Miss Thrifty

Funny About Money has hit upon a super-thrifty solution to getting grease stains out of laundry. She was wondering what to do about a seemingly indelible spot on a tablecloth, when she remembered an old household hint: that window cleaner lifts grease from carpets and furniture. (more…)

Christmas was a dizzying whirl of visits to relatives and friends in various parts of the South East, and I’m still disorientated. Seriously; I spent this afternoon working while feeling ever so virtuous for beavering away on a Saturday. It was only at 9 pm that I found out it was only Friday (to much chortling from my husband). Hey ho; at least I get to have two “Saturdays” in one week! But it’s time to come back down to Earth again, isn’t it?

It also means that another edition of Friday Bargains is due. And I must admit, I’m enamoured with the sudden rash of £1 deals. They’re everywhere! (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…)

One of my newest followers on Twitter, Jenn Davis of CheapTweet, found the Miss Thrifty blog via my Favourite Frugal Twitterers post and dropped me an e-mail with some info about the new CheapTweet site.

CheapTweet - http://cheaptweet.com - is a website that mines Twitter for posts about deals, coupon codes and sales. Tweets about deals are ranked based on user votes and how many times a deal is mentioned on Twitter.

With the holiday shopping season upon us, everyone is looking for the best shopping deals they can find—and online merchants are trying to get hip by posting exclusive deals and discounts to Twitter followers. Still, consumers don’t want to clutter their Twitter feeds with several tweets a day from each merchant, so CheapTweet was created to cut out the mess and aggregate just the best deals for shoppers. It’s easy to peruse deals by category or do specific searches.

Just like Twitter democratizes communication, we’re democratizing deals. We’ve got Dell coupon codes, special offers from Whole Foods and free shipping from the smallest Etsy shops selling handmade crafts.

(more…)

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…)

Thanks for the great feedback on my list of Favourite Frugal Twitterers. I’m not the only with a thing for themed Twitter lists, it seems. Two personal finance bloggers, Peter at BibleMoneyMatters and Nittany at Online Banks Blog have drawn up their lists of top ten personal finance Twitter bods. I know that personal finance isn’t quite the same as frugality, but there’s a fair amount of overlap.

Peter’s list: Ten People All Personal Finance Junkies Should Follow On Twitter.

Nittany’s list: 10 Personal Finance Bloggers You Should Follow On Twitter.

Do you use Twitter? If you do, you’ll find me there (follow me at Miss_Thrifty). The more time I spend on Twitter, the more I like: it’s dangerously addictive, but I follow a number of frugal freaks and mommy bloggers, and I’ve picked up lots of money saving tips and pointers. I also get to talk/tweet with some of the people whose blogs I really enjoy, and others who are regular Miss Thrifty readers. Snaps all round!

Anyway, the Twitip blog has asked its readers to submit their “Top Ten must follow lists“, so this got me thinking. I’d find it hard to come up with a “Top Ten must follow list”, but I do have a list of some of my current frugal favourites.

I should add that I’m a total Twitter tart, so this list is in permanent rotation. This lot all tweets/blogs about matters frugal (otherwise @stephenfry would definitely be on the list), and they all meet my following criteria:

• They have been active on Twitter within the past week. There is no point following someone who is never there!
• They don’t fill my Twitter homepage with tedious chatter about inane rubbish. Nope, I don’t want to read blow-by-blow accounts of your visit to the dental hygienist. Thanks all the same.
• Nor are they signed up to advertising programmes such as Magpie, which stream ads onto followers’ homepages. I’m rather particular, so I usually unfollow people who do this.
• Lots of great tips / I find their tweets - at least some of them - useful.
• Other tweets just make me smile…

Here they are: (more…)

I love reading Sharon Rose’s Vintage, Fashion, Me blog. Sharon Rose has an admirable talent for excavating gorgeous clothes from charity and thrift shops: a Marc Jacobs dress for £5, anyone? So I took the opportunity to ask, how does she do it?

The lovely Miss Thrifty has given me the honour of doing a guest post while she is away.

For anyone who is not familiar with my blog, I have a love of modern and vintage designer items, ranging from jackets, dresses, jeans and blouses to handbags, shoes and accessories. I especially enjoy sourcing these from charity shops and boot sales around where I live. I’m very lucky that there is an abundance of charity shops and regular boot sales, so I generally have great chances of picking up good quality items.
Here are my tips for picking out fabulous pieces: (more…)

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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…)