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!
This week has been a mad week.
We were away for the first two weeks in August pretty much and then the third week, we went back to work after very little sleep (due to some poor judgement on our part about how well we’d cope with getting back home in the early hours and then getting up for work the next morning) so we spent that week in zombie mode which meant that this week felt like the first ‘real’ week at home in August.
The house had a layer of three week’s worth of dust, the freezer was empty, the garden needed sorting and on top of that, we accepted an offer on our houseso had a stack of house viewings to do as we want to be completely sure that the house we fell in love with, is the house for us.
There’s there’s no getting away from the fact that the house we want is a LOT of work (think full renovation project) and will take a long time to get to the house that we can both see in our minds. It is in liveable condition but room by room we will need to completely strip back and start from scratch as it’s had one gentleman owner for the past fifty years and there are rooms there that I don’t think have been touched in that time. 😁
I mean, that’s probably a slight exaggeration but you’d be forgiven for thinking that if you walked around the house!
Right now, our heads are a bit battered with the decisions we need to make and the things we need to sort out but money saving is an even bigger priority right now as we did say that we wouldn’t buy any house if our lifestyle had to change which means that the money saving needs to come from sensible savings and not giving up the days out or the trips away.
1) My little containers of fruit and veg probably (definitely) haven’t saved us money over the course of the Summer as we had the initial investment of the tubs, the soil and the plants but we have come back from our holidays to a bumper crop of tomatoes so I guess this week you could say we saved money as I’ve had enough to use in salads for lunches and two portions of my favourite roasted tomatoes with chilli and lime.
Whatever happens, next year, I’m going to expand my little container gardening corner to include more useful food that will save me money throughout the Summer as well as giving me the satisfaction of knowing that we’re eating something we grew ourselves.
The success we had with our strawberries was shortlived and we never grew enough to make even a small bowl full of them, I clearly offended the cucumber plants as they withered away within about three days and the chilli plant never made it as I put it in with the tomatoes so I think they strangled it.
The rocket we planted however, that was so successful that we couldn’t keep up with it and it started flowering before we could eat the majority of the rocket.
Next year – more plants, more pots and MORE research. 😁
2) We went bowling this week and used our Kids Pass app to save 10% on the price which is one of those savings that will never make us rich but it takes no time at all to do and the money is better in our pocket than someone else’s.
We also went to the cinema on Bank Holiday Monday and used KidsPass to get money off our cinema tickets because, let’s face it – you need to remortgage just to go to the cinema these days! We did get a good amount off though which made the £6 bag of popcorn easier to live with haha.
If you have a Cineworld near you, they let you pay for drinks and snacks on the app too as much cheaper prices but ours has closed down and our other local cinema doesn’t do this. They’re quite relaxed about taking drinks and snacks of your own though but we decided to go instead of somewhere else that we’d been planning to go so did it at the last minute which meant I was rushing and didn’t even think! At least the savings more than covered the popcorn though.
KidsPass is an app that I pay £2.99 monthly for but it pays for itself, especially at this time of year. You get discounts off days out around the UK, cinema tickets, meals out and all the other things that the kids want to do that can max out any budget in no time. I have paid for it for a couple of years now and it’s saved me on a regular basis.
If you do sign up, use my referral link and start saving before the Summer is over! It’s £1 to trial it for 30 days at the moment.
3) Another way we saved money on Kids activities this Summer was to book a Summer pass for somewhere we know they love going. It actually worked out the equivalent cost of just two visits and is a really easy option for something to do.
The Summer pass means we can literally just turn up when we want with no booking and as long as there is space, the kids will get in the next session.
There’s loads of other places around here that do a visit once, get annual entry too so they’re places that we’ve been taking advantage of. We already have entry to Beamish, an adventure farm and a museum near us so we’ve used each of those in the past few weeks to so that we’re doing things but not spending too much after our holidays.
