Money Saving March: Make a gift

I'm on a mission to save money in March! I'll be posting three times a week with ideas and challenges. Free free to join in! :)

It's the end of Money Saving March! There's just time to cram in one more way to save yourself (or someone else) some money.

Challenge 12 of Money Saving March is to make a gift!

Maybe you have a birthday or anniversary coming up or maybe you are just visiting family or friends. Either way, if you're going to take a gift, why not spend some time and make one they'll really appreciate?

I have a couple of weeks off from University, so I am going for a much-needed trip home to Cornwall to visit my family, and then on to a week's holiday in Turkey! So exciting! Anyway, I am spending tomorrow making this vegan carrot cake that Mum dropped hints about mentioned and some cheese straws for my Dad who insists that vegetables should not be ingredients in cakes!

There are plenty of awesome handmade gift ideas out there waiting to be Googled. I hear Pinterest is brilliant for this, but I refuse to sign up to it for fear of getting addicted to drooling over crafting!

Even if you don't have a birthday coming up, make something anyway! You can either save it for a few months or send it to the lucky recipient as a "thinking of you" way to brighten their day. :)

Money Saving March: Batch cooking

I'm on a mission to save money in March! I'll be posting three times a week with ideas and challenges. Free free to join in! :)

I sometimes get home from Uni pretty late and the last thing I want to do is cook something from scratch. It would be so much easier to just heat something from the cupboard or freezer, but wait! Cooking from fresh is cheaper and healthier! What a dilemma!

The solution? Get organised. Batch cooking!

Challenge 11 of Money Saving March is to do some batch cooking this bank holiday weekend!

The great thing about batch cooking is that you can just make extra of whatever you're having for dinner, then reheat it for lunch the next day or stick it in the fridge/freezer for a later date!

What sort of things are good for batch cooking? Anything that can be frozen and reheated easily is great because you can make a few day's worth of meals at once without having to eat the same soup every night for a week! Meals like chilli, soup, pasta bake, curry, cottage pie and stews freeze well and can be separated into portions for easy reheating later on.

Don't forget you can also make all sorts of desserts to freeze for a later date - no more excuses about eating the whole batch of cookies before it goes stale!

Food safety: Make sure you stick the food in the fridge or freezer as soon as it's cool enough to do so. DON'T leave it out on the side for hours - bacteria can breed on food left at room temperature. Defrost frozen food in the fridge overnight. Reheat food thoroughly so that it is piping hot all the way through. :)

My batch cooking:
I don't know about you, but I have five days off for Easter! It's a pain to be busy all day and then come home and cook, so I have pre-made some stuff for us to eat! 

Today I was making pasties, so I made extra pastry and turned the rest into a quiche that we can have for lunch for the next couple of days.

Whilst the oven was still hot, I decided to make some carrot cake using this recipe. The orange-flavoured icing really makes it taste delicious, although I definitely should have sifted the icing sugar first!! I made two cakes and stuck the un-iced one in the freezer for future snacking! :)

I also made some sweet potato soup using Anthony Worrall Thompson's recipe, but I forgot to take a photo!

We had vegetable chilli for dinner, so I made twice as much to store in the freezer for an easy evening meal.


All in all I spent about two and a half hours preparing and cooking enough food for six meals each for the two of us, plus 16 pieces of cake! :) By investing time in cooking this weekend, I can have hassle-free meals later on, with less cooking time and most importantly, less washing up!

Do you batch cook? Care to share some recipes? :)

Money Saving March: Find a better ISA

I'm on a mission to save money in March! I'll be posting three times a week with ideas and challenges. Free free to join in! :)

I have been learning about ISAs (Individual Savings Accounts) this week. Interest rates are still awful and it's hard to find savings accounts offering more than the rate of inflation (a whopping 2.8% in February!). We're trying to save enough to put down a deposit on a house at some point in the distant future, so it makes sense to try not to lose too much to inflation!

Challenge 10 of Money Saving March is to find a better ISA!

My 1% extra bonus will run out at the end of the tax year (5th April), so it's time to start hunting for a better rate!

You can save up to £5640 in a cash ISA, or up to £11280 in a stocks and shares ISA in the current tax year (until 5th April). After that, you get a whole new tax-free allowance to play with (but you lose any unused allowances for previous years).

I have a cash ISA. I don't have the full allowance for this year though because I withdrew some of it when we moved to Bristol. Unfortunately you can't reinvest money you withdrew until the next tax year.

The best thing about ISAs is that the tax-free allowance is ADDED to the amount you saved in previous years. For example, if you have saved £3000 into an ISA in the 2012/13 tax year, you can combine it with the 2013/14 cash ISA allowance of £5760 and save a maximum of £8760 next year! People who have maximised their stocks and shares and cash ISAs every year since they started in 1999 could have over £100,000 saved by now!

