Every week I share five frugal things that I’ve done during that week just to show you that the small things you do all add up to a great frugal lifestyle where you can learn to live a fabulously frugal life.

Before I start though, I do want to say that being frugal to me is about getting the best value for our money – it’s not about doing without for us or about not having nice things.  We all have different financial situations and we’re all frugal for different reasons – we’re frugal so we can afford to do nice things together.

1) We’re going for a bit of a homemade Christmas theme this year so when I saw a pack of five oranges reduced to 30p in Morissons earlier this week I bought them and dried some slices of orange in the oven ready to decorate our Christmas garland like we did last year.

This is last year’s garland attempt – I still need to tempt Mr Frugal up into the loft to bring the garland and fairy lights down so I can put this year’s together.

2) Despite saying we were going to leave it until the kids break up from school to put our tree up…

I know I said we were going to leave it until much later this year but we decided to just go for it.  Our tree isn’t a huge tree and it’s certainly not perfect and symmetrical but we do love it and once Christmas is done, we can plant it in the garden and hopefully nurture it so we can bring it back in again next year.  I’ve been reading up about it and it’s not an easy task to move a tree from a warm house to a cold garden but I’m going to give it a good go.

I did all the grown-up stuff when inspecting the tree and made sure it had a good, healthy-looking root ball and that all the branches were healthy and strong.  Apparently, this means that as long as we keep it watered then we have a better chance of keeping it alive when we move it outside although we were told that keeping in a container would be better than trying to plant it in the ground.

Also, the tree isn’t exactly as I want it yet but it’s a good start.

3) I’ve swapped cars with Mr Frugal which makes me a little bit sad but his uses less petrol and is older so it makes sense for me to have that one with my new longer commute to work.    There’s no point me spending more money than I need to and putting extra mileage on our nice car and it’s too much of a faff to swap about all the time so we’ve just done a swap.

I wish we didn’t need two cars but there’s just no way we could manage with one right now – at least this swap means we’re spending less than we would have done if I’d kept the bigger (nicer) car.

4) Remember my homemade white clay Christmas decorations from last year?

They look amazing on my tree again this year and definitely fit with my homemade Christmas theme this year.  I’m planning to make a Christmas wreath this weekend which fits with our slightly less sparkly than usual Christmas decor.

I have plans for a few more homemade decorations but as with everything this Christmas, I’m in no rush to get it all done.  A slow Christmas with no stress or drama is exactly what we need.

5) I printed out this year’s 2019 free Financial Planner and have it in a folder ready for the week between Christmas and New Year when I’ll spend some time going through it.  I’ve shared this planner on here for the last few years for you all to download for free but it originally started as a way for me to track my own finances as it really motivates me when I plan ahead and get everything down on paper.

More often than not, I go to print this out and by the time I’ve set the printer up, printed it out and put it in the folder, I’m less enthusiastic about filling it in so I end up putting it away and getting it back out again another time.  This year though, I had a spare half an hour so I got it all ready for when I’m in the mood to fill it in.

As usual, we’ve been having some really good discussions this week over in our Live Well, Spend Less Facebook group.  We’d love to welcome you to our little community if you fancy popping in.

Come over and join us!

As always, we’d love you to join in with us by sharing your five Frugal Things from your week – whether it’s an Instagram picture (#5frugalthings), a blog post or even a video.  Just add your link to the linky at the bottom of this post.

You don’t have to share five things you’ve done, anything thrifty or frugal that you’ve been doing is perfect.

You’re more than welcome to copy and paste the badge above but it would be even better if you could let your readers know that you’re linking up with the five frugal things linky by adding a little line to the bottom of your post like this one:

I’m linking up with this Cass, Emma and Becky in this week’s ‘Five Frugal things I’ve done this week’ linky.

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The post Five Frugal Things we did this week {7 December 2018}…. appeared first on The Diary of a Frugal Family.