How to be frugal

Today I am very excited to have a fantastic lady guest posting on my blog. She is one of the ladies that always inspires me through the way she lives her life and of course the advice she is giving the world through her blogs. So today I present you Cass Bailey:

I’m Cass and you can usually find me over at The Diary of a Frugal Family or at Meal Planning Made Easy but today, the lovely Otilia has invited me to take over her lovely blog.

Otilia asked me to share with you some of my top tips on how to be more frugal at home to save your family some money so here you go, my top tips….

First of all, I can’t stress enough how much money you can save just by planning your meals in advance.  Every week, I go through my fridge, freezer and cupboards and I base my meal plan for the following week on what we have in already.  I write a list and stick to it as much as possible and although there are often last minute changes, on the whole it works really well for us.  We’ve cut out the majority of midweek ‘top up’ shops and our shopping bill has reduced massively.

The next thing I would do would be to sit down with your bank statement and make sure that there are no Direct Debits or regular charges for things you no longer need.  If there are, cancel them straight away!  You can use your bank statement to work out your monthly budget which is the first step to saving money – you need to know how much money you spend on things and how much money you should have left over at the end of the month before you can improve your budget.

Now you know where your money is going, you can start to work out where you can make savings.  I start with my utilities and made sure I was on the best deals available to me for each one.  I use cashback websites like topcashback and Quidco whenever I change suppliers so I earn extra cash as well as saving money on my payments.

I do the whole bank statement / monthly budget review every 3-6 months to make sure that my budget is as up to date as possible.

If you don’t actually have the amount of money left in your bank at the end of the month that your budget says you should have then I would recommend keeping a spending diary for a month.  In fact, this is a good exercise to do anyway as it focuses you on what you are buying in more detail.

There is so much more you can do, but the things I’ve mentioned above are a good starting point.

Thanks for reading and thanks for having me Otilia.

Cass

And thank you Cass for your wonderful advice! Starting this month I also have a diary so hopefully this will make me more aware on my spendings.