Saving Money

Every year in Australia, Lush holds Boxing Day Sales starting on the British holiday of Boxing Day. The last few years have seen 50% off Christmas and other leftover holiday stock. With 2017 offering in-store-only discounts, I expect future years to be the same. I got really lucky to visit a store in 2017. I was interstate on holiday and certainly not expecting to come across a Lush handmade cosmetics store. What is Lush Cosmetics? For those of you that lived under the same rock I did until about 2016,  Lush is a global cosmetics retailer. Lush is known for [...]

This is personal to me and how I save money. I'm not telling you that you should do all of these things too. But if you are looking to save some money, here are a few things I find helpful for my family. Reduce the meat in each serve It took me a long time to realise that any meal that requires mince probably doesn't need as much as the recipe says. And I have HelloFresh to thank for that. We had a recipe for nachos that only used 250g of beef mince, which turned out to be plenty. So [...]

We choose to feed our dog with premium food because we were given a small bag as a part of the adopt a pet program. I also did a little bit of research and noticed many people had mentioned that with cheaper dog food they need to feed their dogs larger portions to get the nutrients they need. With premium dog food the serving size is generally smaller because there is more nutrition in it. Here are a few things you can do to save money on dog food 1. Make your own I know that making my own pet [...]

There are a few things that I don’t spend money on. I just don’t find value in these things. A few are things of convenience. And most I feel I can do myself, or just plain do without. Things I don’t spend money on Hair cuts I know a lot of people may disagree with me on this one. But I don’t actually value the work that a hairdresser does. My mum always cut my hair. And my brother’s hair, my dad’s hair, my grandpa’s hair, my cousin's hair. You get the picture. I always had long hair so it [...]

We have been using the cash envelope system for one month now and it’s time to tally everything up to see how we did. Unfortunately, we used most of the money set aside. Which is actually ok, because it was set aside for a certain purpose. I am keeping track of how much is left at the end of each month, assuming we are going to continue with this method for a while. For me, I like the idea of trying to have more and more left over each month. Cash Envelope balances at the end of month one Groceries [...]

We were lucky enough to be able to get started with the cash envelope system as soon as we made the decision to try it. I had some personal savings that had no real purpose. And I was willing to sacrifice it to get us started. I’ve been tracking out spending since March using Google Drive’s budget spreadsheets. One for each month, then adding them to a yearly spreadsheet. The budget column isn’t really what has been budgeted though. It’s what I think is reasonable. Many of the amounts are actual because I know they are a fixed cost. But [...]