Can we have a 'best money saving tip' thread please?

[PlateSpinningAtAllTimes]

Myself and DH have decided that we really need to have a frugal couple of years to start properly saving some money. I think the MSE website is good but can be a little overwhelming- so much info! What are your best tips for curbing spending?

My tip: meal plan, cook in bulk, freeze individual portions. Lasagne and pasta bake seem to freeze well and are cheap to make.

This thread is brilliant I've took screen shots (cropped/edited)and created an album on my phone to remind me of some great tips.

Recently my heating and electric went up £30 combined so really feel I should be doing my best to minimise usage

Quite a good website called www.flubit.com/

They offer you any product on the web cheaper. Rarely fails to save me less than 10% on every product. Many others used it?

Sorry forgot the convert link thing - this will make it easier I think x

www.flubit.com/

Great idea tattle

Buy a weekend newspaper and make it last

Asda smart price squash, ham,orange juice, brown bread, nutella, biscuits are all fine, the smart price fabric softner is lovely. Love aldis aswell the tinned beans are much cheaper than heinz and just as nice.

Any spare change put in a tin that cant be opened without a tin opener, just opened mine and had £93! Enough for my daughters birthday present and tea party.

Some council run leisure centers run lots of free activities for children during holidays.

Remember children can have fun without spending loads of money

Always take packed lunch to work rather than buy lunch out, especially drinks!

Also ignore what others have, only buy it if you can afford it and actually need it x

Decide on a monthly budget and put the rest into savings at the beginning of the month. We also pay slightly more then necessary into our "house/bill/insurances" account meaning any accrual can pay for any extras (e.g a plumbers bill) without dipping into savings. It also means we can afford a small mortgage overpayment without affecting our savings.
If you have child care costs apply for childcare vouchers, makes a difference.
We bulk buy store cupboard essentials from suma. Saves money on coffee, tea, bread flour. Make your own bread.
Drive a car with a small diesel engine and good mpg. If you have 2 cars, do you need both?
Mobile phones - use giffgaff for cheap payg deals and earn money back.
Make your own cleaning products. We bulk buy vinegar and baking soda to do this. Google recipes online.
Get rid of tv/tv license and watch iplayer/4od. Netflix only 6.99 a month, cheaper than tv license or sky subscription. Invest in a projector and avoid costly trips to the cinema.
Babies in nappies - use cloth nappies, cloth wipes and wet bags. Avoid disposable everything. We use jay cloths to clean hands and faces after meals and stick them in washing machine when done.
Marmite and olive oil half the cost in lidls, also good for stocking up on tins. Buy seasonal fruit and veg and avoid packaging - you are paying for this too.

Try and do the weekly shop 1 day later each week if you can, so stretching to 8 days rather than 7

For xmas, we just buy for nieces and nephews, not adults.

At the end of the day, we buy what we want during the year anyway by saving up, so not missing out tbh.

Love this thread!! I have just gone on maternity leave awaiting arrival of DS2 and me and DH are considering whether we can maybe cope on just his salary and I will be SAHM with our two boys for a few years until they are both at school. We don't have any savings but we are in the middle of making some changes to try and make our money go further and this thread has had some brilliant ideas!!!

I will read whole thread, but just one point. You need a TV licence to watch iPlayer. It's pretty risky to try to go without IMO.

go to the supermarket with cash only. add up as you go round. surprising how much you save when you do not have a debit/credit card.

A little thing, and I'm sure everyone knows this, but never buy bananas in bags if there is a loose alternative. You'll pay twice as much for the privilege of the bag.

If you're paying a lot out on debt repayments, get in touch with a good debt advice charity like Stepchange. They can help bring your repayments down, get your interest frozen or let you know if it's worth looking at ways to write it off like DROs or bankruptcy. Have saved £500 a month which was previously going on repayments, now I don't have to repay any of it at all.

gaelicsheep I watch iPlayer, but only on catch up and not live TV. Have contacted TV licensing about this and they confirmed I don't need a license for that.

Oh OK, fair enough. It' just something I'd be nervous about having genuinely not had a TV and having to jump through so many hoops to prove it!

keys she is right, she doesn't. As long as you don't watch live TV you don't need a licence.

