5 Frugal Things post 14 – No Spend January continues

5 Frugal Things Post 14

My frugal and low spending month continues with another good week. After the excesses of December where we overspent by around £800 we really needed to cut back in January. We have shopped frugally, ate maybe only 3 takeaways and done no sale shopping. The social life has taken a hit with very few nights out. It’s pretty dull to be honest but I am taking pleasure in the fact that we are saving money and its enabling us to put some money aside for our holiday in April.

Here are my frugal things from this week.

Classic Board games

The boys got lots of board games at Christmas and they are really paying dividends currently to help keep everyone when happy when it’s too cold to go out. We have chess, connect 4, Frustration, this game pictured here and played blackjack with pennies. We love a game of chess and are just trying to teach Josh, aged seven, the rules. Classic games really are the gift that keeps giving.

Aldi cat food

I must rave about Aldi cat food. Its £1.75 for 12 packets of pouched meat, I bought 60 packets for £8.75. This is compared to Tesco where the best deals I have seen are £8/£9 for 40 packets of either Tesco branded cat food/Whiskers/Felix. Its great food that costs so much less. And both cats love it. As time goes on we are switching more and more branded purchases over to Aldi own brand and cat food is the latest.

EBay selling

I have a post that will be live later today, I will update this post when its live or please come back again after 7pm on Friday to see it. But I have been ever so lucky to have a decluttering and selling lesson from the Emma Drew. We had loads of fun going through so much clutter in my house. I have around 50 things to sell and have made a slow but valuable start. Three things are listed that are already bidded up to £70. The post on Friday evening will have Emma’s top ten tips for selling and the most exciting part is that we filmed You Tube videos, one for Emma’s channel and another for mine.

Walking to school

Despite the freezing cold weather, we like to walk to school as often as we can, at least 3 days a week. Its 4000 steps and 2 km walk to school and back so it’s a good number of steps and it doesn’t take long. Plus it means that we don’t have to defrost the car and waste petrol on a short car run;-)

Setting money aside weekly for holiday

We go on holiday in 11 weeks (and counting) we are off to Vegas to celebrate my 40^th birthday. So, operation set money aside commenced this week. Hubby has been setting money aside for a few months now, which he is keep as a surprise how much he’s set aside. I am transferring £50 per week into my Piggypot, a new savings app that I wrote about last week. Also, I am thinking about when to exchange my dollars. The general thinking to hedge it and buys some now and then some later closer to holiday date. As who knows what will happen to the exchange rates between now and April. I use Holiday Currency Exchange to buy my currency, their best rate today is £1 = $1.23 (sob it was $1.40 last April)

I’m linking up with Cass, Emma and Becky in this week’s ‘Five Fabulously Frugal things I’ve done this week linky.