Every week I share five frugal things that I’ve done during that week just to show you that the small things you do all add up to a great frugal lifestyle where you can learn to live a fabulously frugal life.
Before I start though, as always feel that I should say that being frugal to me is about getting the best value for our money – it’s not about doing without for us or about not having nice things. We all have different financial situations and we’re all frugal for different reasons. 😉
1) I know I’m a bit late to the party but this week, I finally got around to joining Chip which is an app that automatically saves money from your current account for you. I’m still getting to grips with it but I’ve seen lots of people saying how good it is recently so I thought I’d give it a go.
Basically, you link your current account to the app (all safe and secure) and it monitors your spending for a while and then a clever little algorithm somehow calculates how much you can afford to put away and automatically transfers that amount from your current account to something called an e-wallet account held by Barclays.
I haven’t used it for long enough to personally recommend the app but I downloaded it on the recommendation of people who I think are pretty money savvy so I’m pretty sure I’m going to like it and if I do, I’ll share some more details and let you know how I’m finding it. If you’re thinking of downloading it in the meantime, then this review by Martin Lewis here is pretty comprehensive. 😉
2) This is another boring money one but this week was payday so I did what I usually do and sat and went through the previous month’s transactions using my online banking. I’m not one for matching up receipts or anything as in-depth as that but I do look for things that stand out as wrong and this week I found that we’d been double charged for Miss Frugal’s tutoring.
She has an hours tutor session every Friday night for her English GCSE and we pay her tutor through a tutoring website and they’ve double charged us in error. It took me less than a minute to sort it out and the money’s on its way back to me as we speak.
This is why you should always check your bank statements – even when you really, really don’t want to.
I couldn’t find an interesting photo to share for the first two so I thought I’d re-share these lovely bargain daffodils from a few weeks ago to brighten up the page. 😉
3) We’ve just written off to try and trace some premium bonds that we think might have been gifted to us by a relative way a lot of years ago. They’ve passed away now so we’re using the trace service to see if we can track them down.
We have a vague recollection of being told about them but we didn’t really get what they were all those years ago and we both just seem to have forgotten about them until another relative mentioned that they’d successfully traced theirs recently.
Fingers crossed for us!
4) This week we bought a pack of four rechargeable batteries and it occurred to me just how much money we must have saved since buying the last lot that we bought.
The ones we did have aren’t holding their charge particularly well these days which is super important when they’re used in the Xbox controllers apparently. They’re not ready to go to battery heaven just yet but they’re just not good enough for the controllers so I’ve charged them up and they’re in the drawer downstairs ready to go when I need some AA batteries.
5) I found some reduced vine-ripened tomatoes last Saturday morning so I bought them and made some roasted tomato soup with them for lunch and it was amazing!
I shared the recipe on here on Monday if you fancy checking it out!
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As always, we’d love you to join in with us by sharing your five frugal things from your week – whether it’s an Instagram picture (#5frugalthings), a blog post or even a video. Just add your link to the linky at the bottom of this post.
You don’t have to share five things you’ve done, anything thrifty or frugal that you’ve been doing is perfect.
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I’m linking up with this Cass, Emma and Becky in this week’s ‘Five Frugal things I’ve done this week’ linky.
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