from a price tag on something I bought recently) and tied it in a bow. Voila!
4) I don’t want to be worrying about us going over our baggage allowance on the flight home and I was going to pay £60 extra for extra allowance but I changed my mind and spent £4 on a pair of luggage scales. I’ll keep a close eye on what we’re buying to make sure we don’t go over our allowance. To be honest, I don’t plan on buying a huge amount but Miss Frugal is after some of the Bath and Bodyworks candles and I’m sure they’re not going to be lightweight. 😉
5) We’ve done our research and we’re going to buy the unlimited passes for the subway so we can get around that way. For the two of us it’s going to be under $50 which seems like pretty good value for all the distances we need to travel. We’ll do plenty of walking too but some of the distances are a bit far for us to cover and because of our time limitations we thought the subway would be ideal!
Have a good week without us.
As always, we’d love you to join in with us by sharing what frugal and thrifty things you’ve been up to this 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.
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I’m linking up with this Cass, Emma and Becky in this week’s ‘Five Fabulously Frugal things I’ve done this week’ linky.
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