July Frugal thread, Just chatting and saving.

[Fluffycloudland77]

Everyone welcome.

I just got €150 for £112.49 at a Thomson travel agent this afternoon, before heading to the airport.

£3.10 DS bus fare to school.
£5.50 bus.
£7.15 train and metro to the airport, using our railcard.
£13.58 Burger King veggie meals for us at the airport.
£5.20 on 2 muffins from a coffee shop, as the ice cream machine was broken in Burger King I really wanted an ice cream sundae.
55p bottle of water.

£13 in Waitrose on Indian takeaway, wine, disinfectant and rubber gloves ( no they aren't connected!). Obvs got my 20% off the curry!

collie I read somewhere that mirrors can make a room a lot brighter but not sure if this is actually the case!

Girlie I've just been diagnosed with vit D deficiency and the doctor thinks it could be partially responsible for my joint problems. She's prescribed a supplement but I'm going to see if it's cheaper otc.
Spent slightly more than I'd hoped at theme park as I got all excited about liquid nitrogen ice cream for £4.50! Also bought 2 drinks and a cake (so not healthy or frugal) so spent about £12 in total. Pleased I took my own water and sandwich.

Wow I got DS shoes for £5!

The farm is near buckfastleigh, in the SW. We have had a wonderful day, lots of running around.
My only spend today, that could have been avoided was a dominos pizza and ben and Jerry ice cream.

I take vit d from superdrug, I take two so 25u a day. I do feel better for it.

North I'm so pleased your bill went down with the spinner and the bulbs. No one pays any attention to me at home really so I've stopped saying anything when people say their bills are really high.

I really think the less you spend on boring essential stuff the more you can spend on fun stuff or at least stay out of debt.

£2 on contact lens stuff.

£6 refunded from ebay, seller has lost the item I bought for a low price. Funny that

Roll on Friday.

I take 800iu a day when I remember

Fluffy the led lights...do you just swap all of your bulbs for led? Is it that simple? (Sorry for stupid questions )

I was at Pennywell Farm today as well Evilwater, we had a great day and I used tokens from the local paper to get DS in for free. I'm working tomorrow so it should be a NSD.

Blimey I didnt know you could take 800 a day.

Pretty much retro fit except for 12v lamps because they have a step down transformer and if it isnt modern enough it wont work ie it will be very dim.

I think usually it's G4 fittings that are 12v and everything else is 240v.

I cant discuss our 12v fitting with dh because 1) he refuses to change the transformer because it's a fucker to put it back on the ceiling and 2) because everytime I mention it he says 12v automatically runs at less power than 240v and I have to Google to prove I'm right.

I tried to get a relative to swap to them but they said "we don't use lighting" and it's really hard to know what to say to that.

My mum's the same with fluorescent.

Candlelight all the way from now on

Did your amazon france order arrive? I can have a bean to cup coffee machine at christmas, hopefully, and dh is teasing me it wont arrive.

Yep, £30 a month is not to be sniffed at. I shall tell dh "well, someone on mumsnet says..." about amazon france.

Not too bad today
£13.44 in co op
£1.99 on a kindle book from wish list reduced and £1.34 on dvd (Atonement) .. We caught a bit of it on the TV in the hotel on our last night on hols (in Greek with subtitles!) and it looked worth watching (Ive read the book) , so I got a 2nd copy on ebay .

also had a fairly frugal win on a 'treat' purchase I made ,. the skirt I bought in the the Toast sale arrived and was too big and then when i looked to see if they had a smaller one it had gone down another £20 (to £29) so ive sent the big one back and re-ordered it at the lower price!

Ive managed to put £480 in my savings account this month as I was paid for my election work and hadnt spent anything at all out of my July pay (except the usual utility DDs) from bank account for the three weeks we were away) and I also got a quidco payment of £9.87. ..

This only leaves me £250 in the bank for the rest of the month , but the petrol tank is full so and all bills paid so we should be fine..

Our gas & electricity is currently £85 a month (4 bed back to back end terrace). I leave DH to sort that as he works for the energy company!

Detached houses do cost more in energy as you don't have the insulation from attached houses but if it's brand new and super energy efficient then I'm sure it'll be cheap

oh yes back to saucepans (am a bit late to the party I realise) . I have stellar stainless steel ones (not non-stick). Got them cheap from a department store closing down have had them at least 15 years ..and they are still like new although used all the time.. the best purchase ever.. Anyway yes they are expensive.. but you can get good stainless steel pans from places like TKmaxx are very good for things like tis..
As for frying pans . I have found Moneta (an Italian brand i think) non stick frying pans really good and they also last years ..I have had 2 for some time now ( you also often get them in TKmaxx also )

I think with pans youjust have to bite the bullet and get the best you can afford..

Circulon frying pans are also really good..

Years ago when i was really skint single mum on a student grant . i bought some 1970s smoked glass saucepans in a car boot sale.. had them years .. everyone laughed at them but they were really great actually.. (if a little retro )

I would love to change electricity supplier but am paranoid about it being more trouble than it's worth.

We changed to Cooperative energy to get a better deal approx 18 months ago on monthly direct debit. Couldn't understand why they kept increasing DD until finally rang them and discovered they hadn't actually been taking any money . Turned out by that point we owed them £1500 but instead of them telling us there was a problem, their system just kept increasing the DD to try and compensate!

After many, many arguments with them where they tried to lay the blame squarely with us, we finally accepted a compromise and half the debt was written off. The DD had been set up properly by us, they just hadn't taken the money and me in my pre-credit crunch naivety hadn't bothered checking it was being taken out of bank.

Cannot bear thought of moving to another supplier (however cheap) and be treated with similar appallingly bad customer service

Seems like you can still buy those retro glass saucepans (they did frying pans too, I had one!) Theres loads on ebay and all seem to have a high resale value -70s chic perhaps ..

However I got mine for pennies at a car boot ( and gave them away to a charity shop a few years later - they were pretty indestructable !!)

I have the same trepidation about switching supplier Peppa - mind you I REALLY need to sort out our broadband. We're with Plusnet and that worked out great when we first got online in this house - we got a cheap deal, not unlimited or anything like that because we were only using the web for email and that kind of stuff. But the data usage has crept up and up due to streaming, and I think we must be getting excess data charges or something because the amount we pay is much more now. I have been a total ostrich about it and really need to actually phone them and ask to switch contract. Hate doing this sort of thing

We pay £122 a month electric only two up two down. Seems expensive compared to you guys

£60 for duel fuel in a three-bedroomed mid-terrace. This was just for two of us.