Five Frugal things I’ve done this week {18th March 2016}….

1) Miss Frugal decided that she was suddenly too old for her beautiful pink and turquoise bedroom and that she wanted to go for an all white look instead.  I did have a fair amount of white paint leftover from when we did our hall, stairs and landing so I told her I’d help her if she did most of the work and surprisingly, she agreed!  She bought the roller out of her own money and set about painting what she could while I helped out with the higher bits.

About half way through it was pretty obvious that the paint we had wasn’t going to do the whole room but ,rather than buy more paint, I talked her into keeping one wall and the inside of the window frame turquoise because I thought a splash of colour would be nice (not at all because I didn’t want to spend more money on paint. ;-)).  In fact, there’s a possibility that the cushion on top of her wardrobe is hiding a square that couldn’t do as the paint tin was completely dry by this point.

I’ll get round to patching it up eventually but for now, you’d never know!

2)  For the last few months we’ve been arguing discussing what our budget was going to be for our upcoming car purchase.  Mr Frugal wanted to spend no more than £500 which he thought was going to get him a reliable car that was going to get him to work and back every day and cope with all his ‘Dad Taxi’ duties, whereas I thought we should be spending more than that to make sure that we got a newer, more reliable car.   I get that the new car would be a second car for us and that we don’t want to spend a fortune but at the same time, I thought that spending too little would be a false economy that would leave him without a car or spending a fortune on repairs.  You can imagine how much we were both looking forward to car shopping this week can’t you?

We managed to compromise and picked a car that was selling for £1100 which is an 06 reg with relatively low mileage and looks immaculate.  Mr Frugal is too polite to haggle over the price so it was left to me and I managed to get him down to £800 including a 12 month MOT which is actually nearer to what Mr Frugal wanted to pay than what I had budgeted for.

3)  It’s car boot sale season again and this week I picked up my favourite bargain yet!

It’s a new tin for my kitchen shelves and a total bargain at just 50p!

I don’t know if you remember what my kitchen shelves looked like from a few weeks ago but just in case, here you go….

My new Coco Pops tin is the first storage tin that I’ve bought with the intention of displaying it on my kitchen shelves – everything else on there has just accumulated naturally.  I do like the idea of buying more vintage style storage though so I’m going to be on the lookout from now on.

4) Now that I’ve shared some pretty photos, I’m going back to the new car for this next one!  When I rang the insurance company to see how much the new car would be, I was a little shocked to hear that it was going to set me back an extra £215 over the rest of the year.  It’s not a particularly powerful car but it is quite sporty so I was expecting a little bit extra but certainly not that much.  Rather than accept the quote I was given, I asked how much it would cost if I just cancelled and went elsewhere because we really wanted the car it had taken us months to agree on but we obviously didn’t want to be paying that much extra on the insurance.  Turns out that there was an extra discount that the man could give me because I was a loyal customer and that meant that the premium was only going to increase by £43.  The moral of this story is always ask for a discount and let the company you’re speaking to know (in a nice way) that you will consider moving to a competitor if they can’t help.

5) Did you read my post about how to use your freezer to save you time and money earlier in the week?

Basically, it was all about how I was using my freezer a bit differently lately to save myself a little bit of money and a whole lot of time and I did mention that I was planning to buy a new freezer to go in the kitchen so I could do even more.  My new freezer is on it’s way and should be here tomorrow which excites me more than it should – I cant wait to fill it!

What frugal or thrifty things have you done this week?

Don’t forget to follow the ‘Five Frugal Things’ Pinterest board as I’ll be pinning all of our five frugal things photos on there.  You can find it here if you want a quick peak….

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Image credit: Shutterstock, Gstockstudio