This thread has some amazing tips that we are going to be using a lot in future! Here's a few of the ones we are already doing:

1. Grocery delivery - It doesn't sound like a money saver since you have to pay for deliveries but it's very handy if you don't live too near one of the big supermarkets. It saves you the cost of petrol getting there, you have more chance of remembering to use your vouchers online / not forgetting your plastic bags and you can sit down with the laptop and your meal planner for the week and also go through whatever is on special offer and see if there's anything you would actually use or compare prices on different types of cereal, kidney beans, milk etc. to get the best value for money. It also stops impulse buys and stops you having to bring kids to a supermarket crammed with comics, toys, junk food, fizzy drinks etc. I was in yesterday just to pick up some nappies and milk and watched a woman with two screaming toddlers in the trolley and another younger one under her feet get goaded into buying lollies and Pizza Express pizzas and a whole load of stuff she probably didn't need or want, and look extremely harried the whole time. Online delivery = lifesaver for anyone trying to run a tight grocery budget.

2. Ratesetter or Credit Union - If you have credit card / store card / car loan debt you will get much better interest rate on a loan from either Ratesetter or your local credit union if you happen to have one. Consolidate debt into one, more affordable loan and then cut up cards so you have no temptation to keep spending.

3. Hostels! - You still want to take a holiday but the obvious budget option of camping is only really a cheap option if you already have all the gear you need, sleeping bags, big tent, gas stove, deck chairs, battery lanterns etc. So you need to buy or borrow all this stuff and then also have somewhere to store it and then hope and pray the weather plays ball and you don't end up sitting under a canvas sheet in driving rain for a week. But a very affordable option is hostels - the Youth Hostel Association ones are all usually very family friendly, have great kitchen / bathroom / living room facilities, loads have family rooms with en-suite bathrooms and TVs, some can provide you with stuff like travel cots and high chairs if you need them, they can arrange bike hire and walking maps and they are usually near beaches or lakes. Very wholesome type of family holiday with lots of fresh air and open space, much less faff than camping, and often much less expensive than self catering cottages or B&Bs which don't give you the option of self-catering. Plus you can also get membership cards which give you a good discount on any Hostel International Hostel across UK / Europe / world etc. Def worth checking out if you are thinking of a summer holiday for next year.

Also, to re-iterate what others have said further up the thread - think about a smaller house in a more central location to save on a whole lot of bills!!

Me and DH bought a 2.5 bed terrace much nearer centre of town in 2008. It's in some (tho not loads) of negative equity but a lot of people were advising us to sell it at a small loss, scrape together a deposit and buy out in the suburbs because prices have come down so low. We went the half way option of renting out our place, which brings in a decent amount of rent because of its location, and renting somewhere bigger in a quiet cul de sac 15 minutes drive further out. It has been a v worthwhile experiment! Our heating & electric bills have gone way up with a bigger house to heat, not helped by all the snow this year, and we really need 2 cars out here so we end up spending way more on petrol, car insurance, road tax etc. So glad we didn't sell up and buy out here since we have now decided to move back to the terrace after xmas when our tenants' lease runs out - we might as well put the money we will save into our mortgage or doing some renovation / improvement / extension work to the house we own and see it as being an investment, and the location it is in means we can walk to everything - schools, park, library, small supermarket, free museum, cycle paths, free local baby groups etc.

Little how do you find good price on youth hostels? Whenever I have looked the family rooms for four seem really expensive. Would love some tips! Especially for youth hosteling abroad?

Little totally agree about moving centrally, we bought a terraced 2 bed cottage in February in a beautiful part of our city. We're saving so much on bills and parking and petrol and as we have downsized from renting large three bed to buying small two bed, our mortgage is now smaller then what our rent was previously

minimalist - it doesn't hurt with hostels that my husband is in that line of work , but i've been hostelling on and off for years with friends round Europe / USA too so i've picked up some skills at getting good prices for rooms!

