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.
Hey! 👐
1) We had a bit of a scare last Friday night with Buddy who deteriorated quickly after a day of not feeling great. I won’t go into detail but we did think at one point that we could possibly not be bringing him home again after his late-night vet’s appointment.
It was a horrible experience overall as I couldn’t take him into the vets myself so ended up sitting in the car park outside from 10 pm until around 1.00 am while they examined him, did some emergency bloods and linked him up to some machine to check his organs were functioning as they should.
I know it’s not their fault at all as they’re just sticking to the social distancing guidelines but I was cold, super worried and stressed sitting in the car not knowing what was going on. They rang me every hour or so to let me know what they were doing but they didn’t know at any point what time he’d be ready to come home so and because it was a 25-minute drive from my house, I just had to wait.
It was absolutely worth the wait when they brought him back out to me and I caught sight of his little tail wagging when he spotted me – not as enthusiastically as normal but at that point I was happy to take what I got.
Just that Saturday night appointment cost £432 which is astronomical for an unexpected expense – especially taking into account the fact that we have several follow up appointments that will no doubt add a fair amount to that bill. Thankfully though, we have Pet Insurance for both dogs so all I have to worry about is paying the policy excess which is £100.
I know I’ve said this loads of times before but being prepared for unexpected events like this really does help me sleep better. I sat in the car last Saturday night and worried about a lot of things but not once did I have to think about money and how I would afford to pay if he needed lots of treatment.
2) I have a shopping list of things that I want to buy today in the Black Friday sales and I fully intend to stick to only what’s on my list. I’m going to be repeating ‘it’s only a bargain if I actually need it’ over and over again to make sure I don’t give in to temptation and end up regretting a purchase!
3) I overpaid my mortgage by £100 when I got paid this week – boring but sensible! An overpayment of £100 won’t make a huge difference on its own but paying extra little and often will make a difference.
4) Last weekend, I was reminded about my old Christmas blog which I’d completely forgotten about and actually thought the domain had expired. I spent a good hour trying to decide whether to resurrect it and then on the spur of the moment, I bought a new Christmas domain name and actually set up a whole new blog.
So when I had a million things to be getting on with, I was actually setting up a new blog. 😂
It’s called Christmas on a Budget and I am so pleased with it because I know that you guys might get sick of all the Christmas posts that I want to share so I’ll add my favourites over here and share the rest over there.
I’m pretty sure this is going to save me money as I look for ways to save to share with you all!
5) I’ve managed to stick to this week’s meal plan pretty well so far! Aside from the payday takeaway treat, everything else was mostly made up of food that we had in the house already. We had a bag of Quorn mince in the freezer for the tacos, I used Instant Pot shredded chicken for the chowder and I had some crab meat in too. The mince was batch cooked and popped in the freezer a couple of weeks ago and the sausages of the toad in the hole were from the freezer too as I got them reduced.
Using up so much of what we already had in meant that shopping was cheap this week!
And there was the added bonus that we’re running the freezer down ready to be filled up with Christmassy goodness. 🎄
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As always, we’d love you to join in with us by sharing anything you’ve done that’s been thrifty or frugal from your week – whether it’s an Instagram picture (#5frugalthings), a blog post or even a video. Just add your link to the Frugal Friday linky at the bottom of this post.
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 ‘Frugal Friday’ linky.
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