Five Frugal Things We’ve Done 25/01/19

I thought I might struggle this time around as it hasn’t felt like a particularly frugal fortnight, especially since we’ve been going out of our way to buy each other presents. Time slips by so easily that sometimes you just need to sit and reflect on what you’ve done each day to figure out whether you’re flying by on autopilot or whether you’re mindful about your money. So here’s what we’ve been up to:

TopCashback £2.50 bonus on a £5 spend

Spotted at 4:30 pm when the offer expired at midnight on the same day!

Sometimes these deals freak me out when the pressure’s on to buy. It can make you shop when you never intended to, which ain’t frugal at all.

I started keeping a list of things (mostly art equipment) that I need but they were all way, way more than a fiver, and my budget is under £50 for the month! I did buy some ink for myself and something out of the household budget, so look out for that in the spending diary.

Finding the cheapest petrol stations in our area

By a long shot, it’s been the supermarket petrol stations.

Ste has been the one hunting down the bargains this month, but in the past I’ve used mobile phone apps made to locate the cheapest petrol stations. Really useful especially if you’re in an area you don’t know well!

Home-made presents

We’re having our present day on Saturday, so I’m looking forward to sharing all the swag with you! I think I’ll write it up as a gift guide instead of putting it into my spending diary, since the present day budget is separate to our personal spending budgets.

So whilst we definitely have been shopping (and I did mention that during the last post), we had a couple of ideas for home-grown presents:

• we printed some tee shirts with a custom Riddler-themed print to surprise not-so-Little Balders with, and next,
• not-so-Little Balders wrote a short fan-fiction story that I edited and printed out as a booklet to give as a present to Ste.

It looks as though I’m the only one who isn’t getting anything hand-made, but that’s ok – I might print a matching tee shirt for myself later!

A free website as a present

This might sound weird, but not-so-Little Balders is going to have quite a surprise when he opens up one of his presents on Saturday and finds his very own domain name (and when he goes to it, his own live website)!

He’s recently started designing playing cards and I know he wants to set up a website, but doesn’t know where to start. I distracted him for a bit and sneakily ordered a free .co.uk domain name as well as the matching .uk domain, all for free from Names.co.uk.

He even has a live site that he can manage with a drag-and-drop builder. I run all my sites on WordPress but I doubt he wants anything like a blog, so letting him use the free site builder from Names.co.uk means less work for me and a more manageable experience for him.

I guess you can tell that my favourite kind of presents are assets – things that create or add value somehow.

Free premium stock photo membership

This might be a bloggy addition but hey, that is what I do and there are lots of costs attached to it. I’ve also found that stock vectors are sometimes useful in my artwork, especially for designing screen prints.

So I was compiling all my five frugal things and income report posts into their own mega pages and man, some of the early feature images and pins I used were straight up UGLY. I mean, I was trying my best but didn’t have a clue yet. Things had improved over the years but I wanted to give this site a proper spring clean and facelift.

I was researching stock photo memberships (not cheap) last week when I came across Rawpixel, which has some fantastic photos and vectors for free, as well as a premium membership.

Someone’s used my referral to pick up their own premium membership, which has given me a free month, so hooray! Seriously, I’m about to go nuts downloading free pics. My blog images and pins are going to be sooo much better this year!

Over to you…

How has your frugal week or fortnight been?

Last week

I’m linking up with Cass, Emma and Becky in this week’s ‘Five Frugal things I’ve done this week’ linky.