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.
Hey! 👐
1) Remember the white jumper in my last Pre-Loved bargains post? I had a plan to dye a lovely white jumper that I’d bought without noticing a little stain on the sleeve.
I popped to Hobbycraft and was wowed by the number of fabric dyes they had in stick and even though I went in fully intending to buy a ruby red kind of colour, I came out with olive green. It was a Dylon dye in a small packed and it cost me £2.50
It’s turned out lovely and has covered the stain but… I’m actually not a huge fan of the colour if I’m honest. I don’t HATE it and I have worn it, I just wish I’d stuck to the original plan and got a brighter colour rather than this one which just looks a bit dull to me.
2) I’ve been doing some online Christmas shopping this week and I’m finding that more and more companies seem to be offering a discount via a pop up asking you to sign up to their mailing list. This week I’ve done it with Champion and Urban Outfitters but there have been others over the last couple of weeks so it’s absolutely worth doing – even if you use a secondary email address that you just use for things like this.
One company sent me a discount code after I’d already made the purchase which was absolutely on me as I was super impatient with it as I was worried this particular thing would sell out. I thought I’d email them just to give it a go and see if they’d consider refunding the difference and they were happy to do it which was amazing.
I also saved a couple of times using the Honey Browser extension that Miss Frugal introduced me to a while back so I definitely recommend that if you’re doing any online shopping!
3) Did you catch my mince pie flapjacks last week?
They were amazing but I did have a trauma with the first batch as I forgot to set the timer when I put them in the oven and then got distracted by tinsel. I only remembered about it when I could smell it cooking and by that point, I had no clue how long it had been in for but it felt like forever so I just panicked and took them out.
Clearly, my guess was wrong as they were just a crumby mess – a delicious crumbly mess but still.
4) Feel free to skip to number 5 here if you have zero interest in actual blogging – I’ll forgive you! If you don’t want to feel like you’re missing out then I can sum this up in a sentence: ‘I had three small blogs that were running slow so I fixed the problem and saved money along the way supporting a small business’. The longer version is below… 😇
You may or may not know that I actually have a few smaller blogs that I set up so I didn’t bombard you on here with certain themes. I’ve had Meal Planning Made Easy for almost as many years as I’ve had this blog and I try and share my meal plans each week and recipes over there and I also have Wanderlust and Me which is my much-neglected travel blog that I set up because I have some amazing travel experiences and photos that I love to share. The newest addition to my blog family is Christmas on a Budget which does exactly what it says on the tin.
I’ve been really frustrated with them all recently as they’ve been running super slow and instead of getting it fixed and sorted, I’ve just left it and not updated any of them very much at all which is a shame as they were each set up for a specific reason. The Christmas and travel themed ones were because they’re both things that I love to write about but don’t want to bombard you on here and the meal planning was to hold me accountable to sticking to my weekly meal plans.
Anyway, this week I went for it and found someone very lovely on Facebook who helped me figure out that it was hosting related (sorry if this is no interest at all to you) which meant that it wasn’t something I couldn’t fix anyway. My host denied all knowledge even though we could see it was their issue so I decided to change hosts my three smaller blogs. I don’t need to do anything with this one as it’s got a special hosting package elsewhere with its own server as it’s much, much busier than the smaller ones which are more just for me.
So, I know I’ve waffled but the upshot is I changed hosts which to a company who still had a Cyber Weekend offer on so it cost pretty much what I pay now. I needed a new blog theme to use for the blogs as the one I had already wasn’t compatible so I searched all over and was looking at around $79 for a theme that would work on all three blogs.
I decided to have a cheeky look on Etsy to see if I could support a small business AND save me some money at the same time and I managed to find the perfect theme for what I wanted for a third of the price which was brilliant and I might be biased but I think they all look pretty good.
I made the logos and blog banners myself and my new hosts did all the installs and uploads free of charge as part of their welcome package.
I am literally so happy with them all and feel really excited to get back into blogging about more of my favourite things!
5) I know it’s only December but I’m planning for next year already – not because I’m trying to wish away time but because this year has genuinely put a lot of my plans on hold and no matter what happens in the world, I need to get myself back on track. I’m going to enjoy Christmas and then come New Year, I’m going to press on with everything I planned to do this year.
This includes all sorts of plans, some personal, some work and some blog related but I do know that I want to grow my income next year (don’t we all?) and I’m starting to look at different income streams to help me to do that. I don’t want to leave my real job or anything and I don’t plan to stop blogging but I have some plans for other sources of income that will help me to do some of the things I plan to do.
Vague, I know and not all money related but I need to be a bit clever to get to where I want to get to so planning has started this week for what I need to do.
Come over and join our fab Facebook group – Spend Less, Live Better! We’ve almost hit 35,000 members in the group now so it’s a great place to be
As always, we’d love you to join in with us by sharing anything you’ve done that’s been thrifty or frugal from your week – whether it’s an Instagram picture (#5frugalthings), a blog post or even a video. Just add your link to the Frugal Friday linky at the bottom of this post.
You’re more than welcome to copy and paste the badge above but it would be even better if you could let your readers know that you’re linking up with the five frugal things linky by adding a little line to the bottom of your post like this one:
I’m linking up with this Cass, Emma and Becky in this week’s ‘Frugal Friday’ linky.
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