The best cash ISAs are outlined by the excellent Money Saving Expert guide. Think about whether you need instant access to your money, whether you have previous ISAs to transfer in, and what your starting amount will be (although don't worry; many ISAs can be opened with just £1!).

Anyone else looking for a better ISA? Don't forget, you can only open one cash ISA per tax year, so wait until the 6th April if you've already started one in the past year!

Money Saving March: No Spend Week!

I'm on a mission to save money in March! I'll be posting three times a week with ideas and challenges. Free free to join in! :)

Despite Money Saving March, my bank balance has taken a bit of a hit again this month! I have had to pay for travel and accomodation to Scotland for a conference (which will be reimbursed eventually!), as well as buying some foreign currency for a holiday next month! :)

Challenge 9 of Money Saving March is to have a No Spend Week!

We have food and no plans that require any money coming up in the next week, so we've decided to have a spending detox and go seven days without draining the bank account! So I will be bringing a packed lunch to uni (as usual!) and hopefully spending part of the weekend starting my veg container garden (depending on the weather, but I can't wait much longer!!). 

Another good reason to have a No Spend Week is that I am only 15% of the way towards my goal of 200 No Spend Days in 2013, and 23% of the year has passed already! I need to get back on the case!

Anyone else feeling a bit skint this month? Leave your wallet at home, grab your sandwiches and join me! :)

Money Saving March: Enter a competition!

I'm on a mission to save money in March! I'll be posting three times a week with ideas and challenges. Free free to join in! :)

When I was a kid, I announced to my parents that I was going to enter any competition I could find. This was back in the days of "describe why you love our product in 100 words or less" - whatever happened to those? I remember winning an art set of pens, paints and crayons for a picture I sent to Twinkle magazine. Woohoo! Apart from that I didn't win anything, so I gave up on that idea pretty quickly!

You know what though, gang? SOMEONE has to win these things! Whether it's an all expenses paid trip to America or a free meal somewhere, I want to win!

Challenge 8 of Money Saving March is to enter a competition!

Whether it's a sport contest, a skills-based competition or a randomly chosen prize draw, you can't win if you don't enter! I suppose it's the lure of potentially winning £1000 or a holiday somewhere, but I've been signing myself up to anything I can find!

Skills based contests
No matter where your interests lie, there is likely to be a competition or contest that interests you. Maybe it's time to sign yourself up for that race or dance contest? You could submit a short story to a newspaper competition or perhaps enter a photograph in next year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

I'm a biology PhD student, and there are lots of science-y challenges out there for early career researchers. Within my University there was a science fair last week, where students create posters about their work and talk about it to people who wander past! I didn't win one of the prizes for best poster, but I can improve on the poster and submit it to other contests later in the year!

Another competition I am entering is the Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize. If you're an early career scientist with an interest in science communication, have a look! The deadline is the 28th April.

Prize draws
Even if you don't want to put any effort in, you can still enter competitions! For many prize draws, you simply shove your contact details into a website and click "submit". Money Saving Expert has a forum page dedicated to competitions and most of the supermarkets and newspaper websites have a big list of things you could enter.

To be honest, it's kind of addictive once you start entering in your details! So far I've entered several competitions to win holidays. I think I'd enjoy a free trip to somewhere sunny! :)


I wish I had some awesome results / photos of a sunny beach in the caribbean to show you (really, I do!), but I've only been entering stuff for the past couple of days so nothing has happened as of yet! In the meantime, perhaps you could share you success stories with competitions! Oh, and don't get me started on the time I won second prize in a handwriting contest at school. My dad was surprised because, and I quote, "your handwriting looks like a spider fell in ink and ran across the page"... Cheers father dear!

Money Saving March: Nine ways to save in the garden!

I'm on a mission to save money in March! I'll be posting three times a week with ideas and challenges. Free free to join in! :)

I love gardening! Growing your own food is a fun hobby with the added reward of being able to eat whatever you produce. I find that food you've grown yourself tastes infinitely better than the stuff sitting in the shops. Of course,  growing your own is not without its costs; compost, seed trays, tools, fertiliser, perhaps pesticides, etc. But if you can keep your outgoings low, you could save a lot more than you spend!

Challenge 7 is to save money on gardening!

This year I am living in a flat with a pebbled garden, so I've decided to grow veggies in containers. I used some gift money to buy some tubs and compost, but everytime I turn around there's some new expense looming; propagator lids for larger seedlings, pots for transplants, labels for different plants, etc. etc.

