Posts Tagged ‘frugal’

I was try­ing to think what to write on this week, but I have been get­ting very excited about Christ­mas, yes I know it is about two/three months away but I would like to save money this year but not buy peo­ple rub­bish presents.

What I did do last year was mak­ing my own Christ­mas cards which I really enjoyed doing, it took for­ever but I was on Christ­mas hol­i­day and other than learn­ing Java and mak­ing cook­ies for my hus­band to take to work not a lot to do.  I will do this again this year, you can get some great sets of eBay (a fru­gal heaven), I got 100 pieces of red and green card for about £5.00 and com­pared to how much it costs to buy Christ­mas cards this was a bara­gin.   I also used cut­ters of Christ­mas trees and snowflakes, and basicly stuck them on.

As gifts for my hus­bands work friends I made bis­cuits, short­bread in shape of rein­deers, icing was not amaz­ing as it was the first go I had at doing icing on a bis­cuit but my hus­bands work friends loved them and I made home made cards for him to use which saved us loads of money and they pref­ered it as it was a per­sonal touch.

With the Christ­mas tree, my mum always use to buy one every year and when I moved in with my hus­band he had a fake one, I did not like at first as I thought it would cheap but it does not look that bad and it has been through the wars since when the girls were kit­tens they use to think it was great fun to climb it!

There was a great show on last year called Home­made Christ­mas with Kirstie All­sopp it was a great show and I only man­aged to watch the epsiodes near the end of Decem­ber but I really want to give these all ago this year and maybe I will do one a week?

Most peo­ple try­ing to save money have already started buy­ing Christ­mas presents, I started about two/three weeks ago but last year I man­aged to get loads of bara­gins when I worked at a local health store and got loads of dis­count and bulked brought for the fol­low­ing year, I am going to miss that this year.  But I would like to make some home­made gifts for my friends I love pretty look­ing soap but I don’t know how mine would turn out but it is the thought that counts right?

I love this idea:

I am really excited about Christ­mas now, I’d bet­ter get a move on with gifts, I am glad the hus­bands presents are already brought, how do you save money at Christ­mas? And what gifts are you making?

I wanted to write about this the other week but did not get a chance due to many dif­fer­ent things going around, lucky for me they have now been solved (re-arranged dri­ving test to Decem­ber time and took my resit which I think I have failed).

Make-Up Prod­ucts

I per­son­ally would love to save money on my make up, why is it so expen­sive to buy decent prod­ucts and I try to the cheaper ver­sions but they do not seem to do the same thing, some of them.

Here are a few tips:

If you want to save money on lip­stick, I did read a great tip and that was to use a lip­stick brush (the very small make-up brushes) and use every lit­tle bit out of the pot but check to see it is still in date (lip­sticks nor­mally last about two years but I am not 100% sure on this).

My mum gave me a tip for remov­ing make-up when she had very lit­tle money (I had just been born), she use to use petro­leum jelly and a tis­sue to remove her water­proof eye make up and the rest of the make up base.

The one way I do save money and my beau­ti­cian friend does this as well is shop­ping on eBay, the amount of decent make up you can get of there for a small price. I love L’oreal cleans­ing, toner and eye make up remover and I man­aged to get a bar­gain of all three for £5.

A great way to try make-up, free sam­ples, most com­pa­nies you can do this and it is great just to use these when you have just run out of foundation.

You can always shop for make-up in the sales, I love the box­ing day sales and I love all the make-up palettes you can get, I also love it for next year Christ­mas shopping.

Only spend money on the impor­tant items, for exam­ple, I am ter­ri­ble with foun­da­tion since I have such sen­si­tive skin plus greasy T zone so I try to spend more money on foun­da­tion that will help with this at the moment I love the Lush foun­da­tion. But I do not need to use that much eye­shadow or blusher so I go for the cheaper versions.

What do you do to save money on make-up?

Hair Prod­ucts

I did come across an inter­est­ing arti­cle with about how to wash your hair with bak­ing soda by Mrs Money.

I do not know if I will give this ago but maybe one day when I run out of sham­poo one day. A few ways to save money on hair prod­ucts is to use less of it and con­di­tion every other day.

I did find a great recipe for mak­ing your own shampoo:

I really want to give this ago but the hus­band is not that keen on this idea, have you ever made your own sham­poo? I saw a recipe for con­di­tioner using may­on­naise with avo­cado, Mm I am really not sure on this one just the idea of putting may­on­naise on my hair, I love the stuff but I pre­fer to eat it. You can always try hot water and honey? I found a great web­site where you can make your own loads of dif­fer­ent items — Make Your Own

Since becom­ing more fru­gal and more green, very proud of myself last night and only put out one small bag of bin men rub­bish most of it was cat lit­ter (eco cat lit­ter though, smells like pine) and three bags of recy­cling, I could do more but I need to inves­ti­gate com­post bins and see if my gar­den is big enough for them.

Been some great posts on Frugal/Green blogs out there, here are my favourites:

Green Par­ent­ing

Since we have started try­ing for our own lit­tle bun­dle of joy makes me think what can I do to be a green par­ent, I had never heard this term until I started research­ing and it makes a lot of sense, most of it I had already heard about as it relates very closely to attached parenting.

Cloth wipes and nap­pies seem to be the way to go, I know some peo­ple seem to think this will be a chore to them and will be a big pain in the bum, but I think if you think about it log­i­cally okay you will have to do more wash­ing and you will have to touch what has been deposited but babies of cloth nap­pies do not seem to have nappy rash and it saves you so much, in the first year you can save £500 on nap­pies alone and £200 on reusable wipes, that is £700 which would be going in the bin!

I approached my hus­band about this before but before I could go into my nor­mal rant about how we should save the planet and money, he said that he had reusable nap­pies as a child and wanted to do it for his own and he knows it will be a lit­tle bit extra hard work but we only have one chance to get this right, or three chances (we would like three children).

I also believe that you do not need to buy loads and loads of expen­sive cloth­ing, my friend buys her child designer cloth­ing and I say to her she will grow out that in a month, what a waste of money you could be sav­ing for her future, I’ll be the one in char­ity shops and jum­ble sales, and if peo­ple want to buy us all this designer stuff I will sug­gest that they put the money towards our child’s future and we will put it in a uni­ver­sity sav­ings account.

I nearly for­got the most impor­tant one and that is breast­feed­ing, breast­feed for as long as you can, my friend said it was gross that I would breast­feed past one and I was said why is it gross? It is nat­ural!  I breast­feed till I was a year and half, and my mother breast­feed my two broth­ers for just as long (well maybe not the sec­ond one as he got bored at 6 months and decided he couldn’t be arsed to suck, but at the age of 20, he is still the same) and my step-mum breast­feed my sis­ters for a year.  I really do not under­stand why it is gross but hey every­one has their own view on it and I guess you do what makes you happy and what is best for your child at the end of the day.

Prepar­ing all your own food, saves you so much money and at least you know what your chil­dren are eat­ing who knows what is in those glass jars you can buy, even though my hus­band really wants the apple one not so our kid can eat it so he can eat it.  He is a very strange man.

I’ve been enjoy­ing the Green Par­ent­ing mag­a­zine, I have to read it on-line as I live in the UK, I found some­thing really inter­est­ing in it today which was using wooden toys:

At the end of the day, each to their own I would never look down on some­one rais­ing their child dif­fer­ently to me but this is just the way my hus­band and me are doing it.