Miss Thrifty

I flash the cash rather than flex the plastic, but (gasp!) am I about to break my own frugal rules? Truth is, I’m having a dilemma here – dilemma being a Money Monster sitting on my shoulder, whispering sweet IOUs into my ear – and if you have any thoughts on this one, I’d really like to bend my other ear in your direction.

As you know, my husband and I keep our spending firmly in check. Take our annual holiday: we will be flying out to America in October and it’s going to be another thrifty roadtrip. Credit cards? Pah! The flights were booked and paid for back in February, and now we are saving up spending money ready for when we go. Exemplary, no?

So… friend is getting married overseas in February next year and we have been invited. It isn’t the first time this has happened: we have had a number of such invitations over the past few years and up until now we always declined them, albeit with regret, because it was difficult to justify a jolly to Southeast Asia or Scandinavia or wherever when we were scrimping to pay down debt.

Here’s the rub. This time it’s my very dear friend L and her wonderful fiance getting married, an amazing opportunity to spend two weeks exploring a beautiful part of India and a great deal… and I really want to go. However the flights have to be booked and paid for in the next four months. As for spending and accommodation: with this trip scheduled so soon after our holiday in America and the Christmas break, there is fat chance that we would be able to save enough before went. We are thrilled to have been invited but if we go, this trip will be going straight on the never-never card.

So what would you do?

(more…)

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. (more…)

Here is one for locals and Yorkshire lovers: 1,000 Leeds hotel rooms are going for £10 apiece. It’s a wheeze organised by Visit Leeds, the city’s tourist body.

Some of the rooms are going for £10 for one night; others are going for £10 for an extra night; others are going for £10 for a third night. The accommodation on offer includes celeb haunt 42 The Calls, and the serviced apartments at Roomzzz Central.

If you aren’t familiar with the city: do check the location of your chosen hotel, as some of the places taking part are quite a way out of the city centre. If you’re coming by car, please note that you will get totally and utterly lost somewhere inside Leeds’ notorious one-way system.

Reasons to visit Leeds, apart from shops and that: (more…)

Kathryn Vercillo is a writer for Promotionalcodes.org.uk, which gives away free discount code deals and also publishes a blog.

Summer is upon us. It’s a great season for spending more time with the family. Many people use this downtime to explore their own towns and to enjoy events in the area that they normally don’t get to visit. Unfortunately, this can lead people to spend more money in the summer than the do during other times of the year.

Follow these tips for reducing summer activity costs:

1. Make a summer activity budget. Knowing how much money you actually can afford to spend will allow you to get the summer off to a good financial start and to keep it that way.
2. Create a calendar of free events. Find out when all of the free events are in your area and build your summer activities around those. This may include music in the park, outdoor movie nights, street festivals, farmers’ markets and free admission days for museums. (more…)

Ah Paris, Paris, how je t’adore! Even though I speak French like Del Boy.

This competition has been organised by Paris Ile-de-France Tours, and you can enter by visiting the competition page and filling out your details. You also have to answer some questions, but they aren’t very difficult as, erm, every question also contains a link to the correct answer.

The prize draw is only open until Sunday (21 December), so get in there quick!

The winner gets a long weekend in the city, which includes the following: (more…)

SKY Travel is running a competition to win a week’s holiday in “one of the best ski and snowboard destinations in the world”.

The winner and his/her guest gets to stay in the Banff Caribou Lodge and Spa in the Canadian Rockies. The prize also includes return flights to Calgary from London Heathrow, car hire, ski lift passes and equipment rental. 

To enter, fill out this form at the SKY Travel website. To enter, you must be a UK resident aged 18 or over.

The closing date is 20 December 2008.

Like M&S, Debenhams is going big on sales and heavy discounts in the run-up to Christmas. Check out the Debenhams website for the full range of offers.

I’m looking for new luggage at present: it’s horribly expensive and up until now, we’ve been the grateful recipients of our parents’ cast-offs. (Why do parents buy so much luggage?) However, the old case that I dragged off to America decided to divorce its trolley handle en route; hauling the thing around four states was most irksome. Lesson learned…

…So the Debenhams suitcase above, which weighs 3.2 kg and stands 42 cm high, has caught my eye. It has been reduced from £110.00 to an extremely attractive £20.00. Perfect!

Well, I’m still suffering horribly with jetlag but at least I’m unpacked now. I hope to post more about our Thrifty Roadtrip over the coming days; right now I’m still trawling through my crammed RSS reader, and wondering how I’m ever going to edit 500+ photos down to a manageable number. Anyway, I’m delighted to report that we had a fabulous time, and really didn’t want to come home.

Heck, even the gas stations were scenic!

View Larger Map

We’re in the middle of planning our week-long roadtrip (above). We’re getting there, but it’s a squeeze. So many miles, so little time.  I’m excited though; I love driving along a long straight road in the middle of nowhere, in a big ol’ American car. I like all the open space – we don’t have so much of that here in the UK. We’re going to spend a day in at the Arches National Park in Utah; on our way down to Phoenix we’re going to pop into Jerome, a mountainside ghost town turned artists’ colony.

I don’t know how we would have managed in the days before the internet, but this is how we have great roadtrips on limited budgets: (more…)

Here at Thrifty Towers, we’re planning our first vacation in a loooong time. Later this year we’re flying from London to San Francisco. We’re going to hire a car, drive down to Arizona and fly back to the UK from Phoenix. We used to live, work and study in Phoenix, so we’re really excited about catching up with our old chums and dining at our favourite restaurant in the world again.

You’ll be pleased – if not entirely surprised – to note that this operation is to be executed with the requisite lashings of financial chutzpah. My husband, who is self-employed, won a training grant to go to California and embark on a highly-specialised, week-long course there. Not bad, eh? The grant covers his tuition and flights, along with a week’s worth of accommodation and food costs. This has slashed the cost of our holiday.  He’s flying out before me; I’m going to meet him in San Francisco the day after the course ends. Then we’ll fly back together, a week later.  

I tried to book our flights and car hire online, but didn’t get very far. Flying into one airport and out of another, with three different flight dates, meant that I spent an age scribbling prices and codes down on scraps of paper, while tapping my fingers irritably as the various flight sites’ price options loaded. The car hire was a challenge too: a couple of the companies will let you pick up the car in one state and drop it off in another, but with various stipulations and with various additional charges whacked on. I must admit, the prices quoted weren’t particularly attractive either. Not unless we wanted to fly from London to San Francisco via Germany (hello! wrong direction!) and New England.

I hummed and hawed. My husband phoned from work to say he would have a go. Just minutes later, he called back to tell me that the flights and car had all been booked! What’s more, the prices he had found beat my online “bargains” by quite a hefty margin.

His secret? It’s a simple one: (more…)