The Best Frugal Living Tips

If you commit to a frugal life, you will be making some amends on your habits making the most of everything you already have, and thinking if you really need to spend money on new things.

From our experience, after a while, you will need less and less and by focusing on what you have and not what you don’t, you will find happiness.

In better words, living frugally means being responsible and thoughtful managing your resources and using your creativity to adjust just a few things about your life. Frugal living doesn’t mean living a life of deprivation, it means adjusting your habits with an objective, a responsible and happy life.

By reducing the number of things you buy, you will not only be saving money but also, helping the environment reducing the amount of waste, and resources used to create new things. This doesn’t mean you are not allowed to buy things, just reconsider if you really need them.

Our tip is, are you have to buy something, make sure it’s something you can reuse more times. Avoid using one single-use staff as it is a waste of money and you will be generating more waste.

One small example of this is the reusable cotton makeup pads, which are better than the disposable ones as you can use them as many times as you want without spending money on new ones. For men is the same, instead of using disposable razors, using this one, saves lots of money, and reduces the waste. Win-win.

These are only two examples but think about all the single-use items you have in your daily life. If you substitute them for reusable ones, you will save a good amount of money reducing a good amount of waste.

This is a fantastic way of organizing your weekly grocery shopping and to help you save money.
If you plan your weekly menu, you will be able to buy all the ingredients you need so they will not go to waste, and also, is great to reuse the leftovers.
By doing this, we save a considerable amount of om money, helping us organizing the weekly grocery shop and the menu. This also allows us to do “batch cooking” so that we only cook once a week and then we can invest that time during the week for something else.

We don’t consider ourselves vegetarian, at least for now, but we have reduced considerably the amount of meat in our meals. With this, we have not only realized that we have saved quite a lot o money but also, we feel better.

When we don’t eat meat more than once or twice a month we have more energy, our digestions are smooth and we feel great.
Also, thanks to that we have discovered a whole new world of vegetarian dishes and new recipes that we would not have discovered otherwise.

This is one of the easiest and yet powerful tips. We started to cook more and going out less for dinners and drinks, we learned how to cook better and we enjoyed it so much! Also, we started to eat healthier meals which is always a match point.

Important to mention, we still had nights out and dinner out but not so often.

In our case, average expenses per weekend were around 80$, so imagine spending $80 x 52 weekends a year = $4,160

We saved $4,160 per year!

Cook your own meals to take them to work. For us, this was a massive saving that we had never thought of before. An average lunch in London costs $6 (what you would normally eat on your lunch break at work). So that is $6 a day x 5 times a week = $30 a week. $30 a week x 52 weeks a year= $1,560 a year. That is a saving of $1,560 a year!

Also, if you take your own lunch to work you will probably eat healthier than doing otherwise.

Tip: If you are taking your lunch to work, we recommend you to use these eco-friendly bamboo cutlery set and this lunchbox. By using these eco-friendly products you will also save money as they are reusable and long-lasting!

It’s time to open your wardrobes, look under your bed, and get out those dusty boxes full of things. Get all the unnecessary things that you are not using anymore and sell them. Here are some good websites to sell things online that we used: Amazon, eBay, Gumtree.

The rule for this is, anything you haven’t used or thought about in a year, it is very unlikely that you will use it again. By selling things you don’t need anymore you will be contributing to not only making lots of room in your house but also, giving those things an opportunity to be reused by people who need them.

Think about clothes, books you’ve read, old gadgets… it can be anything! One of the best frugal living tips to declutter your house and make extra cash.

We all love to subscribe to the new catchy offers, that’s true. And then, we end up being subscribed to things we don’t really need. For example that monthly mysterious box subscription? You don’t even need that.
Go through your emails and cancel all the subscriptions you don’t need for your daily life or the ones you are paying monthly fearing you will ever need them in the future because it is very unlikely.
Our tip is once you are going through all the subscriptions, cancel the ones you receive by post so you will be saving lots of paper going to waste too.

One of the best tips for frugal living is to stop consuming what you don’t need. By this, I promise you, you will be happier with less.

Living a frugal life is not about deprivation, but about being conscious and responsible for our actions. Of course, if you need to buy something you are not banned to do so, or you don’t have to feel guilty. Just, think if you really need to spend money on that thing or if you can borrow it from someone. Sometimes we can even use something that we already have to substitute things.

