This may come as a surprise to you (although more than likely not) but I’m not always a shining example of frugal-ness. 😉
I spend so much time on here sharing ways to save money and ideas on how to be frugal and rarely share much of the non-frugal side of my life so I thought I’d start a monthly post to share some of the slightly non-frugal things I’ve done! I hope it shows you that no-one’s perfect
This is the second post in my frugal fails series- the first is here and the second one is here if you want to see the last few month’s frugal fails.
Frugal Fail #1 – Managed to save on cinema tickets then spent the saving on treats in the cinema
This one isn’t on me but I obviously wasn’t clear enough when I said to Mr Frugal that he needed to take treats with him for him and Master Frugal to eat in the cinema!
We used a Meerkat Movie code to buy the tickets for Mr Frugal and Master Frugal to go to the pictures this month which I was pleased with as it saved almost £10. Then they sent me a photo of them settled into their seats with giant Tango Ice blasts – they’d apparently ‘forgotten’ to take treats and seeing as they’d saved on the admission they’d treated themselves.
Frugal Fail #2 – Having to hire a skip
Our garage has gotten so full of junk that we needed to hire a skip to clear it out! £135 later and we have an almost empty garage but I can’t believe we let it get that way. We’ve cleared it out a few times since we moved in but there’s always been a lot of things in boxes that we just stacked at the back and left alone but add that to the things we’ve been putting in there that we don’t need but don’t want to part with, the things we were keeping just in case we ever needed them again and the things we just couldn’t fit in the car to take to the tip and it was about to explode. I can’t believe we let it get to the point where our only option was a skip and hate that we had to pay out so much money to hire one.
Frugal Fail #3 – My plan to eat what we grow
So basically, this is all I have managed to harvest from my greenhouse so far this Summer…
I have no idea what I’m doing wrong but the plants just aren’t doing that well. My garlic and chilli still seem to be going strong (although strong may be an exaggeration – they’re not dead though) but most of the other plants are just wilting away. I’m not giving up but it’s quite disheartening as I had such big plans for my garden now that the kids are old enough not to need it as a playground.
Frugal Fail #4 – I’ve been overpaying on Master Frugal’s mobile bill
I absolutely pride myself on getting the best deals for our mobiles! We don’t have contracts on our phones as we save and buy the phones in full and we have SIM-only deals which we regularly review for everyone’s phone but Master Frugal. Master Frugal was on a PAYG deal that cost almost nothing a month until recently when he started to use his phone more but rather than get him on a SIM-only deal, I bought a SIM from the shop and set it up for him as PAYG with the intention of getting him on the same deal as us when I had some time.
I completely forgot about it though and he’s been on the not so good deal for about four months – £15 a month for 5GB data. His auto top-up went wrong this month as he ran out of data before the date I’d set the recurring payment up for so I had to give EE a call to sort it out and within five minutes of being on the phone, I had a much better deal. £15 a month on a 12-month SIM-only contract gets you 25GB data and for an extra £3, you get 50Gb which I know is way more than he would ever need but gives you an idea of how much we’ve been overpaying.
Frugal Fail #5 – A voucher I was given expired
I was given an experience voucher last year as a Christmas gift from a company I’ve worked with a few times but I put it to one side and forgot all about it. I remembered last week and was so annoyed when I realised it had expired!
There’s nothing unforgivable there (or at least I don’t think there is) so I hope we can still be friends. 😉
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Why not pin my ‘August’s Frugal Fails’ for later?