4) One of the first things we did when accepted the offer on our house earlier in the week was to buy packing boxes so we could start to pack things away. Reality hit when we packed our first few boxes and it didn’t make a dent even in one room. We realised we were going to need somewhere to store the boxes as we started to gradually pack everything away.
We started with a good clear out of my old garage which was so full of junk and rubbish that you couldn’t even get in there! Two trailer loads went to the tip and we had a really good sort out so this is now what it looks like…
There’s space in there for a fair few boxes now and my ex-husband is happy for us to store the boxes in there until we need them in exchange for us clearing it out and getting rid of so much junk that’s accumulated over the last couple of years since I moved out.
This absolutely won’t be enough space though so I think we’re going to potentially need a storage unit. We have a few jobs we want to do straight away when we move in and we’d rather only take the essentials for the first week or so to allow us to do that and to be able to prioritise these without piles of boxes everywhere.
I think we will empty the loft and the sheds into the garage we’ve just cleared out and then just get a storage unit closer to the time for the house stuff which will save us money. Honestly, the loft and the sheds have more things in than you can imagine and I have no idea how we’re going to pack it all up.
As we were tidying out the garage, we did list a few of my things on Facebook marketplace as we came across them to try and add a bit to our savings pot.
This huge mirror went before we’d even finished pulling everything out of the garage to sort through and for a fiver, it was a real bargain for the lady who bought it and a few extra pounds for us.
5) Bear with me for this one… 😁
I love spending time with my grown up children – they’ve both grown into amazing young adults and they’re genuinely really good, easy company. Sunday mornings are when we usually make time to something together and I really value that time.
I sometimes think it’s mad how they’ve grown into real adults who earn money, pay bills and make life decisions of their own and then I feel honoured (probably not the right word) that they still want to spend time with me and that they do it because they enjoy it rather than just because they feel they should if that makes sense.
Strawberry picking a few weeks ago was one of my favourite times with them lately although the strawberry fight they had in the field reassured me that they weren’t fully fledged grown ups just yet. 😁 🍓 😁
Anyway, one of the things we often do is to go out for breakfast which gives us chance to really catch up on what we’ve been up to that week and what we’ve got planned. We all live separately so it’s a much valued check in for me to see what’s going on in their lives.
We have a favourite place for Breakfast now – it’s a local cafe that I’d say caters for what I call the Instagram crowd. It’s all picture perfect with food that nobody eats without taking a photo of first (including me) and drinks that have ingredients in that I’ve not even heard of. This was last Sunday’s bowl of loaded oats…
I tend to eat the fruit and some of the oats and leave it at that as I don’t want to overload on carbs (thanks Diabetes) but there’s not much else on the menu there that I can eat so this is the lesser of the evils on the menu. 😁
The kids absolutely love it though and alternate between big stacks of loaded pancakes and huge fruit filled Acai bowls.
The drinks there are incredible too with all kinds of Matcha and every smoothie under the sun! I was tempted last weekend by a Matcha Mojito but in the end, I went for my usual water which even that comes in a can here…
Anyway, are you asking yourself how this is frugal and saving me money yet?
Well, we spend about two hours in there usually and I will spend about £12 for a couple of drinks and my oats bowl which I don’t think is bad for the time we spend somewhere with a lovely atmosphere (we sit outside undercover too) and last week, we discovered that you can order using their new app so rather than me paying and the kids transferring the money to me, which was always after at least three chasers and was never the right amount, I suggested that we all order our own and just pay for ourselves.
Not a huge deal I know but it’s saving my bank balance so I’ll take it. 💰
While we were talking, Miss Frugal noticed that I was selling something on Facebook that she was after so she ended up paying for my breakfast in exchange for that which meant I got a free breakfast, got rid of something that was taking up a lot of space and had been on Marketplace for at least a month and she got a bargain in with the deal too!
That’s a successful week if you ask me!
Hope you’ve had a successful money saving week too. See you next week.
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