This year I'm trying to keep things as cheap as possible. Here's how:

1. Grow from seeds! I remember my Nana buying some tomato plants for £1.50 each last year. You can buy a pack of seeds for that and grow tens of plants! It pays to grow a few more than you think you'll need, since not all of the seeds will germinate. Of course, if they do you'll have to find some friends to fob them off to kindly donate them to. :)

2. Don't buy pots! If you're growing seedlings up for later transplant outside you can get away with free alternatives to pots. Just fill 'em up with compost and grow seeds and seedlings in them until the plants are ready to move into your garden.

- Margarine tubs: poke drainage holes in the bottom, lid can be used as a saucer to catch water.
- Milk bottles: cut in half, poke holes in the bottom. Top half can be used as a cloche (see below).
- Toilet roll tubes: can be directly planted into the soil once seedlings are hardened off.
- Egg boxes: these are awesome! The top half can be used as a seed tray, whilst the bottom half is handily separated into individual sections! These can also be planted directly into the soil and will break down to allow your plants to grow.

3. Alternatives to cloches. Some of my seedlings have outgrown the little propagator lids, but it's still a bit cold for them to fend for themselves. I am using bottles cut in half (soda bottles, milk bottles, shampoo bottles, squash bottles - anything that lets some light through!) and placed over them at night, to protect them from the worst of the cold.

4. Grow things you'll actually eat. It's tempting to grow stuff because it's easy or you have been given some seeds. The problem is, if you're not going to eat brussel sprouts, don't grow them! You're wasting valuable time and space that you could be using for other things!

Last year's tomato plants!

5. Grow the most expensive stuff. I only have a few large containers to grow my plants in, so as tempting as it is to grow potatoes, I know that would be fairly dim when I can buy a massive bag of them for £1 in the supermarket! I'm better off growing something that takes up less space and produces more valuable products, for example spinach beet (spinach costs quite a lot for a small bag, whilst the easier-to-grow spinach beet will keep me in leafy greens for most of the year!).

6. Recycle water. Don't use fresh, clean water to water your plants. During the summer, you'll need to water at least daily in hot weather, so make sure you're re-using water from both your shower and washing up bowl to reduce your water consumption. 

7. Use coffee (but not as a pesticide!) - Coffee grounds are often espoused as being great for your garden. They enhance the soil, making it easier for plants to grow. They are often recommended (including by me before I knew better!) as a pesticide to repel slugs, but this is actually illegal because their effects as a pesticide haven't been officially tested. You can get free coffee grounds from most coffee shops (or perhaps your own kitchen!).
 
8. Make your own fertiliser. Last year I made fertiliser out of rotten stinging nettles! All you need is a bucket, some stinging nettles and water, and you can make nitrogen-rich fertiliser that is perfect for giving leafy veg a nutritious boost!



9. DIY compost! I've written before about how to make your own compost. All you need for a rich compost is some old vegetable peelings, grass cuttings, or even shredded paper! Unfortunately I don't have anywhere to make compost in our flat's garden, but it's something worth doing if you have a bit of space!

So far I've got a few seeds planted, with more to come when the weather gets warmer. I have lots of milk bottles, toilet rolls tubes and egg boxes under the sink ready to get started! What other top tips have you got to save money in the garden?

Money Saving March - Midway Round-Up

Hello! I'm halfway through Money Saving March and I reckon I've saved a pretty penny already! Here's how I've been getting on:

Challenge 1 - Packed lunch - I came close to failing this within a couple of days! I got up late and didn't have time to make lunch. Luckily, I had a not-very-tasty cheap-o packet of instant noodles under my desk at work, so I was able to just grab a banana and run out the door. Not the most exciting of lunches, but I haven't had to buy anything yet! :)

Challenge 2 - Finding change on the street - I've only found one 5p piece and a penny so far. Boring!

Challenge 3 - Stay in with friends - We made some awesome pasties, and I've also had brunch cooked for me by a Uni friend. I'm planning a murder mystery night too! :D

Challenge 4 - £50 extra income - I did the psychology experiment (involved a lot of clicking mouse buttons!) for £10, and have done 3 hours of demonstrating so far, with more next week! So far I've earned ~£43!

Challenge 5 - £1 meals - We've stuck to the meal plan pretty well this week, apart from on Saturday when we ended up going to visit a friend. Tonight we're having more fajitas to use up some ingredients, but I'll be making the quiche anyway to take to Uni for lunches! :)

Challenge 6 - Save money on bills - Still waiting to hear back from the energy company about whether we can get a better deal.


How're you doing this month? Are you having an expensive month like I did last month, or is it all going to plan? :)