Five Frugal Things We’ve Done 29/11/19

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Remember last fortnight when I wrote this:

A while ago we switched broadband providers and went through TopCashback, which gave us over £90 of cashback. We chose to get this as a Tesco e-gift card, as we could get a bit of a bonus on top of it.

Five Frugal Things 15/11/19

Well, we’ve used it all up! It was a great help, but what else have we done over the last two weeks to save money?

Getting Quidco cashback as a Tesco e-gift card

Aha! I did it again!

Well, this time I only had a bit over £8 payable in Quidco*, but I chose to get it as a Tesco card since the last one was such a hit.

This is just the way I like coupons – quick and easy.

Bulb let us reduce our bills

Bulb are actually very good when it comes to customer communication – they emailed me recently saying that we’d built up a lot of credit on our account, and that we could adjust our bills to use it up. Well of course!

It’s not just overpaying that lets you build up credit with Bulb though, as you can earn £50 of credit for referring a friend, and we’ve done that before.

You can read my full review of Bulb here.

Installing and reviewing Emma

Not long ago I started using Emma, the budgeting app, and wrote up a review.

It’s been a really smart move for me actually, as it really does help me juggle my multiple current accounts and see when I have bills due… and when you have bills coming out of multiple accounts, a bit of help organising doesn’t go amiss.

If you ever feel stressed about potentially bouncing payments, this could be the app for you. And it’s free!

Using Groupon and Curve for a night out

Last week a friend of ours organised a group roller skating night for our kids, and one particularly thrifty mum told us that the venue had tickets for sale on Groupon, with an extra code.

Naturally when a pal throws out news of a bargain like that, you do the sensible thing and jump on it! I did pause a little bit because – believe it or not – I’d never used Groupon before.

I know, I know… but it never looked like something I’d be into.

Anyway, I braced myself and signed up to Groupon through Quidco* and bought my vouchers using my Curve rewards points.

So… having bought a few hours of skating as well as our drinks entirely with my Curve rewards points, I’ll be getting cash back on top of that as well. Thanks, thrifty friend!

Repairing my laptop with FORMcard

My laptop is so decrepit now that even Ste is starting to admit that it’ll need to be replaced eventually. He’s the barometer for when something is legitimately trashed – he would rather squeeze every ounce of life out of an electronic device than concede defeat, so if he says that it’s on its last legs, then it’s definitely past it.

The laptop repair attempts have been going on for a while now, (and by that I mean over two years at least) so now that things have gotten even more drastic, the solutions had to get a bit more drastic as well.

This time I sandwiched the bit of the body that had snapped off in FORMcard*, which is a mouldable bio-degradable plastic. I have two more pieces from the original pack I bought ages ago, but this was a piece that I’d previously used to fix a mop.

I just put it in hot water, re-shaped it and stuck it onto the broken laptop case. One problem down, five more to go – maybe we can make it a few more years?

Over to you…

Have you managed to turn up any money-saving tips these past few weeks?

Last fortnight

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