Frugal
5 Cheap Meals Your Kids Will Love
Unsplash – CC0 License Mac ‘n’ cheese is a staple for many families. It’s a delicious meal in itself. And if you know what you’re doing, you can make pasta nutritious, too. Regular mac ‘n’ cheese uses white pasta and doesn’t include any vegetables. However, if you want to improve the nutritional content for your family at a low cost, just chop some broccoli and add it to the bake. Also, use brown macaroni, too, as this contains all sorts of B-vitamins, fiber, and minerals you don’t get in the refined white stuff. It’s not cheap, but if you wanted to make a cashew cheese sauce using cashews, lemon juice, salt, and nutritional yeast, you could. This improves the nutritional value even further and effectively transforms junk food into something healthy for everyone. Fresh Dough Pizza Take-out and store-bought pizzas are expensive. However, making your own hardly costs anything. All you need is some cheese that will melt, a bag of flour, and some passata (plus any toppings you have lying around in your pantry). When you make pizza yourself, you have more control over the nutritional content. For instance, making pizza bases with brown flour and adding veggies as toppings can help transform it into a healthy meal. Eggs And Tomatoes Unsplash – CC0 License Despite inflation elsewhere in the food supply, breakfast staples, eggs and tomatoes remain incredibly cheap. Putting together eggs over hard with grilled beef tomato slices is the perfect light breakfast for all the family. Sweet Potato And Black Bean Chili Sweet potato and black bean chili is an inexpensive treat that everyone will love. Plus, it’s super healthy too, thanks to all the fiber and polyphenols from the beans, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes. Adding regular chili powder will give the dish that classic Mexican taste. However, if you want it to taste even more delicious, try adding smoked chipotle chili to the dish and serve it with cornbread and coleslaw (both of which are super cheap in their own right). Philly Cheese Steak Sloppy Joes Regular steak is expensive. But if you use mince or other cheaper cuts, then you can bring the cost down tremendously. To make Philly steak sloppy joes, cook the beef in a pan with some species and perhaps a few vegetables. Then open up some submarine buns and place the mix in the fold. Add some grated cheese and place under the grill until it melts. Then serve with sauces of your choice. If you want to make it take-out style, serve it on the baking sheet you cook it on.
How To Avoid Overspending On A Wedding
You’ll want your wedding to be special, of course, but also, you won’t want it to cost the earth. You’d much rather spend the money on your honeymoon or on buying a home! While it’s impossible to get married without paying anything, there are plenty of things you can do that’ll prevent you from spending any more than necessary. And the best part? You won’t compromise the quality of your special day — you’ll still make it memorable and romantic and so forth, but you’ll have more money in your back pocket. In this blog, we’ll look at some of the best ways to avoid overspending on your wedding. Pexels – CC0 Licence Set Your Budget First thing’s first: make a budget! If you don’t have a set idea of how much you can afford to spend (or how much you want to spend), then you’ll run the risk of spending more than you’d like. Costs can quickly add up when you’re getting married, after all. Once you’ve got a set sum in your mind, then you’ll be able to get to work. You can have a great wedding with a small or big budget; it’s just if it’s smaller, then you’ll need to do a bit more work to find deals. Off-Season Weddings Looking for an easy way to save a ton of money on your wedding? Look at holding your ceremony in the off-season. Most people want to get married during the warm summer months, and this results in higher costs since venues know that they can charge more and someone will pay the cost. If you get married before or after the summer, you could save thousands on venues, catering, and photographers. In any case, getting married in fall or winter isn’t a lowlier alternative; there’s a lot of charm in getting married in the snow, after all! Buying the Essentials There are some things that you’ll need in order to have a classic wedding, such as rings, dresses, wedding invitations, and so on. But it’s important to remember that you can always find ways to avoid overspending without having any dip in quality. For your rings, you could look at diamonds for sale and then get them set within a ring. For your dresses, you can wait for a big sale, which will be much cheaper than going to a boutique wedding dress shop. And for things like your invitations, you can just do them yourself — you don’t need to pay someone else to make them! Limit the Number of Guests Finally, you can seriously reduce the overall cost of your wedding by reducing the number of guests that you have attending. Each guest could add anywhere from $50 – 200 to your bill, so the fewer guests you have, the cheaper it’ll be. Think about who you really want to have at your wedding to celebrate your big day with you, and then keep it at that number. You’ll save money and have your nearest and dearest there to witness your big day. Perfect!
Free Kid’s Smart Watch or Phone
Disclosure: Totally free to you, but an affiliate link helps me to earn a small fee. Yes, these are FREE, but only through the evening of the 29th! So, check it out now~ Free SmartPhone or SmartWatch Giveaway Get the world’s safest kids smart device, FREE. Keep your kids protected while staying connected this school year with Gabb Wireless! GO HERE
Living Frugally During the Cost of Living Crisis
Money is tight for many of us and a lot of people are currently tightening their purse strings to get by. This is fine and it’s important that we all do what it takes to ensure that we can pay our bills and stay out of debt right now. But what can you do to help yourself financially that you might not have thought about right now? Here are a few suggestions that might come in useful for you! Insure Your Belongings When people cut costs, one of the first things to go tends to be insurance. They may think that they’ve never claimed on their policy, so they simply don’t need it and would rather run the risk than fork out the monthly insurance premium. But this is a mistake. You never know when problems may strike and it’s always better to be insured so that you can easily replace your belongings. During a cost of living crisis, chances are, you’re not going to have the funds set aside to replace a kitchen appliance or other costly household items. You also want to hold onto things like life insurance if you have dependents – just in case. Of course, there are ways to save when it comes to insurance. Use price comparison sites to compare different providers, their policies and their prices. You may be able to find a better deal. If you do, your current provider might even price match to keep you as a customer. Opt for a Used Car A lot of us spend a lot of money on car leases, car finance agreements, and more. If you’ve got your car on credit or a finance agreement, you may want to consider handing it back at the next opportunity in your contract and considering a used car instead. Sure, having a new luxury car is desirable. But you can often find that a second hand car will perform just as well for a much lower price tag. Of course, if you’re buying used, you need to make sure that you’re using a reliable dealer like edmunds. Finding a dealer with good reviews for both new and used cars can give you faith in them to only provide you with something of good quality that will stand the test of time. Reduce Luxury Spending Sure, nobody likes to cut out the things that they enjoy. But if you’re finding that life’s luxuries are digging you into debt, it’s time to cut them out, at least for now. This will place less pressure on you when it comes to paying for the things that matter and the things that you are contracted to pay. This could range from healthy food to kids’ school trips to finance agreements. You’re really going to need to prioritise what’s most important right now. Nobody likes cutting back, but it’s important to stay out of debt where possible during times like this – as we’re all unlikely to have the spare money to pay the debts back as agreed. Keep the information above in mind and it should help you down the line!