We have one week left before the kids are back at school so our thoughts are turning to back to school preparations in the frugal house this week.I'm organised with school uniform (mostly) seeing as you have to buy a lot of it from the school directly but that's the easy part of going back to school if you ask me so I thought I'd share a few top tops on how to make going back to school as easy as possible for you and your children.... Get them back into a routine I've started waking my two up at 8.30 so the back to school early mornings next week won't be such a shock to the system … [Read more...]

As someone who wasn't that great at managing money when I left home (and for way too many years afterwards) I want my children to be as well equipped as possible to manage their finances and their household budgets when the time comes.The schools have enough to cover in the short period of time the kids are there so even though they might briefly cover some aspects of money management, the bulk of the responsibility falls to me as a parent and I've been teaching them as much as I can since they started nursery (and probably before to be honest).It can be a fine line though between … [Read more...]

I'm worrying.Master Frugal has just gone to the beach.With his friends.And no adults.And as if that wasn't bad enough, he's left his phone at home as he didn't want it to get damaged.This leaves me, pacing the floor in the living room debating with myself whether I've done the right thing letting him go on his own, worrying whether his friends are all sensible enough to know what's safe and what is it all the while trying to decide whether it's acceptable to go for a little drive to the beach just to check on him.I'm also worrying about all of the potential dangers of … [Read more...]

Miss Frugal's school teach some areas of the maths curriculum electronically - meaning that they assign the pupils work to do on a laptop and the children do the lesson on the laptop (both at school or at home) and then complete a test on the module which they have to get a set score in order to move on.Whilst at school they can ask the teacher to clarify what they don't understand but for modules set as homework (1-2 a week) it's not so easy as the work has to be completed to ensure that the homework shows as done (detentions are given if not) but it's quite hard for some children to pick … [Read more...]

I've lost count of the number of times in the last month that someone has asked me what our wifi password is so this morning, after I was asked the question again, I decided to make a little wifi password printable to share our wifi password with any guests.It's the kids friends who mainly ask me and I have no problem sharing it with them as it means that they can YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram to their heart's content without worrying about using all their data.All I did was copy a slogan from a t-shirt I saw recently (no idea where it was from as it was being worn be someone I … [Read more...]