Frugal Friday – #3

Quick one this week as it’s Christmas Day!

I’m talking today about a saving I’ve made in my health life, with a voucher code it works out at an even better deal 💷

One of my friends at Bannatynes is an instructor and personal trainer (PT) and we had been talking on and off for ages about nutrition. It’s taken me a while, but I recently bought a customised meal plan from him which is working really well.

Before Tom created this plan for me, I gave him a few ideas of things I like so that he could try and integrate them. Amongst those is Grenade Carb Killa protein bar.

Carb Killas come in some great flavours including Jaffa Quake, Dark Chocolate and Raspberry but my absolute fav is Chocolate Chip Salted Caramel.

Proper decent flavour!

As much as I love these bars, they are like £2.50 each and my food bill would be huge if I were to buy these from Sainsburys or similar.

They are available on subscription from Amazon and work out around £1.50 each. However, I have found similar bars at MyProtein where there are called Carb Crushers.

A box of 12 bars using the current coupon code at the time of writing brings the cost down by £5.72 to £13.34. This then works out at a pretty decent £1.12/bar.

Another good thing about buying from MyProtein is that you can collect points to use as money off in the future, and they pretty much always have offers on such as a discount or spend X and get a free t-shirt.

If you don’t have an account with MyProtein then use my link (aff. link*) and create yourself an account. If you spend over £35 then you’ll be given free delivery for three months plus I’ll get a little thank you credited to my account 😁

Also, if you go to TopCashBack and create an account (aff. link*), not only will you get a £5 bonus but you can then search for MyProtein, you can get up to 12% cashback.

* This is an affiliate/sign-up link, please see my Affiliate Disclaimer.

Frugal Fridays – #2

If you listen to the ChooseFI podcast then the likelihood is that you’ve heard Brad and Jonathan talking about saving money on your mobile phone bill. The provider that they have been recommending is Mint Mobile, if you’re UK-based then Mint aren’t an option. I’ll share here how I’ve made a decent saving on our family mobile bill.

Can you save on your mobile bill?

We have been using Three as our mobile provider for four 12-month SIM-only contracts; two at £8.22/month and the other two at £9/month, all with 8GB data, unlimited texts and minutes. This wasn’t too bad a deal as it gave a saving over our Virgin Mobile deals plus £175 cashback altogether via Quidco*.

For that twelve-month period, the cost per SIM worked out at £4.96 average which is decent but if we’d stuck with Three, the average cost would rise. Plus the kids were complaining of lack of coverage now and again which is pretty much end-of-world when you’re a teenager!

After some looking around, I opted for Lebara. These guys piggyback on the Vodafone network which apparently provides decent 4G coverage for our area.

I signed up for the first deal via Topcashback* which will earn me £5 cashback and, using Honey*, I also got a voucher code which saved £2.50 on sign-up. If you haven’t used Honey, it is a browser extension that checks websites for valid coupons/vouchers to save you money.

The contract is £5/month on a rolling monthly deal, this provides 2GB, 1000 minutes, and a 1000 texts. This will be fine as I’m connected to wifi the majority of the time and I don’t make many calls. As a Lebara* customer I can make referrals which is handy as I can then earn £10 for each of the other three SIMs I sort out for the rest of the family.

If you take a look and decide that Lebara might be good you too, then if you sign-up via my link* then you get double data for the first month and I get a referral bonus.

Searching out a new deal rather than just sticking with our previous provider has resulted in a monthly saving of £14.44 and a cashback bonus/saving of £37.50. Decent 🙂

* affiliate link(s), see affiliate disclaimer

Frugal Fridays – #1

So the idea is that I post something about frugality each Friday, I expect the posts will be pretty short in comparison to my pretty wordy monthly updates!

This first post is for something super-exciting – hand wash 😀

We use the handpump washes at home, these come in a 250ml plastic container when bought individually. The standard Carex antibacterial ones cost £1 (40p/100ml) each and the Sainsburys “The Collection” equivalent is 85p (34p/100ml) for a 250ml item.

Sainsbury’s currently have for sale a Carex 500ml original refill pouch at £1.50 (30p/100ml) which will save you 50p over the price of two individual items. The saving is smaller if purchasing The Collection variant.

Exciting photo of handwash…

When I last bought a refill pouch I was able to pick up a 1000ml version for £2.85 which works out to 28p/100ml.

With using these refill pouches you can save not only money, albeit a small amount, but you also save on waste packaging. Each pouch can be recycled so rather than chucking away the container and pump each time the handwash runs out, considering refilling it – you’ll be saving money and more importantly helping to save the environment.

Thanks for reading – I can’t guarentee the next Frugal Fridays post will be any more riveting but I don’t think anyone said saving money would be mind-blowingly exciting! 😉

If you have any frugal tips then please share them in the comments section below.