The benefits of being responsible for shopping are quite a few:

1. Saving money
2. Contributing to help the environment
3. Having more space in your house
4. Valuing what you have
5. Being happier

By buying single-use stuff you will be generating lots of waste which is bad for the environment as you throw your money in the bin. That could be avoided if you buy products that you can use several times.

These products are normally eco-friendly, plastic-free and in the long run, you will save lots of money while you help the environment.

Think about the products you use for personal use that you dispose of after each use, or kitchenware, plastic containers, cutlery, napkins…

Here you can find some eco-friendly products that will make your life easier as you save money.

Babysitting, bar tendering on the weekends, dog walking… There are plenty of options that will help you with saving money. You can do this by looking into local newspapers or registering to websites like Upwork for some freelance work.

You can always make of your hobby a way of increasing your income, for instance; If you like photography like us, you can try some of the hundreds of stock photography websites and upload your best pictures to try to earn some extra cash as you sell them.

There are even websites that pay you a really small fee just to watch advertisements. I find this article from Josh Pakota really interesting about 21 Easy Ways to Get Paid to Watch Videos (and TV)

As we said, frugal living is not about deprivation but about living a more sustainable life to be happier and save more money.

If you like traveling, you don’t have to stop doing it. There are lots of ways to save money when traveling.

If you would like to save money when traveling you can do pet sittings in lots of destinations. We do that a lot, through trustedhousesitters.com where you create your profile and then you choose where in the world, you would like to pet sit. That means staying at someone’s house looking after their house and their pet. This has allowed us to visit lots of places without spending money on accommodation.

If you prefer to try something different, you can also do volunteer work. This is another interesting way of traveling without spending the bare minimum. By doing volunteer work you can work doing anything in exchange for free accommodation and sometimes it also includes free meals.

We have done many volunteer work in hostels, where we were able to visit different destinations, do a lot of activities, and meet lots of people.

Sometimes this is not possible and you have to use transport which is okay. But sometimes, we impulsively use transport without realizing that we can actually take a walk. One of the best frugal living tips to save in transport is to walk whenever it is possible.

If we reduce the use of transport to walk more, the benefits are worth it. By walking more you can:

1. Have a healthier life
2. Improve your body shape
3. Save money
4. Get to know the places better
5. Happier life

One of the biggest investments in our lives takes place in our house. We spend lots of money yearly in the house, paying bills, buying appliances, repairs… etc

If we organize our house more frugally, that can help us save a lot of money, living a more sustainable life. Let’s see the best frugal living tips to organize your house:

1. Try to wash with cold water whenever you can and only wash your clothes when they are dirty.
2. Reuse food containers. Sometimes we throw away these amazing containers and we end up buying more instead of reusing it.
3. Turn the lights off when you are not in the room. This applies to airconditioning, heater, Tv… etc.
4. Only turn on the dishwasher when it is fully loaded.
5. If something is broken, try to repair it instead of buying a new one impulsively.
6. Cut the bottles of body cream, shampoo, toothpaste, and any other product that comes in a bottle and you will find out that there is still more product left that you can use.
7. Dry your clothes in a dry line or drying rack.
8. Make sure all the windows are closed when you are turning the heater on or air conditioning.
9. If you have the chance, plant your own vegetables and herbs.
10. Use your old clothes for cleaning purposes.
11. Don’t use single-use plastic bags to store food or foil… Instead, use these reusable silicone storage bags.

We used to go to the gym and pay at least 30$ monthly for our gym subscription. As this might have affected you as well, with the Coronavirus crisis all the gyms were shutdown.

This made us create a solid routine of exercise at the home combine with outdoor activity and realized that at least for us, it is easier to stick to this routine, rather than going to the gym. Nowadays there is a lot of information and workouts on the Internet that you can easily follow, from monthly workout routines to online workout classes… everything for free!

This way we don’t feel lazy about having to go to the gym and we can exercise as much as we want and whenever we want. For us one of the best frugal living tips to save money.

Committing to frugal living is not a hard task if you really believe in the benefits it has. For us, since we follow these best frugal living tips, we have been able to save money, being more sustainable, and having a happier life.

We now value more what we have, realizing how our actions can have a positive impact on the environment and we have saved a lot of o money ever since.

After a while, these best frugal living tips become a habit and we don’t have to remind ourselves what to do anymore.

We encourage you to live a frugal life in which you will be more responsible, increasing your savings, and becoming a happier person. If we can do it, so do you!

If you have any other suggestions on how to live frugally, leave a comment below!