Five little things that have saved us money this week {6th November 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.

It’s been another one of those weeks where I’ve managed to squeeze in a few money-saving things without really going out of my way to do anything differently.

Some weeks I have to sit and think about what I’ve actually done to save money, but this week I’ve had plenty to choose from, which is always nice. 😂

Anyway, here’s what I’ve been up to this week…

I chased a missing refund and cancelled an old credit card

We have a filing cabinet in our Harry Potter cupboard (which is actually just our cupboard under the stairs which is super sized) and the top drawer of it is actually really organised, which makes us look much more on top of things than we really are. 😂

The truth is though, neither of us are naturally brilliant at filing things away as we go, so we have a basket in the middle drawer where we throw anything that we might need to keep or deal with.

We try to go through the basket regularly, filing anything we need to keep, throwing away anything we don’t need and dealing with whatever needs sorting out. We had a good clear-out last weekend and it turned into a couple of hours of proper life admin, which wasn’t particularly exciting but did mean we finally got around to a few things we’d been putting off.

One of the things we found was a handful of receipts from things we’d returned recently, so I decided to check that the refunds had all gone through. I’m glad I did because one of them hadn’t actually made it back into our account, despite it being long enough since we’d returned the item that the money should definitely have arrived.

I sent a quick email to the company and they said they’d look into it as it should have been with us by that point. The money arrived back in our account yesterday, so that was an easy one to sort out, but I could easily have forgotten all about it if I hadn’t come across the receipt. That’s exactly why I like keeping return receipts until I know the money is back where it belongs.

Also in the basket was a letter containing a new credit card for an account that I honestly thought I’d cancelled last year, possibly even before that. I rang the company while I had the letter in front of me and got the account properly closed before cutting up the card.

I know cancelling an old credit card isn’t always the best thing to do from a credit history point of view, but I really didn’t need this one and having it sitting there was just an unnecessary temptation. In fact, within about thirty seconds of finding it, I’d already mentally planned a holiday that I could put on it, which probably tells you everything you need to know about why cancelling it was the right decision for me. 😂

I checked our bills and discovered a water leak

While I was in full-on life admin mode, I decided to have a quick look through our regular bills and direct debits to make sure everything still looked right. I’ve spent quite a bit of time getting our household bills organised since we moved, so I wasn’t expecting to find anything too exciting, but our water bill stood out because it had gone up more than I’d expected.

We do use the dishwasher every couple of days and I definitely can’t pretend that we were particularly careful with the hose in the garden over the summer, but neither of those things seemed enough to explain the increase. We started having a look around to see if there was anything else that could be using water and discovered that the cistern in one of our toilets had been slowly dripping.

It’s a toilet that we hardly ever use and I never use it at all, so it had completely passed me by. I have no idea how long it had been doing it but I suspect it had been a while, especially as we hadn’t noticed anything wrong until I started questioning the water bill.

I had a little look online afterwards and was surprised at just how much water a leaking toilet can waste. Northumbrian Water reckons a leaking toilet can cost around £200 a year in wasted water if you’re on a meter, although obviously that depends on how bad the leak is. Ours was only a slow drip so I doubt it was anything like that, but it does make you realise why it’s worth checking these things.

We’ve fixed it now and with the garden not needing anywhere near as much watering at this time of year, I’m hoping we’ll see our water usage come back down. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on the next bill to see if there’s a difference, although I’m hoping there won’t be any more little surprises waiting for us.

I planned our meals and saved £20 on our Morrisons shop

I sat down at the weekend and planned our meals for the coming week, which is something I always feel better for doing because it takes away that daily question of what we’re having for tea. With my partner working shifts and everyone having different likes and dislikes, it makes life so much easier when I’ve got a plan and know that we’ve already got everything we need.

I even went completely old school and wrote my shopping list out with a pen and paper rather than using an app or the notes on my phone. 😂 I checked what we already had in the freezer and cupboards first, worked out what meals we could make with those things and then added whatever else we needed to the list.

I had an extra incentive to get organised this week because I’d been given a till voucher from Morrisons offering £20 off a £60 online shop, which I thought was a pretty good offer. I don’t usually need much encouragement to do an online shop when there’s a decent discount involved, especially as I find it much easier to stick to what I need when I’m not wandering around the supermarket spotting things I hadn’t planned to buy.