Often the hostels, particularly Hostelling International / Youth Hostel Association will give prices per night on their websites but if you phone them or email directly and ask for a price per week instead of per night you'll often get a very good discount. Hostel membership cards can also save you an additional 10% on top of that. If you are flexible about the room offered as well that helps, so if there are 4 of you and you want a room to yourself they might give you a small dorm room to yourself instead of an en-suite family room so you'll have privacy at night but maybe have to share a bathroom, which is only really an issue during peak season when hostels can get very full. June / July / Aug are the peak months in UK / Ireland (and most of Europe) but if you are prepared to go in May or September, or around Easter to fit in with school holidays, again that can be a good time to get a discount and still (usually!) get ok weather.

Loved your mention of Tiny House Living btw, never heard of that before! Made me feel much better about our 1920s terraced house, it seems massive compared to some of these places and we have room to do a bit of extending work if we want to and can save up enough as well (i'd love a loft conversion with an en-suite and roof terrace)

Little thanks for the tips ! I think I will look into this so thank you.
I love reading about tiny house living, I find it fascinating

this is a brilliant thread!

a lot of these things I do already and any tips I can think of have been mentioned.

I am using asda essentials bath foam as hand soap and shower gel and I keep one old empty bottle so when I buy a new one I split it in two, top up with water in both and add a few drops of essential oil and give them both a good shake then I top up my liquid soap dispensers when needed. I have been leaving the bottle buy the bath but realised this leads to the dcs just helping themselves to a good old glug of it to make more bubbles so I have to hide it in the cupboard now which is a faff when i'm already in the shower and realise I haven't any to wash myself with- also I had been meaning to decant it into another liquid disepenser as too much comes out of the bottle, however after reading this thread I remembered I have two bars of palmolive soap under the kitchen sink from making laundry gloop so Ive opened one of those to use as soap for washing in the shower now instead. I would use the other for hand washing but the dcs get so grubby and would leave big grubby puddles in the soap holder and I cant stand that so will stick with liquid soap for hands.

i am really not a big consumer at all- i don't buy clothes, music, alcohol, cigarettes, magazines, newspapers etc. if the dcs need clothes i go to the charity shop and see what i can find, same with shoes and coats.

however i have realised i am a bit of a hoarder and have had a massive clothes clearout to sell what we no longer wear and will be car booting this weekend and ebaying on the next free listing weekend (does anyone know when that is?)

i am a real junk food eater so i have really cut back on that and this week i actually haven't done any grocery shopping apart from milk and butter as i worked out a meal plan based on what i had in already. the cupboards/freezer will be bare by Monday but it feels good to not have spent £30/£35 in asda on stuff we don't need.

I've also gone back to my homemade cleaning products after having spent a few months using commercial stuff- it's so expensive and vinegar works better than a lot of them.

towels- we have all gone from using one each every day plus one for my hair a day and at least 1 bath mat a day! (35 towels a week!) to using 1 each for the week and drying them out after use on the radiator airer reducing the towel wash down to four items a week.

one thing i have tried and just cannot seem to make work is reducing the wash temperature down to 30 or even 40. i find stuff comes out still with marks and the whites are horrible after a 40 wash- so much so that i have to rewash them at 60. how do other people get good results from low temps without having to buy expensive powders and stain removers/whiteners?

also- my car is a massive expense and i need to sell it. it costs £260 a year to tax, £20 in petrol is only getting me 100 miles (someone math savvy can work out what that is to the gallon) it's 10 years old and things seem to have started going wrong with it costing more money. i think i would only get about £1000 max for it when sold, but i cant rid of the car completely as i work out in the countryside at different locations and not set hours so it is essential to get there and back as no public transport at all. i am also registering as a CMer and will definitely need one for that- i have held off on selling the car until i am registered but that is getting closer now and the thing seems to have started falling apart on me so i think it's time but i have no clue what car would be best to get for CMing that will be cheaper to tax, insure and run. does anyone have any experience of cars and what would be good to look at?

We have a Nissan Note and my DH puts in £35 a week for petrol, 52 miles each day five days a week plus popping out in town at weekend (to swimming etc, maybe even a trip to and from MIL which is about twenty mins away) I'd say that is a CHEAP car to run! We're very pleased.

minimalist that is very cheap! what is the tax on it?