Five frugal things we’ve done this fortnight:
The shopping spree has continued! It’s been so good to finally get my hands on the things I’ve saved up for over so many months. On my list this past fortnight have been block printing medium, UV inks, screen printing supplies and printmaking paper.
None of this stuff comes cheap! However, I’ve been very pleased with our efforts at making our money stretch. Quite proud of us, actually! Here’s what we’ve been up to:
Homecrafts
This week I discovered Homecrafts, and I’m so glad I did! I spent a long, long time looking for the cheapest place to get Jacquard Solarfast for my latest art project, and both Amazon and eBay were letting me down.
Lots of online art stores stock it but none were as cheap as Homecrafts; in fact, most other stores were selling half sized bottles for more than the cost of the full sized bottles at Homecrafts.
I got my £66.94 basket down to £56.90 thanks to a 15% welcome discount and free shipping over £40! Plus a massive 10.1% TopCashback bonus… and then when my order arrived, they included two discount codes for money off my next order!
How to use up a virtual Mastercard
We found ourselves with a £6.80 virtual Mastercard after choosing to get our TopCashback payout that way. We’d never tried it before and thought it would be a good choice, but then we were faced with a dilemma – how to use the full amount on the card without being able to split a payment online.
After some research I figured that the best ways for us to this were to either:
a) Top up our Amazon gift card account and save it for our next Amazon purchase, or
b) Pay off utility bills online (council tax, in our case).
You could always use a virtual card to send money via PayPal, but you’ll lose some of it to fees – the two ways above worked out as the most cost-effective for us.
Curve points
A few more clever people have gotten themselves £5 for signing up to Curve with my code, which has also given me some referral payments. I’m still using my Curve card of course!
Domain renewal time
It was time to move one of my domains from Siteground, as their renewal prices were more expensive than others. I was ready to give in and just renew, but I fought it and found a discount code on Namecheap’s own site, making an already cheap renewal price even cheaper.
Even better, I used my awkard USD PayPal balance to pay for it, cutting out the exchange fees!
Loyalty points
As I said last time, we discovered we had £12.50 to spend in Nectar points, which went towards one of our eBay purchases. Also, I used £1.05 worth of loyalty points at The Works’ online store.
Over to you…
Are there any frugal things you’ve been particularly happy with this week?