I did my shop online using my meal plan and shopping list, checking what we already had as I went, and used the voucher to get £20 off. I was really pleased with that because it was money off shopping I was going to be doing anyway rather than an excuse to buy things we didn’t actually need.

We also had some Farmfoods vouchers sitting in the paperwork basket from one of their leaflet drops. I always keep these with every intention of using them but more often than not, I completely forget about them until they’ve expired. This time I took them out of the basket and left them on the fireplace so we’d see them before we went out shopping later that afternoon, which worked perfectly as we remembered to take them and saved a few more pounds when we popped into Farmfoods.

I’m clearly at the stage in life where remembering to use a supermarket voucher before it expires feels like a bit of an achievement. 😂

My bargain mushrooms made an amazing tea

I do love a good yellow sticker bargain and this week I found two huge Portobello mushrooms in Sainsbury’s reduced from £1.25 to just 31p. They weren’t on my shopping list but I knew I’d use them, so I popped them in my basket with the idea that I’d do something with them over the next day or so.

My partner was working nights tonight, which meant I only had myself to feed and could make whatever I fancied without having to think about whether anyone else would eat it. I decided to turn my mushrooms into little mushroom pizzas using tomato purée, ham and cheese that I already had in the fridge, and they were absolutely amazing!

I just topped the mushrooms with the tomato purée, added the ham and cheese and cooked them until the mushrooms were soft and the cheese had melted. They were really filling and made such a lovely tea that I didn’t need anything else with them, which was perfect as I wasn’t in the mood for making anything complicated.

I wouldn’t necessarily have thought to make mushroom pizzas if I hadn’t spotted the mushrooms reduced, but I’d definitely make them again. I do try to only buy yellow sticker bargains that I know we’ll actually eat rather than getting carried away just because something is cheap, and these were definitely a good buy.

I’m actually quite tempted to buy some more mushrooms now, although knowing my luck they’ll be back up to full price when I do. 😂

I earned mortgage cashback on our Nando’s lunch

Last weekend, I went shopping with the kids because we’d picked up two tags from the Dunelm Christmas giving tree. If you’ve not seen these before, they have a Christmas tree with tags on it that you can take to buy a gift for someone who might otherwise not receive much at Christmas. Each tag tells you a little about the person you’re buying for and what they’d like, without giving you their name.

We had two tags between the three of us, so we decided to go shopping together to choose the gifts. I thought it would be nice for us all to get involved rather than me just picking something up on my own, and it was lovely spending some time together doing something that will hopefully make Christmas a little bit nicer for someone else.

While we were out, we decided to go to Nando’s for lunch, which is always a popular choice in our family. Now, unusually, we were all paying for ourselves, which I can assure you isn’t normally how things work when I go anywhere with my kids. 😂 I wasn’t about to question this unexpected development, but I did have a little plan to make the most of it.

Rather than us all paying separately, I got them both to transfer their share of the bill to me so that I could pay for all three meals together using Sprive. I’ve mentioned Sprive a few times now because it’s become one of my favourite ways to get a bit of extra money knocked off our mortgage, and I use it whenever I can for things we’re buying anyway.

Nando’s is one of the places where I can earn cashback through Sprive by buying a gift card, so by paying for the whole bill together, I earned cashback towards our mortgage on all three meals rather than just my own. The kids still paid for their lunches and I paid for mine, but I got the cashback on the full amount, which I was quite pleased with.

I also remembered to use my Nando’s loyalty card, which meant that we’d earned a free meal for our next visit. Between that and the cashback, I was feeling quite pleased with myself by the time we left, although I suspect the kids were more interested in the fact that we’d had a nice lunch than my excitement over earning a bit of mortgage cashback. 😂

And that’s my five for this week!

Not the most glamorous collection of jobs, I’ll admit, but I’m quite pleased with what we managed to get sorted. The life admin basket is looking much healthier, I’ve finally used some vouchers before they expired and I’ve discovered that 31p mushrooms make a surprisingly lovely tea. Although, knowing us, that basket will be full again before long. 😂

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