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!
We’re going on holiday to Iceland tomorrow and I’m super excited but it does mean that this week has been chaotic to say the least. We’ve had so much to get sorted before we go that we’re both a bit wiped out and genuinely in need of a week’s sleep, never mind a holiday where we know we’ll be on the go a lot of the time.
But we’ve definitely managed to get some moneysaving in so let me share a few of the things we’ve done this week to save us some money…
1) Last Sunday night, I made a batch of my homemade spicy butternut squash soup which I then had for lunch on Monday and Tuesday while I was working from home as well as for tea on Monday night with a cheeky cheese toastie. 😁
I love having a batch of soup in the fridge as it’s so easy to just heat up for a quick and easy lunch – it costs less than £1.50 to make and does three portions easily which is amazing value and having something to hand that takes minutes to heat up means that I’m not tempted to eat something that’s not particularly good for me and more than likely costs more than my 50p portion of soup.
2) I bought a few Christmas presents this week!
Anyone who has been following along with my life since the kids were younger will know that I used to like to be all done with my Christmas shopping early so that we could have the best time together throughout December.
I’ve not been very good at that the last couple of years but I’m determined to be sorted by the start of December this year so that I can really relax in December. It’s a busy month at the best of times but add in our house move and the fact that I’m permanently tired these days and it has potential to be a bit of a nightmare so I’m doing everything I can to be sorted before December.
Grown up kids are hard to buy for but I found a couple of things that I know they will enjoy on sale so it was a win, win.🎁
I even have a packing box labelled neatly ‘Presents’!
3) I’m not a huge make-up wearer but I do like to wear it and I’ve been wanting to experiment with a highlighter for a while now but I’m useless at putting anything on other than foundation and mascara so I didn’t want to spend a fortune on something I might never be able to put on properly or worse, I could learn to put it on and look ridiculous!
So when I spotted the Lacura highlighter in Aldi this week for 49p, I went for it.
No idea how much it usually is as I’ve never seen it before in there but it was at the tills with some much darker versions.
And after bringing home my bargain highlighter, I can confirm two things – (1) I absolutely can’t put it on like the cool people can and (2) even from my pathetic attempts at applying it, I do indeed look ridiculous. 😁 And here’s me thinking I’m going to look all glamorous on holiday.
So I saved money by buying a 49p version (which is actually very good quality from what I can tell) rather than one that costs more then £10 but I wasted 49p as it will never make it out of my make-up bag again I suspect.
That’s a kind of money saving win though, right?
4) I’ve been doing some carpet cleaning this week with our carpet cleaner and I asked Miss Frugal to get me some carpet cleaner on her way over as she was the last one to use the cleaner and was bringing it back over to me to use.
She rang me to check if it was the Rug Doctor one that I wanted as that was the one that she’d bought the week before to do her carpets. I told her absolutely not and sent her to the cleaning aisle in Asda for the £1.89 which is less than 20% of the cost of the rug doctor cleaner for the same size bottle. This is the one I buy..
I don’t know what the Rug Doctor solution is like so I can’t say this works just as well or better but I can say that this does exactly what I need it to do and my carpets are looking good right now!
5) Back to Basics for the last one today… we’re flying from Manchester tomorrow and had the option of staying over in a hotel ready for the early start or driving up through the night and we decided to drive up through the night to save the cost of the hotel stay on top of what we’d paid already for the trip.
We also looked on the petrol prices app to find the cheapest price for petrol near where we live. We found the cheapest price which was actually 6p per litre cheaper than the one closest to us for the sake of driving 20 minutes away to a small local garage. Normally, 20 minutes drive to save wouldn’t be worth it but it was actually on the way to where were were going – it was a two minute detour and because we were filling up a 60 litre tank from empty, we saved the grand old amount of £3.60.
Not enough to make a difference in the grand scheme of things but again for something that took no time at all, why would I want to pay more?
I think that’s where successful money saving starts – it’s a mindset change when you realise that the little things add up and even if you can afford to pay more, why would you?
And that’s why I tell you about the small things that I do to save money, because they’re things that I do without thinking these days.
Things that I used to do because I needed to do them, because I needed to save every penny that I could in order to afford to work part time while the kids were younger so that I could spend as much time as possible with them as they were growing up. I focused on saving money in every area that I could and saw all those little savings add up to a saving on our monthly budget that allowed me to keep working part time and to enjoy my children as they grew up.
Now I don’t need to do them, but I still do. 😁
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