Every week I share five frugal things that I’ve done during the previous 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) It’s been a while since we’ve had a Too Good To Go bag because with one diabetic in the house and one fussy eater, it’s unlikely that we will eat everything in the bag which defeats the purpose of reducing waste, doesn’t it?
There’s a shop near us that get’s 4.9 stars out of 5 and the bags are quite hard to get hold of – as you’d expect with such great reviews. So when I saw a bag on the app for this shop last weekend, I bought it straight away as I wanted to see what it was all about.
It cost £3.99 and this is what we got.
Yes, there’s things in there that we wouldn’t eat but there’s lots that we did enjoy between us. Just after taking this photo, I packed the smoothies and yoghurts into a bag and popped over to see the kids with them as I knew they would enjoy them.
The Kelloggs bars had a couple of weeks on them before the best before date and we got 8 of them! There was three packets of ham and one pack of turkey which had two days on them too.
The only thing that was wasted out of the whole bag were the two yoghurts in the end as the kids didn’t end up eating them but that’s pretty good going for a £3.99 bag if you ask me!
2) Miss Frugal’s car died this week.
It’s been coming for a while and we’ve been joking that it’s been on life support since she was hit by an ambulance last year. The car was written off at the time but it was actually quite a quick fix so we bought it back from the insurance company and replaced the smashed headlight and pulled out as much of the dent as we could.
I can’t remember how much they wrote it off for and how much she bought it back for but I think the buy back price was just short of 50% of the cars value which meant she kept the car and got enough back for the repairs and some extra leftover. It was an older car though so it wasn’t worth that much in the grand scheme of things.
She had a lot on at the time of the accident so she didn’t have the time or brain capacity to cope with looking for a replacement so she kept the car, we got it fixed up and after it got through it’s MOT, she gave herself a year to save for a new car and she’s spent the last six months putting money to one side ready for when this day came.
It died sooner than expected although to be fair, we could fix it and keep it on the road for a bit longer for her but it got to the point where it was putting money into a car that would be replaced in the next six months or so.
I love how prepared she was with her savings and that even six months after starting to save, she had enough money to buy a car – albeit, a cheap car. 😁
We had a couple of disastrous car viewings with one mad so desperate to sell that he offered to pay for me a taxi at 10.30 at night to go view the car and another who swore at us when we pointed out that the car needed four new tyres as the ones that were on were illegal.
But we found a gem that was well within budget and pretty much a dream car for her, despite her initial reservations.
It’s actually a convertible in pretty much immaculate condition with low mileage.
There was a reason it was so cheap but luckily we could fix the issues within a day (it helps to have a mechanic in the family) so now it’s pretty much perfect.
We saved even more money on the car as we bought it from a man who also breaks cars (selling the parts of them) so we asked if he would buy her old Audi from us so he gave us another £200 off the price AND collected the car from her address so it saved money and hassle for her.
3) Still on the subject of Miss Frugal’s car… The only bad thing about it was that we’d been looking for a car that was cheaper to insure than her old car which was a chunk each month with it being a sporty Audi (even though it was a 2012 plate so quite old realistically).
Her original plan was to go for a lower insurance group car which should have been really achievable even though her budget was still relatively small but honestly, the cars we were looking at were high mileage, damaged bodywork, faults that needed fixing and sellers convinced their car was worth what they were selling it for.
So when we spotted this one, in such great condition being sold somewhere we had experience of, it was a no brainer.
The insurance wasn’t much cheaper than on her Audi though at just £3 a month less so we spoke to her existing insurance company and found out that if we cold get a better deal then the cancellation fee was likely to be worth it. We shopped around and got a much better deal so cancelled her previous insurance mid policy and saved money by going with a new company.
4) I am on countdown to the Summer holidays right now as we have a couple of trips booked so spending money is on my mind right now. 😁
This week, I’ve listed five things on Vinted and sold three of them.
Vinted sales won’t make a fortune by any means but it all adds up and the money all goes straight into the holiday funds account. I do have some more things to list but I’ve been a bit lazy as the heat has just made me want to sit in the garden after work every night.
This week I will definitely make an effort to list more things as I have loads. When I moved out, I realised how much I had that I just didn’t need and I have it in black bags in the loft here so it’s either going to go on Vinted or to the charity shop at the end of this Summer if it’s still there.
5) I also just got a Payout on TopCashBack from when we booked our car parking for one of our trips this Summer. We booked using Holiday Extras but just used TopCashback to click through to the site which was super easy as I have the browser extension on my laptop so I get a pop up when I click on a site that could earn me cashback.
If you don’t already have TopCashBack then I can’t recommend it strongly enough – you can use my refer a friend link if you do want to sign up. You’ll get a cheeky £10 bonus too if you do too.
Join Top Cashback and make some money.
And if you do sign up, please do download the browser extension when prompted as that’s what makes it easy money to me. I get a pop up on my screen to remind me when to use the site and it’s then two or three easy clicks to make some cashback – literally 20 seconds!
So, there’s this week’s five frugal things – I hope you’ve all had a happy Frugal week!
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