4 Christmas DIY Tricks To Keep On Trend And Save You Money.*

Christmas time is always an expensive time of year. If it's not trying to buy the perfect gifts, stocking up the cupboards with treats or picking out those new dresses for the work party it's trying to refresh the Christmas tree decorations to keep up with the latest interior trends. I've decided to put together a few little Christmas decoration tricks to help you keep up with the latest trends and save you money!

Tips For Reducing Your Monthly Outgoings

I asked recently via a Twitter poll what you, my readers, would love me to write next and Tips For Reducing Your Monthly Outgoings was the winner, so here I am, giving the people what they want!

If you've been following me over the last 7 or 8 months you'll have seen a running theme around here about how skint I've been, with buying our first home 1 year ago and planning our wedding, money is just a fleeting number in our bank accounts each month. However the reason why we can afford these things is because about 2 years ago I did a complete overhaul on our finances, which is what I'm going to be talking to you about in this post.

I'm going to write a little disclaimer here just in case, but these might be tips that work for some of you and wont work for others, but these are what helped us personally. I really hope you can take something from this post!

The first thing I did was sat down with our bank accounts and figured out exactly how much our outgoings were, the first and most important are the bills because obviously they need paying first. Secondly we looked at the things we were paying for that were for pleasure, for example, Netflix, Spotify and game subscriptions etc. I highly recommend you do this to help see where your money is going and what things you don't need to be paying for or don't use anymore.

Once we had all of our bills in plain sight with exact amounts, I decided to look over some things. The first thing we noticed is that we were paying for our electricity every quarter (we only had electric at the apartment if you were wondering about gas). I looked over our bills and rang them up to make sure we were on the cheapest tariff and decided to switch to paying a direct debit amount every month. This was just an easier way to keep track of how much we were paying out month by month and wasn't a huge shock when we suddenly had to fork out a lump sum every quarter. If you end up paying too much on a direct debit you get refunded your over payments and they reduce your direct debit accordingly after 6-12 months.

This is something you should do with all of your bills, look over them and make sure you are getting the best deal possible, if you are single and living alone make sure you are taking advantage of 25% council tax discount. Same goes for car insurance, house insurance, etc etc make sure you find a comparison website and see if you can be getting a better deal and switch, don't be paying over the odds for things that you can get for cheaper, this is a great way to save some serious £££.

Then the next step is to do the same with your pleasure outgoings, do you have some old subscriptions to things that you didn't realise you were still paying for? I decided to stop paying £10 for my Spotify when I could sit and listen to 30 seconds of adverts and Nick decided to stop paying for his Wow sub. I only recently noticed that you can reduce your Netflix account too, I think it defaults to two devices, which if you only ever watch it on your TV you can knock a couple of quid off your bill from that too by switching in your settings to just 1 device! Which also leads me to my TV Licence, I spoke to the TV Licence people and they said because I only watch Netflix, which is pre-recorded, that means I don't need to pay for a TV Licence. So if this is something you do too, you might be able to save yourself some cash also.

The next thing that really helped reduce our outgoings was meal planning. Meal planning is amazing. If you haven't thought about this before then you really should. Planning your monthly meals means you don't need to nip to the shops as often and risk splurging out on all those pesky deals! The amount of times we've been to the shop for a handful of things and come out with bags of things we didn't need because we were tempted by chocolate, crisps, pop etc and all of these purchases soon add up. I also find Poundland is amazing for toiletries, stop paying £4 for a tube of toothpaste in Boots when you can get the exact same thing for £1. We still buy things like kitchen roll and hand wash from here because it's so much cheaper.

Another thing I've discovered is cashback websites, when you do have to fork out some cash on something new or expensive, like a new washer or fridge for example, you can find the best deals and get cash back from those big purchases. It might not seem worth it for one off things but if you make a few little purchases over the year it soon adds up! I cashed out £80 last year that was completely free, I was spending money on those things anyway but I get £80 back by going through cashback sites, which is amazing. Every time I plan on buying something online I always just go through the cashback website to see if there is a deal first, you can even get it on things like Just Eat, so it's completely worth having a look and building up some £££.

I've rambled on for quite awhile with this one, but the main thing really is to use your common sense. Research your purchases before buying something, keep a look out for better deals on your bills and really consider little things, like if Spotify is really worth paying £10 for or if you can stand listening to a few adverts once in awhile. All of these things helped Nick and I save a couple of hundred pounds a month which we then put into our savings account to help towards house deposits and wedding things.

I really hope this post helped in some way or another and that you end up reducing your bills and saving some cash to put towards something more exciting than bills! Let me know in the comments if you have anymore tips or if you found this helpful!




If you enjoyed this post you might also enjoy Living on a budget: Where to start?

Living on a Budget: Where to start?

I ran a poll over on twitter about what post people would like me to write next and 'Living on a budget' won by a smidgen. So in this post I'm going to talk about why I live on a small budget at the minute, learning to make your money go further and what I've learnt through the on-going process, so lets start at the very beginning, it's usually a good place to start.

For those that haven't followed the blog over the past year, Nick and I got engaged and bought our first home last year and this year decided to finally tie the knot, so it's been a very heavy year or two on the bank balance. Along with that comes some very heavy adulting and deciding on whats the best way to do things.

Before figuring out the money side of things, we had to have the very adult conversation of decided how this is going to work, which resulted in us having a joint bank account to share all of our money. This was something we were both very against in conversations previously in last 3 years however we felt we could both get what we've wanted much quicker if we worked together. Once this conversation was had and the decision was made, I took the following steps towards some major budgeting.