Every week (ish) I share five frugal things that I’ve done during the previous 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! 👐
Last week we had the most amazing week away in Italy staying on Lake Garda and I get that this might seem like an odd subject for a ‘five frugal things’ post but it was done completely on a budget so I thought I’d share a few of the things we did to save some money – both before we went and while we were there.
1) First up, booking the holiday! We booked cheap flights through Easyjet and chose a budget accommodation on a campsite. The campsite we chose (after a lot of research) had a few bungalows with private hot tubs available to book on their site although the majority of it was reserved for campervans and tents. We paid around half of what a hotel would have cost us and we were literally right on the lake which was just beautiful.
We did this to save money but also because having a full kitchen was important to us as I’m diabetic and am still not confident eating out too much while I get to know what spikes my blood sugars and what is OK for me.
We got a two bedroomed bungalow with two bathrooms, a kitchen and a living room with outside space and a hot tub on a site that had everything we could possibly have needed or wanted – we could hire bikes and pedaloes, use the washing machines and tumble driers and even shop at the on-site shop (which we didn’t as it was expensive as you can imagine).
2) Having a kitchen meant that we could shop with the locals in the supermarkets and farmers markets which was so much fun and also, so much cheaper. We did eat out a couple of times (you have to, don’t you?) but we had most of our evening meals sat out on our terrace overlooking the pool after having the fun of shopping for our ingredients. The meals out cost us around £60 a time whereas I don’t think we spent much more on a full week of meals.
We also ate breakfast in our bungalow but lunches we tried to eat out and find somewhere reasonable with a nice atmosphere and a good view.
3) Train travel is so cheap in Italy and we deliberately chose our accommodation as it was ten minutes from one of the best railway stations on the lake for transport links to the major cities.
We took the train to Verona and Milan to save us money and it was so easy!
We did choose to drive to Venice rather than train as we could drive quicker and park in the big car park outside the city and although this worked out a little more expensive than the train would have done, it worked out well as we ended up leaving earlier than we thought – it was such a lovely day and the city was packed so we decided to head back to the lake and enjoy the sunshine instead of battle through the crowds. We saw all the main attractions before we left though.
4) We planned ahead and although I didn’t have a full on itinerary, I did know what days were market days, where there was a wine festival going on and for the cities we planned to visit, I’d done my research and knew all the sites to see and what order they should be done in based on shortest walking distances.
We didn’t stick to it all the time as we like to go with the flow and often get distracted by something that we want to explore instead but it was good to have the information there if it was needed as it meant we could see everything we wanted to.
We do get easily distracted though – we spotted an interesting road sign on a drive around the lake and after a bit of googling, realised it was for a waterfall which we ended up diverting to and it was the best thing we did while we were there.
But distractions aside, having a plan meant we could budget better as we knew there was a couple of things that we wanted to do that would cost more than other things -we wanted to do the cable cars for example which weren’t cheap but because we knew that we wanted to do them then we saved money for that day.
5) We booked some time at the thermal spa on the lake which was a must on our holiday bucketlist but we saved a fortune by booking in advance and booking the evening experience which meant that we could get in from 6pm-10pm rather than through the day and made it less than half the day price,
It was reasonably quiet and we had plenty of time to enjoy everything that the spa had to offer while enjoying the sunset over the lake,
It was such a beautiful week and even more beautiful because we did everything we wanted to do on the budget we’d set ourselves.
So, there’s this week’s five frugal things!
Holidays are a luxury, I absolutely get that and I know how lucky we are to be able to put money aside for holidays.
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