BEST OF: The Daily Mail’s “Frugalistas”

Miss Thrifty2 July 10, 2008

Today’s Daily Mail carries a piece about so-called “Frugalistas”.  I say so-called because the definitive label doesn’t appear to have been settled on yet. Frugalistas? Recessionistas? Take your pick. I predict that with gloomy headlines rolling off the presses like sausages at a sausage factory, we’ll be seeing these features with increasing regularity.

Anyway, today’s article takes three women “who are meeting the challenges of Britain’s higher prices”, and shares their secrets. Some of them, such as selling one of the family cars and not buying any more designer clothes, are like, duh. Other pointers don’t quite add up: one of the women keeps bees “to make her very own honey” – but isn’t readymade honey a lot cheaper than beekeeping? Another woman claims that she used to spend £70 on groceries every week (just for herself!) but has reduced her food expenses to £20 by growing her own vegetables and having boxes of organic produce delivered. I’m not sure how this works: those boxes are £8-£10 minimum, which leaves very little for the rest of her weekly food.

But head-scratching aside, they had come up with some good ideas, which I have distilled for you as follows:

  • To shop for groceries online because “you aren’t tempted to buy food you don’t need”.
  • To stop using the tumble dryer. Those things gobble up electricity/cash.  It’s summer: hang it on the line.
  • To hold clothes-swapping parties with friends. Yes, I know that these aren’t new, but the parties described in the article are held every month and involve bottles of wine – which sounds good to me. 

 Daily Mail

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2 Responses to “BEST OF: The Daily Mail’s “Frugalistas”

pennypincher says:

hi miss thrifty,

love your name and blog (cool)

Ok, in reply to your comment about fruglistas. i agree the whole article was exagerated, but all the papers do this, in order to sell more papers. The reason I liked the piece was because some of their traits were very old style. I am an avid old style addict on the money saving expert website forum.

I totally agree with the good point you pulled out, I shop online for food every week, using the money off vouchers and I also have stopped using our tumble drier.

I have not tried clothes swapping parties yet though!!! 🙂

July 17, 2008 at 12:16 pm

AlexM says:

Your blog is interesting!

Keep up the good work!

August 14, 2008 at 2:59 pm

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