Calculating the cost of saving

This week I have been giving some thought to how much it can cost you to save money. For instance I have a set radius that I am prepared to drive to a jumble sale, around 10 miles, as otherwise it is beginning to cost me a significant amount in petrol. Similarly I won't take the car out unless I can do more than 1 errand on the way.

This feel I was planning to go to Lidl to do my grocery shopping as the savings are so great and the saving on chocolate would have paid for the petrol. However, I was tired, it was Friday night and I decided that my time was also worth something. So, I went to the closest store and spent the same as if I had gone to Lidl but without the peril cost. Your time is also worth something, especially if you could be doing something else with it to help build a healthy lifestyle. I spent the extra time saying 'hi' to Miss Shoestring who is just back from USA. Well worth it !

Save on Children's Party Presents

I've written before about keeping a present cupboard but mostly I just stock it with presents that I know I will need, for example for birthdays and christmas in the family. However, Master Shoestring still sometimes comes home with an unexpected party invitation, as he did last week and then I need to have  a few other strategies up my sleeve as teenagers are often not keen on the sorts of generic presents I might have in stock.

For circumstances like this, where you might need to buy something a bot more personal I have found it useful to hold onto any gift cards we are given and then use these to purchase a present. That is what we did for Master Shoestring's party invitation. He needed two presents, one for a girl and one for a boy and he was able to choose something nice and pay for it with a gift card that he had been given for his birthday but did not want to use as the store had nothing he wanted. Everybody was pleased, no-one spent any money and the recipients still got nice gifts !

I always keep birthday cards, ribbon and paper in stock so Master Shoestring did not have to spend anything for a night's entertainment !

Saving on Printer Cartidges

Over the years we have spent quite a bit of money on printer cartridges. One, rather annoying printer, would refuse to print unless it had a manufacturers cartridge installed. The only way to save money with that printer was to set the print size to very small and not very dark. Also to look to see who had special offers on those particular cartridges and then stock up. However, we were caught out one day when the printer died and we had to put the rest of the stockpiled cartridges on Freecycle !

Now we have a printer that will accept cheaper cartridges and these cost about half the price of the other ones. We also have a place in town which will refill your cartridges for you and you can buy kits to do this yourself. We have done both of these things but could never get the cartridges to work in the printer afterwards. Perhaps it is time to try again, now we have a less fussy printer ?

Buy Toiletries Online

I cannot recall the last time I was in Boots the Chemist as I almost always buy the things they sell more cheaply online now. A case in point would be disclosing tablets which I use to cut down on expensive visits to the dental hygienist ! A little pack of 20 in Boots is over £4, online I can get double the quantity for the same price with free postage. It is the same with the eye drops I sue and several other things. I even order glasses online now that I have a little device for measuring pupillary distance accurately so the glasses will fit !

Prices are not always cheaper online, especially if you get a quick sale, such as those on Black Friday, bit it is certainly worth shopping around to find out who has the best price for things you regularly buy !

Jumble Sale Haul

I went to one sale this week and did really well. Ten books for the long commute at £2 for the whole lot and fill a bag for £1 clothing. I was not able to fill the bag but in went 2 very expensive looking wrap dresses, a pair of Canadian mittens, a linen skirt and jacket and a really thick navy blue corduroy skirt. I have just got rid of a linen skirt and jacket after spilling watercolour paint on them, so was very pleased with this find. However, it was the wrap dresses which were the real bargain !  I looked them up when I got home and the full price is £89 ! All the other items fitted and looked really nice too so a great haul!

Chocolate covered Strabwrries

A friend asked me to make some of these for a teenage party after she discovered that her fridge was so full of food to feed the hordes that she could not fit anything else in !

They are easy to do and doing them myself means that I could be sure that the chocolate used was one that Master Shoestring could have.

All you have to do is melt the chocolate of your choice and then swirl the strawberries in. I did buy other fruit but there were enough strawberries in the value packs that I bought to feed 30 teenagers so I shall just use the other fruit for something else. The whole platter also only used a single 100g bar of chocolate so that was pretty economical too. A bit more expensive was finding strawberries at this time of year. At first I was planning to use raspberries and kiwi but then found 400g strawberries for £1.09, which was a greater weight for a smaller price so just went with those in the end.

The strawberries were a hit and the whole platter cost less than £5 to make so I was well pleased !

Making your own Shortbread

I had planned to make a few rounds of shortbread for some Christmas gifts this year and have been saving pretty tins to package them up in. However, in Lidl this week they had really pretty tins of shortbread biscuits with lovely watercolour pictures of Paris on them so I picked up a few of them. Each tin only cost £1.99 and thinking about how busy I am up until the holidays made me very tempted to buy them. They nearly went into the trolley at a cost of just under £8 which I had not budgeted for.Then I reminded myself about how good homemade shortbread tastes, that I already had pretty tins at home and that I could make shortbread at home for far less and make lots of it !

When I got home I costed my recipe.

4oz butter = 42.5p (85p unsalted butter at Lidl)

2oz caster sugar = 2.5p (45p sugar from Lidl, ground finer at home)

6oz plain flour = 5.4p ( 45p plain flour at Lidl)

Grand total for ingredients is just over 50p ! Even allowing for a bit of power to grind the sugar finer or cooking in the oven the cost is going to be far less and the result much nicer. I just have to find the time at the weekend to do it. If I'm really pushed I could also do it one day during half term and pop all the biscuits in the freezer until I need them.

I was so glad that I had put the tins back !