Miss Thrifty

A millionaire businessman, Matt Stockdale, is launching a new energy company – charging gas and electricity at cost. Fat cats, begorrah!

The company is called At Cost Energy. It isn’t up and running yet – at the time of writing, an application to become one of OFGEM’s licensed energy supply companies is going through the system – but prospective customers are being invited to register their interest at the At Cost Energy website. There is no obligation to sign up, but At Cost Energy is hoping for an indication of how much energy it may need to buy, with a view to going “live” later this year.

I have registered – this initiative is timely. Read the rest of this entry →

Welcome to the 219th Festival of Frugality! We are on the right the other side of the pond this week so, as on previous occasions, I thought I’d go for a British theme. This time around we are looking at the good old ration book (above): if there is a physical object that represents the possibilities – and the limitations! – of a frugal lifestyle, then surely this is it.

Rationing was first introduced in the UK during the First World War (1914 – 1918). It was reintroduced in the Second World War (1939 – 1945), when we grew only a third of the food that needed – and U-boats were polishing off the boats that brought in supplies from overseas. The UK wasn’t the only country to ration food and other goods during wartime – the U.S. rationed petrol and certain food products, and other countries also adopted rationing systems – but in our case, rationing was relatively severe and prolonged. We didn’t bin our ration books until 1954.

Here is the amount of food allocated to each adult, weekly (below). Not surprisingly, housewives became extremely resourceful (and skinny).  All sorts of recipes were concocted. Make Do And Mend became a way of life.

Being a 1940s Domestic Goddess sounds pretty wretched though: Read the rest of this entry →

Whew! Thanks so much to everyone who entered the win a handbag competition. Three hundred and sixty-seven of you got your entries – and your handbag essentials – in before the deadline. Now it’s time to pick the winner! So here goes…

Here is the random number generator that I use. I asked it to pick a number between 1 and 367.

And it picked comment number… Read the rest of this entry →

South of the Watford Gap?

If you are in or around London at 6:30 pm on Thursday 24 February, stylist Hannah J is running a Make Do and Mend workshop on Brick Lane. The tickets are £25 each, which I thought sounded a bit dear as you can get a whole new outfit from TK Maxx for that price, but as it turns out you get quite a lot of bang for your buck (in addition to plenty of tea and cake). You get lots of tips and advice; also, you take three “tired” garments with you and are helped to transform them during the course of the workshop. Further information is available here. Read the rest of this entry →

Win a handbag – yes siree. See this one here. You like it? It’s up for grabs.

This competition prize has been donated by ThisHandbag: a new site that stocks one handbag at a time, and sells at heavily discounted prices. The bag on show measures 29 cm by 26 cm, and is available from the website for £9.99 plus £1.50 postage.

To enter, simply leave a comment below, listing one item that you keep in your handbag and couldn’t do without. Apart from your purse or wallet, of course. (For me it’s a notepad: I’m always scribbling things down.)

The closing date is 5 pm GMT on Tuesday 23 February. I’ll pick the winner using an online random number generator.

UPDATE: The competition has closed and the winner has been picked! See here for details.

Last year I got all moody about the jacked-up prices for ordering flowers online. This year Interflora are well and truly back in my good books, after sending me free flowers (huzzah!) and a special Valentines flowers discount for all Miss Thrifty readers:

Discount: 10 per cent.

Code: valblog

Valid from: NOW!

Valid to: Midnight, Saturday 13 February 2010.

T&C: Minimum product value is £25.00.  Discount offer excludes overseas delivery and delivery- included products.

Interflora Website.

P.S.  If you would like to send me some flowers too, please feel free to do so. No really, don’t let me stop you…  I do get offered stuff by PRs these days, but the items are often weird things like a heated coaster or incontinence pads.  So things are looking up, people.

Best Western Hotels is giving away two-night hotel breaks every 30 minutes for 24 hours, from 8 am on Tuesday 9 February. The prizes include dinner, bed and breakfast in a UK Best Western.

This is a Twitter comp. I’m seeing more and more of these; of course, if you’re on Twitter already and you aren’t following me, I demand that you do so immediately! Those who have yet to succumb, however, can enter via Best Western’s Facebook page.

How it works: follow Best Western on Twitter (@bestwesterngb) or on Facebook. Every 30 minutes a question about Best Western will be announced. Find the answer and @reply on Twitter, or submit the answer to the Best Western wall on Facebook. The winner will be selected at random, from all the correct answers submitted within 15 minutes of the question’s announcement.

In case you were wondering, that is indeed a Best Western hotel room pictured above. Earls Court, apparently.

NB. I am not sure if you get to choose your hotel. Let’s hope so, eh?

The January sales have been a Miss Thrifty-free zone this year, partly because (as you may have noticed) I haven’t been around much, and partly because I like to hold off until the last possible moment, when the pickings are heavily discounted.

Some people aren’t keen on sales, because they feel that (a) you can go overboard, splurging on rails of worthless tat; (b) why bother with the dregs that nobody was prepared to buy at full price?  Personally, I am not convinced by these arguments. If it’s rubbish, why buy it at any price? As for the “dregs” defence: this presumes that all the people buying stuff at full price have good taste. Ha! I think not, if the frock horrors falling out of Mayfair nightclubs and WAG boutiques are anything to go by.

Now is the best time to go sales shopping, in my book. Two of my recommendations: Read the rest of this entry →

Slow Cooker: save on money and save on washing up was featured in the 239th Carnival of Personal Finance, hosted by Darwin’s Finance.

Miss Thrifty’s pick: Staying Off the Car Payment Treadmill, by Tough Money Love. “I don’t understand the logic in borrowing money to purchase a depreciating asset”, notes Mr TML. Me neither.

When “cheap” and “Manolo Blahnik shoes” go together was featured in the 212th Festival of Frugality, hosted by Yes I Am Cheap.

Miss Thrifty’s pick: Composting on the Balcony: The Easy Way to Environmental Virtue, by Life On The Balcony. It can be done! This blog is dedicated to gardening tips for flat-dwellers.

Talking of gardening: Growing Brussels sprouts for Christmas was featured in the Make It From Scratch! Carnival, hosted by Out of Debt Again.

Miss Thrifty’s pick: All Day Beef Stock, by Making My Own Luck. I can tell you that if I ate meat, I’d be sloshing this over everything…

Image credit: Infrogmation.

The Cath Kidston sale is currently in progress on the company’s website. As regular readers will know, I am v. partial to Cath Kidston but bristle with indignation at the RRPs. This time around, some of the discounts are stingy but others are pretty good, so I thought I’d round up the most bargainous of the bunch for you. Here they are, divided into the website sections:

Accessories: nothing to write home about here, unless you’re in the market for thick woolly scarves.

Bags: bonanza! The cowboy tote bag (left), made from oilcloth with leather trim, is reduced from £55.00 to £30.00.

I love the cowboy print – I even have it on my bedroom wallpaper – and there are a few cowboy bags in the sale section this time. The cowboy messenger bag is reduced from £38.00 to £25.00. The cowboy bucket bag is reduced from £40.00 to £25.00. I hope this doesn’t mean that the cowboy print is for the chop…

Bathroom: washbags down from £18.00 to £12.00. Read the rest of this entry →