For various reasons we need to reduce our monthly outgoings and start to live a more frugal lifestyle. Now don’t get me wrong, we are not particularly well off, we rarely have holidays, nights out or expensive treats. However, we don’t try to economise, we can buy day to day things without questioning the purchase and we buy what we want from the supermarket, rather than what we actually need. We do not have any savings and live to our limit each month.
We need to drastically reduce our outgoings and so I am blogging about our journey to document our quest to live a more frugal lifestyle and hopefully I will get some tips from others in a similar position too.
Our top things to investigate so far are;
- Cancel our Sky TV or reduce our package. This is astronomical and often there is nothing we want to watch!.
- Change our Phone/Broadband packages.
- Cancel all subscriptions, Love Film and Which cancelled (saving £20 per month).
- Investigate changing our electricity prepayment meter.
- Find cheaper contact lenses (currently pay monthly).
- Food shopping – We currently shop at Tesco and do throw away food. We don’t plan our meals, so we often find things are out of date and then they get chucked out. So our challenge is to find cheaper places to buy food, to plan our meals to reduce waste and so we aren’t tempted to order takeaway when we haven’t cooked and it’s getting late.
- Sell all unwanted/outgrown items on ebay. We have a fair bit of Baby’s stuff that we could get rid of and lots of handbags! (the sacrifice!).
- No unnecessary spending. Now this will take effort from me, but I have no choice. If I am honest I buy Baby clothes because it makes me happy, but we can no longer afford to do this. So all clothes will be 100% necessary and be either in the sale or from Ebay.
There are a few areas that I can’t see a way to economise on, but would welcome tips from others who are doing the frugal thing. Dog insurance and Car insurance (compared the market on both of these recently), car tax, rent, council tax and credit card repayments. Oh also we have coal fired central heating and the coal is quite an expense at about £32 per week. However, we can’t go without as the house would be too cold for Baby (at almost 7 months). We live in the middle of nowhere so I can’t do without a car, I cannot walk to a shop and so can’t cut costs on the car.
So this is the first step of our more frugal lifestyle. I think it will be a journey with many ups and downs, but I am quite looking forward to seeing where we can cut back and will see it as a challenge to try and save as much as possible.