Living Frugally

Both of us have been brought up in families where we have been careful with our spending on a day to day basis. This has meant that we have money to spend on the big stuff when the need comes along. I had not really thought about how often each week that we make small savings and how these add up to a big saving overall. Here are some of the everyday small things we do that make a big difference.

I do not buy bin liners as I use shopping bags from supermarkets or shops that provide bags for free. I use a different bag every day for the waste from every room in our house. All rubbish is taken to the kitchen and put in the carrier bag. I sometimes use two bags instead of one at the till at the supermarket to help with my stock of 'bin liners'.

We squeeze the last drop out of every container that we use from toothpaste to face cream to ketchup. I will cut open plastic tubes to get the last few drops out and make sure nothing goes to waste. I buy large bottles or jars of items to decant into smaller bottles as this is more economic. I shop at Costco and will buy large bottles of ketchup or sauces and then decant them into smaller bottles that we use on a day to day basis.

I buy items in bulk when I see them on offer or reduced to very cheap prices, so instead of buying one box I will buy say six and then store the remainder in the garage, the loft or in cupboards at home. This goes for just about everything that we use on a regular basis from food, toiletries to Christmas wrapping paper etc. My grandfather worked for a company that make washing up liquid, washing powder/tablets and cleaning products etc. He could visit the factory shop once a month and buy a set limited number of items of each product at vastly reduced prices. We would buy the maximum number we could of each item as we were saving huge amounts of money particularly on laundry items. I have not been able to buy cleaning products from the factory shop for 3 years as my grandfather died in 2011. I have been using the stocks we had and which are stored in my garage and I still have enough to last me another 3 years or so. We must have saved £100s.

We use things until they are worn out and this happened at the weekend when I noticed that the fitted sheet on our bed had two tears in it on both sides of the bed. When I had a closer look I realised it really was threadbare but we had slept on it for the last 5 nights no problem. I usually have two sets of sheets and pillowcases and alternate them each week. So this meant that I had just one fitted sheet left for me to use....or so I thought. 

Before I go to buy anything I look to see if I already have it at home - I am simply shopping at home. I had started to look on the Internet for the best prices for fitted sheets as we have a superking size bed and they can be expensive when I had a thought. I have a bedding chest on our landing and I had not looked in it for a while, so could there be some fitted sheets in there already? Yes there were and more than one.

There were two Christy sheets that I had originally used when we had first bought our bed but when I bought two new sets of sheets I had put them away (freshly laundered of course). As I dug further down to the bottom of the chest there were two brand new fitted sheets still in their wrappers. I remembered buying these off ebay at a silly price given that they were superking but in addition they are Lulu Guinness aswell. What a result! Four fitted sheets that I had forgotten I had as I had bought them about 6 years ago. Do you like my shoe horn on my bedding chest in the picture below? It is a Manolo Blahnik one designed for Habitat. I love the seductive shape and have three of them all bought from car boot sales. They cost me between £2 and £15 and are currently for sale on eBay at around £40.

We have a clear out of storage areas on a regular basis to remind ourselves what we have and what we no longer use, want or need. I cleared out and cleaned my pantry two weeks ago and found some items at the back of the cupboard that I had forgotten I had. This made me think about new recipes to try and how to use up some of items. I made a number of lasagnes because I found tins of tomatoes, pasta sauces and boxes of lasagne sheets. I made fish pie because I had found parsley sauce mix and when I next went shopping I found half price fish. I also found some Mexican food sauces and spices and realised that we tend not to eat Mexican food these days so I put them to one side to give to my sister. I know that she in turn will give me bargains she has found or things she no longer needs. When she visited at Christmas along with presents for us and champagne to drink with our meal she brought a ready cooked chicken and four panettone which she had bought reduced. Which leads me on to my next point.

As a family before we give anything away to charity we always see if anyone else in our family wants it. When my sister visited last weekend I had four bags of items for her to take away. One bag of items from the pantry that I no longer wanted as I did not think I will use the items any more.  Another bag had three tops that I was no longer loving and we're a little too tight for me and several scarves and set of gloves that I no longer loved. There was a bag of magazines that I have read and wanted her and my niece to have before passing on to their friends. Finally there was a bag with two vanity cases which were once full of toiletries but were empty as I have been using up my stock of toiletries to try to reduce the amount of space they were taking up in my bedroom.

If you visit a hotel make sure you bring any spare toiletries home with you that they provide in the bathroom and anything else that they provide for free such as individually wrapped teabags and sachets of coffee, hot chocolate, sugar and biscuits. Shoe shine pads and sewing kits have come in very handy when brought home too as have those little flimsy slippers. I have used many of these items on our weekends away when we gone self catering. I would certainly not take anything that is not provided as a free item.

Having said that if I have taken extra sachets of sugar, sweetener and paper napkins when out for a coffee before now. I would not dream of taking the whole lot provided at the table but an extra one or two will surely not be missed and again come in handy when kept in my handbag or when away for the weekend. I even now have a kilner jar in the pantry that all of the sachets go into so I know that I have a standby if we are getting low on sugar or for when my sister visits as she is the only one in the family who uses sweetener.

Make as much food and drink as you can at home rather than paying for it outside of the home. I make packed lunches for both of us to take to work. This costs a fraction of the cost of buying ready made sandwiches. I sometimes buy sandwiches ready made when they have been reduced at the supermarket which is not a problem but I will not pay £2.50 for a sandwich when I can buy it reduced to 85p or make it at home for even cheaper. Our sandwiches for work on one day this week cost 75p for me to make. It also forces me to look at other ideas rather than just sandwiches so I may take cheese and crackers, home made or reduced price soups, celery or carrot sticks with dip or cream cheese. I love the idea of a bento box and need to look at this as an option going forward.

I have lots of other scrimping ideas to share but think that this is enough for now and will share them in another post. Happy Frugal Living.