Frugal families: Share your tips, monthly budgets and self sufficiency strategies here

[Yemelade]

Hi mumsnetters,

Just looking for inspiration really, and some lived experience/examples of living well (but frugally/self sufficiently) as a family/multi-person household. If you consider yourself fairly minimal in terms of your outgoings, please feel free to share your tips and how you've achieved this below!

Purpose of my post: We are hoping to move home and sell in the new year. With the cost of living crisis and in considering starting a family over the next couple years, it's become more important than ever to mitigate financial stressors and reduce our living expenses. We are in a fortunate position and we've worked really hard to "flip" our current home so we will hopefully have a decent chunk of equity to help renovate our next home. Not just to look nice, but we're really eager to support reduced/cheaper outgoings. E.g. we are keen to install solar panels and improve energy efficiency with insulation etc, and potentially explore a log burner. We are currently also maintaining a very small garden, but plan to invest in raised beds and a green house (maybe some chickens too) in our next home to support with fresh produce. DH has also recently started sea fishing, which again can mitigate or reduce grocery expenses.

Any other families striving towards self sufficiency? Any tips to share? What are your current outgoings and expenditure and how do you keep it minimal/offset high costs?

Thanks so much!

My partner and I have worked really hard to become more frugal (we still like to treat ourselves to things) but the main things we do are:

• shop around for cheapest utilities, gas etc
• find the cheapest (but most efficient) internet
• minimal subscriptions (we have amazon prime & amazon music) - we are fortunate enough to use my sister's Disney+ account on occasion but we don't have Netflix or sky or anything else, no food subscriptions or magazines etc.
• reduce clubs that kids are in - our daughter does trampolining and ballet and our son (SEN 3.5 year old) has swimming lessons and we go to soft play once a week with a membership (less than £10 a month) and this is plenty for each of them, it means we get time together as a family too.
• meal plan, snack plan, take food everywhere and take drinks everywhere - we eat at home 95% of the time, we like the odd take away or meal out, but we buy cheaper food (frozen/canned) it all tastes the same once its cooked. We buy 95% of store brand things as opposed to the big name brands and we eat near enough everything that we buy, we eat out leftovers and we eat some weird food combinations, but we're fed, happy and we don't feel like we miss out on anything because we don't.
• We put the heating on first thing in the morning at around 6:45 when one of us gets up with the toddler and it will stay on for an hour. If my partner or I are at home but the kids aren't we will use blankets/hot water bottles/hot drinks and meals and we stay perfectly warm. Unless it is FREEZING cold like it was last weekend when we had the heating on for an extra couple of hours in the day (we were out most of Saturday anyway), we find this is plenty for us. We also have the heating on from about 4:30-6 and then if it's particularly cold we will do an extra half an hour around 8.30-9 - both kids have plenty of blankets and a hot water bottle each that they can have whenever they need.
• We don't have the newest/most up to date stuff - my phone is now almost 4 years old and I have no intentions of updating it anytime soon, it still works and on SIM only its £20 a month, significantly lower than a contract, we have a refurbished MacBook that we've had for 4 years and have no intentions of upgrading until it is no longer compatible with the software upgrades, and we have an iMac that we bought for £200 on marketplace for my partner when he's working. My son has a second hand iPad (£25 on ebay) and my daughter has a kindle that she was very kindly bought for Xmas one year.
• We shop second hand sometimes - my daughter grows so quickly that to buy her new stuff when she's grown out of it would definitely become expensive. We buy new things like coats that we can keep going for a couple of years, but we don't always need new things, the charity shops are always good and so is Vinted - both my parents' xmas gifts this year are from Vinted. We've also got furniture second hand, we bought a lovely Welsh dresser (not a necessity but definitely helpful for storage) for £80, and we've only just upgraded our wardrobes that I had from the age of 9 (I'm 28 now).

We really try to not overspend or buy things we don't need until we really need to and sometimes we don't spend even if we need to when it comes to my partner and I. We are slowly redoing our house, and thankfully we have friends and family who won't accept much in return for the work they are doing, just the costs of the materials and a crate of beers which I appreciate is very fortunate for our bank accounts. We definitely live well below our means, our cars are 12 years old and 22 years old and we have no intentions of upgrading those yet, however when we do we may well splurge for our dream car because we can afford to. We are also planning a Disney holiday in the next 2-3 years, possibly a cruise, maybe Paris, but these things are only possible because we are careful and sensible with our money (it hasn't come naturally to me either, I've had to work hard to save money and introduce self-control of my money). Eventually we would like to move to a house with a bigger garden as currently we don't have enough space to grow anything, but I'd love to be able to one day and also have some chickens (and hopefully a couple of cows just because I love cows) Hopefully this helps someone out there with the frugality/keeping costs low side of this post