Yip yip! Our first five frugal things of the year! I’ve been looking forward to getting stuck in to a new blogging routine and I do love turning up thrifty things we’ve done. It’s encouraging for me, and I hope it’s helpful for you!
Used a Tesco coupon for a discount on a magazine
Back in December we picked up the Tesco magazine and scanned the coupon page for anything useful. Behold! A coupon for £1 off a magazine! Well, we knew just what that would go towards – we held onto it until the first week in January when Ste picked up just the magazine he had been looking forward to.
It’s a great feeling being able to make a saving on something you’re certain you’d have been getting anyway.
Made homemade deodorant
Just what it sounds like – crunch time came around, and by crunch time I mean that moment when all the deodorant ran out and we realised what a bunch of stinkers we truly are.
If you’ve read these posts before you might have noticed that I occasionally make our deodorant at home (here’s the recipe) and the main reason isn’t because I’m stingy, but because I hate smelly toiletries, especially aerosols. Being dirt cheap to make and eco-friendly is a big bonus!
Tracking our grocery spending… online
A new year, a chance for starting a new series of posts on the blog – and a new personal project for us.
After writing lots of posts about cutting down on supermarket spending last year, you would think we have it cracked, right? Well, we don’t do too badly, but we could definitely improve! We’ve decided to blog about our grocery spending in order to share our tips in (almost) real-time and give ourselves a kick up the collective bum when it comes to our food and household budget.
Ste will be doing the calculations on this one (he did volunteer, I promise) so it’ll be a pretty effective collaboration – I’m convinced we’re going to save a lot more this year!
A very good friend gave us a lovely gift…
This has nothing to do with us being frugal, of course, but I had to give it a mention anyway because it was such a generous gesture. A friend of ours gave us his Samsung tablet because he’s been given a newer version.
Now, our friend could easily have sold his old device, and that would have been a thrifty move on his part, but he offered it to us out of the blue. That’s genuine generosity that truly bowled us over!
Present day shopping through TopCashback
We’ve scheduled our annual present day for the end of January, and we’re going nuts with picking the perfect gifts for LittleBig Balders (he is genuinely huge now).
It seemed easier when he was on the edge of teendom and we could do things like a treasure quest wearing silly costumes, whereas now he’s way too cool for stuff like that. Still, we’ve had some cracking ideas and have been doing as much of our shopping as possible via TopCashback and Quidco.
I’m also going to be spilling the beans on what we bought when I publish my new spending diary!
Over to you…
How has the start of the year been treating your finances? Done anything super-frugal (or even teensily thrifty)?
I’m linking up with Cass, Emma and Becky in this week’s ‘Five Frugal things I’ve done this week’ linky.
7 Comments
Love the home made deodorant! I am currently using a natural solid one just like that and it works a treat. I might give that a go.
I have been looking at spending tracker apps today, funnily enough, so I might move away from spreadsheets and into the 21st century!
It’s funny you should say that about moving towards the apps, because I used apps exclusively for years but my husband only wants to use a pad and pen. Now he does most of it so we’ve switched to full analog!
It is kind of helpful to me to think of the thrifty things I’ve done too. It makes me realise we’re not doing too badly after all. Looking at posts like yours is great for ideas of other ways we could save money.
I like the sound of the deodorant. Is cornstarch American for corn flour? Is arrowroot better?
Tx
Hey, yes cornstarch is the same as corn flour. As for whether arrowroot is better… tbh I’m not sure, I think arrowroot is a wee bit finer but I’ve used corn flour the last few times I made it because we tend to always have it around. It’s like a miracle ingredient for DIY crafts! 😀
Thank you! ?
I just need to cut in briefly to say that corn flour and cornstarch are not the same thing. Similar, but not the same. Maybe they will accomplish the same thing in the context of a homemade deodorant, but for cooking purposes, please realize that they are two different products. They also have a different texture, so even for deodorant, you might find that one is better than the other. Check out this post for more details:
http://doyoucookwithme.com/corn-flour-vs-cornstarch/
Hi Amanda, thanks for your comment! You’re quite correct in that in the USA, corn flour and cornstarch are different things. I wouldn’t make the deodorant with the corn flour you mean. Here in the UK, when we say cornflour we mean what you call corn starch… and when we say corn meal, we mean what you call corn flour. It’s confusing but I’ve lived in both countries and as most of my readers are also here in the UK, I stick to British terms. I’ll probably update the posts to make that more clear though.