Five little things that have saved us money this week {5th June 2026}….

Every week I share five small things we’ve done to save a bit of money, make life easier or help us spend more intentionally.

None of them are usually huge on their own, but that’s kind of the point. Those small choices add up over time and give us more room for the things that really matter — whether that’s days out, holidays, home projects, treats we’ll actually enjoy or just a bit more breathing space in the budget.

Hey! 

1) I told you I bought a new car, didn’t I?

It’s just as good on fuel as we thought it was going to be and now that I’ve had it for a couple of weeks, I’m over the obsessive checking on the MPG data on the dashboard. 😁

When my petrol light comes on, I have the option for the car to navigate me to the nearest petrol station so this week, I thought I’d take it up on it’s offer and say yes when it asked me if I’d like to go get petrol. It did a great job taking me to the nearest petrol station but when I got there the petrol was £1.64 a litre which is ridiculous when I knew it was so much less nearer to where we live.

So, bearing in mind that I still had around 50 miles to go before I ran out, I decided not to bother and carried on with my journey home! 🚗

Before I set off though, I did check the Petrol Prices app and found a petrol station on the way home that wasn’t out of my way where petrol was £1.52 a litre. I put £50 in which meant that I saved around £4 by ignoring my car!

A relatively small amount (although it all adds up) but it’s money wasted if I spend that much extra every couple of weeks when I top up – it takes 10 seconds to open the app and put my postcode in. 

I use the Petrol Prices app and find it to be pretty accurate usually. 

2) I had a lovely meal out with the kids this week at Nando’s which felt like a proper treat because it’s actually been a couple of weeks since I saw them both together at the same time. They’ve both had their own things going on and have been away here and there so trying to get us all free at once has been surprisingly tricky lately.

We had a really nice couple of hours catching up and putting the world to rights over chicken and chips. 😁

When it came to paying, I remembered at the last minute to check the Sprive app to see if Nando’s was on there and luckily it was, which meant I got £4.68 cashback towards our mortgage just by buying a gift card through the app before paying.

I know I sound like a broken record talking about Sprive lately but it genuinely feels like a no-brainer to me. It took less than 30 seconds to do and every little bit chips away at the mortgage balance. Altogether we’ve already saved over £10 on the mortgage just from purchases we were making anyway.

My thinking is always that if I accidentally left a £10 note sitting on a table somewhere then I’d absolutely spend 30 seconds walking back to pick it up, so this feels exactly the same to me. 😂

3) This week, we saved £195 on call-out charges for a blocked drain by trying our luck with Northumbrian Water before booking Dynorod to sort out a blocked drain in our garage. We were pretty sure that the blockage was on our side but we wanted to get it checked before we paid a fortune just in case and Northumbrian Water were pretty amazing to be fair – they were with us within 45 minutes of picking up the phone to call them and within about 15 minutes they’d done what they needed to do to be able to tell us that it was a blockage within our property lines. 

The team were lovely and said that they had all their kit with them so as a goodwill gesture, they’d sort it for us anyway. How lovely was that?

The drain has been blocked pretty much since we moved in but it’s out of the way in the garage so it wasn’t high up our list of priorities for the last couple of months. The torrential rain on Tuesday moved it up our priority list though. 😁

4) I went to the pictures with Miss Frugal this week to finally see The Devil Wears Prada 2 and I had a lovely afternoon. 

We’ve been planning to go for ages but things kept getting in the way so I didn’t believe we were actually going until she pulled up outside my house to pick me up.We’d made a deal that I’d buy the tickets and she’s buy the slushies but when I used KidsPass to buy the tickets, I saved 45% so obviously I ended up buying them too although I’m probably fooling myself that there are any circumstances that would have meant I didn’t buy them. 😁

5) This is a reminder to take your bags for life with you when you go shopping. 

Two bags a week is 80p a week which is £41 a year which is absolutely not going to break the bank in the grand scheme of things but as with most of the savings in today’s post, it’s a saving that’s going to add up to a decent amount over time. 

And that’s the best kind of saving, something that takes little time or effort but puts more money in your pocket. 

There you go, hope you enjoyed seeing what I’ve been getting up to this week!

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