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) I’m definitely getting better at using up leftovers for lunch and my lovely little food flask (Facebook made me buy it) is in use most days either for me or Miss Frugal who shares it with me. If I heat up the leftovers before I leave for work then the food is still warm at lunchtime so it’s perfect!
This was pasta arrabbiata leftovers that tasted even better the next day for lunch!
2) I made a giant batch of chilli in the Instant Pot on Sunday and froze it in different size smaller portions – it’s fab on jacket potatoes, on nachos, on loaded wedges on pizza as a topping and even on avocados occasionally…
I thought I’d so some smaller batches of it for the freezer so it’s easy to pull single meals together where needed with everyone having different schedules at the moment.
3) Last Monday was the fifth anniversary of the implementation of the carrier bag charge here in the UK and I’m just about there with remembering to take my own bags with me when I go shopping.
These are similar to the ones that I keep folded up in the back of my car so I always have them with me although I don’t have them open in my trolley like this as I’m doing my shopping – I wait until I’ve unloaded the shopping onto the conveyer belt before I open them out like this.
It did take me a while to get the hang of remembering to take them into the shop but they definitely make life so much easier now that I’ve finally got it! Judging by the number of people who I see buying bags for life, I think we’ve got a long way to go as a whole but the potential savings when you add them up can be significant.
Morrisons, for example, do paper bags that cost 30p a bag (which is the same as they charge for their plastic versions I think) and I reckon you’d easily use four bags if you’re doing you’re weekly family shop. Over the year, that works out to £61.20 which I get isn’t a huge amount in the grand scheme of things but it is when you think you’re paying that much literally because you can’t remember to take your own bags into the shop. It’s literally throwing money away and that’s without even taking into account the whole reason that the charges were brought in originally which was the impact that our carrier bag consumption is having on the world we live in!
So this week, I’m calling out one of the small things that I did – I took my own shopping bags with me when I did my weekly shop. It took me about five seconds to get them out of my car boot, saved me around £1.20 on that one shopping trip and did my small bit for the environment.
(Affiliate link: You can get similar shopping bags on Amazon for around £11.00)
4) I picked up some chicken thighs from the reduced section when I went shopping this week so I did a quick swap around of my meal plan and decided to make my one pot Spanish Chicken instead of the Mexican pasta bake that I had planned. I popped the mince back and quickly googled the recipe (which is over on my meal planning blog) to see what else I needed to buy.
The recipe needs a green pepper but I had a yellow one in the fridge so I just decided to use that instead so all I needed was an orange. Nice and easy!
Meal planning is definitely the way forward but you do have to be a bit flexible when you’re shopping so you can save money when you see a bargain like my chicken thighs.
5) With the nights drawing in, it’s getting to that time of year when I go to bed earlier and enjoy reading my Kindle (which I know makes me sound old before my time but I feel like I’m OK with that at the moment) so this week, I spent some time filling up my Kindle with a stack of free books using my Kindle Unlimited subscription – I have no idea how much I’d spend on books if I didn’t have this as I read super fast and probably get through 3 books a week on a slow week. 😁 I think I pay around £7 a month for my subscription but it’s genuinely the best money I spend each month as it saves me so much – especially as my the two libraries near where I live now have closed so that’s not really an option for me anymore.
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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