Miss Thrifty

I’m not a fan of Ticketmaster, generally – I don’t like their booking fees and I take my orders from 1990s rock totty – but the concert giant’s latest scheme gets the thumbs up from me.

In short, you can trade in your old mobile phones and/or iPods for a Ticketmaster giftcard. Find out the value of your item by visiting this site; if you want to proceed they’ll send you a stamped, addressed recycling envelope. For every phone recycled, Ticketmaster will also donate £1 to charity.

Apparently the phones can be traded in for up to £150. To give you a guide: my current phone, a Nokia 6500s that came free with my latest mobile contract, is worth £40.

Image credit: In Veritas Lux.

We ran out of floor cleaner so I’ve started making my own, out of some of the old-fashioned tricks and treats that now grace my cleaning cupboard. It costs pennies and works just as well as the relatively expensive, chemical equivalent. The tiled floors also seem to dry more quickly, although I don’t know why that is.

Here is the recipe (if you can call it that): (more…)

White vinegar comes in handy: it’s an ingredient in my thrifty leather food, and I also use it when I’m mixing up my own kitchen and bathroom cleaner. I buy the stuff in bulk: this five-litre vat (left) from Summer Naturals costs £4.19 and lasts forever. (Although, to my annoyance, it is sold out at the time of writing.)

Anyway, I’d read somewhere that white vinegar makes an excellent fabric softener, it had been playing on my mind ever since. It would be great if it worked – but how would it work, exactly? And what if it made my clothes smell of chip shop?

Right now I’m on a roll when it comes to laundry – I’m nuts about my eco-friendly soap nuts – so I decided to throw caution to the wind and try out the vinegar. I wasn’t going to test it on my own pretty garments, but my husband provided me with the ideal opportunity. He decided to do the laundry, carefully picked out all his own clothes for the machine, then left his wet washing mouldering inside the drum for a couple of days. Perfect! And if the clothes smelled of chip shop afterwards, so be it. I put the load through the machine again, and added a slosh of white vinegar into the fabric softener compartment. (more…)

I bought a packet of soap nuts from the Summer Naturals site, and I’m loving them. Soap nuts grow on sapindus trees in China and India; they are sticky and gooey with a surfactant called saponin. Forget laundry detergent; put a handful of these nuts into an old sock, chuck them into the washing machine and let them do their stuff. They really work! They are eco-friendly too, being reusable, biodegradable and lacking the potential environmental impact of shop-bought laundry detergent.

These sticky little nuts also work out very cheap – which surprised me, because I presumed that they would be relatively expensive, in the way that worthy, hippy-friendly things often are. (more…)

Welcome to The 157th Festival of Frugality: The Queen’s Speech Edition!  And a special welcome to all first-time visitors to the Miss Thrifty blog. If you would like to stick around, please feel free to put your feet up: some of the most popular posts include thrifty household tips, my beloved Thriftymobile and a hotlist of Frugal Twitter Users. For regular updates in your RSS reader, whack the big orange button to your right.

With the Festival on the other side of the pond this week and Christmas looming, I thought I’d go for a quintessentially British theme. As you may know, we take the seasonal festivities very, very seriously over here; Christmas Day is centred upon a vast lunchtime banquet at which we all wear paper crowns, eat until we pop and try to keep the flaming Christmas pudding from setting the curtains ablaze. After that it’s copious quantities of sherry and telly until bedtime. The day after Christmas Day is a public holiday, to give everyone time to recover.   

So there is plenty to choose from when it comes to selecting a theme. I was going to go with The 157th Festival of Frugality: The Alka-Seltzer Edition, but on reflection felt that this would provide an unfortunate impression of the scenes of carnage Dickensian delights for which the British Christmas is renowned.

Instead, I have plumped for another fine British Christmas tradition. (more…)

The Times has published its top 12 money-saving tips for Christmas. It’s as wickedy-wack as one would expect; I know I’m mean about these well-intentioned broadsheet round-ups, but come on! This time around, the top frugal tips include wrapping presents in brown paper from the Post Office (which, erm, works out more expensive than regular Christmas wrap), and decorating the Christmas tree with pine cones foraged from one’s garden and spray-painted gold (Pfffffff. See: Caitlin Moran).

Anyway, another one of the Times’ tips is to eschew Christmas crackers in favour of recycled, fill-your-own crackers from John Lewis (£5 for six). But one of the readers has replied with an even better idea, which I love: (more…)

I’m thinking about trying out Furoshiki gift wrapping this year. It’s simple (well, the finished results look simple), pretty and the wrapping can be recycled.  You use squares of fabric, rather than spangly paper and ribbons. Check it out:

Furoshiki gift wrapping from RecycleNow on Vimeo. 

Japan’s Ministry of the Environment has kindly provided a Furoshiki instruction sheet, with wrapping instructions for a variety of different-shaped gifts.

If my efforts come up trumps, I’ll post the photos. If I end up with pouchy knapsnack-style confections, let us never speak of this again…

Hey, do you remember the other day, when I listed Secret Freegan (@Freegan ) as one of my Favourite Frugal Twitterers?

Well, it turns out that Secret Freegan also has a Secret Freegan blog, which makes for eyeopening reading.

Just look at this: (more…)

Yes, I know I’m really late to the party. I’d read all about Freecycle, which reduces waste by encouraging people to post their unwanted items online, and pass them on. But I hadn’t really paid much attention, because (a) Freecycle always popping up in those same rubbish “recessionista” features in the women’s pages. You know: those round-ups that tell us all to go out and stuff fallen fruit into our Lulu Guinness handbags, and take our clothes to “swap parties”. Also, (b) I’d presumed that Freecycle’s domains were eco-trendy places like Islington and Brighton, rather than my creaky Yorkshire backwater.

But lo! I looked Freecycle up, and it turns out that the little place in which I live (pop: 13,000) has its own, thriving Freecycle group. (more…)

Who’d have thunk that Woolies would be a magnet for frugal gardeners? It really shouldn’t surprise me – after all, that shop sells everything – but since discovering that it sells good gardening products at rock bottom prices, I’ve become a fan.

If you’re a super-organised gardener looking ahead to your Spring beds, I’d recommend that you check Woolworths out. The plants themselves are hit and miss – a forsythia I bought last year has done diddly squat – but the bulbs and seeds are great value for money. Cheaper than the supermarkets and discount stores, even. (more…)