I’ve always been careful with money. I don’t spend recklessly and I love a bargain, but I do enjoy a good lifestyle and would like to keep as much of my money as possible to spend on nice things and great experiences.
We do ok as a household, we both work and earn about the average, but we are by no means flush with cash. Plus, because we chose to spend big on the house, our mortgage is horrendous 🙈
This has led me to find as many ways as possible to squeeze every last penny out of our monthly income and make them count. And you know what? I found a way to save £166.16 a month without really sacrificing anything. Or should I say, I found lots of little ways to save £166.16 a month.
This isn’t one of those articles that’s going to tell you to stop buying expensive coffee or eat fewer avocados. It’s about training yourself to have a money saving mindset that leaves you financially better off without you even realising. I have done it myself. It’s about taking lots of easy wins and seeing them add up to one big win.
Looking after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves, as my Nana used to say.
Why “It’s Only A Few Quid” Thinking Keeps You Stuck
I have friends who are the personification of the phrase “It’s only a few quid”. In fact, this applies to most of my friends.
I swear they are the easiest bunch of people to upsell. Do they want express delivery for an extra £1.70? Yeah why not, it’s only a few quid. Do they want it gift wrapped for an additional £3.00? Yeah why not, it’s only a few quid. Do they want to upgrade their meal to a large for £2.50 more? Yeah why not, it’s only a few quid.
These are the same people that tell me month after month that “money is really tight at the moment”, and complain about the cost of living. Well yeah, the cost of living like you lot is expensive 😂
I’m not being mean, these people are my friends, but they are an excellent example of a money mentality that keeps you skint. So often, when people think about cutting back or saving money, they look at the big stuff. Change the car, skip a holiday, etc. What if they simply stopped being so frivolous with their small change? What if they learned the value in saving £1, not just in saving £100?
One important thing to say before I get into the numbers: the £166.16 figure isn’t meant to capture every single penny we save. It’s just the stuff I can put a fairly solid monthly number on.
There are lots of other small changes we’ve made that save loads of money, but those vary so much from household to household that it’s impossible to give a meaningful monthly figure. Think of the £166.16 as the measurable saving. The mindset stuff sits on top of that.
Easy Savings No One Ever Thinks Of
Think you’re already doing everything you can? I bet there’s more.
If you are the sort of person who doesn’t have an expensive car lease, or the newest phone every year, or a wardrobe full of designer gear you are still paying for on Klarna (seriously, if you do this then stop), then read on.
I don’t know your specific situation so I can’t give you specific advice, but I can tell you some of the things that we have done in our house. I’ll go through them one by one, and tell you how much we saved so you can see how I got to my £166.16 saving.
FYI: Where the saving is weekly, I have multiplied it by 4.3 because 52 weeks in a year divided by 12 months is 4.3333333 🤓🎓
Reduced The Sky Bill
Sky is a luxury, I know. I’m leading with this to get it out of the way.
In terms of haggling your bills down, Sky are actually one of the easiest companies to do battle with, so if you have a Sky subscription you could start there. One thing we also had, was a multi-room option that was costing us £5 per month. But we generally only watch TV in one room, the other is mainly for the Xbox, so we cancelled multi-room.
Monthly Saving = £5
Car Charging Frequency
We have an electric car and are on an EV tariff with Octopus Energy, who have a 6 hour window of super cheap electricity between 11.30pm and 5.30am. We were running the battery down then charging it to full once a week, but that would take longer than the 6 hours the cheap energy window was open for. So some of the charge would be at the cheap rate, but some would not.
So, we started plugging it in more often even though the battery was still half full, so 100% of our charge was within the cheap energy window. Our smart meter tells us we save an average of £6 per week doing this.
Monthly Saving: £25.80
Timing Our Appliances
Similar to the above, but for our washing machine, dishwasher, and tumble dryer.
All of these appliances can be set to come on after a delay. So we get them ready before we go up to bed, and they do their thing while we are asleep.
Everyone’s appliances are different, but running a washing machine, dishwasher and tumble dryer five times a week uses roughly 150 kWh of electricity a month. At a typical daytime rate of around 28p per kWh, that costs about £41.84 per month. If those same appliances are run overnight at a cheaper 7p per kWh, the cost drops to roughly £10.46.
Monthly Saving = £31.38
Netflix and Disney+ With Ads
Netflix went up to £12.99 per month for the standard subscription, but that comes down to £5.99 with ads. Similarly, Disney+ is £9.99 per month for the standard subscription or £5.99 with ads.
We have two kids so cancelling them is not an option, but there are no ads on the kids profiles anyway and me and my fella can deal with adverts. We were born before the internet for goodness sake, we lived through the dial up era and had to rewind VHS tapes – ads are nothing compared to that! 😂🤪
Monthly Saving: = £11.00
Meat Free Mondays
I’ve written about Meat Free Mondays on this site before. I even have a few recipe suggestions in there too.
Meat is expensive, and we are a family of four, so cutting out meat once a week makes more of a difference than we first thought. We sometimes go meat free two nights a week, but for today’s purposes let’s just call it one.
I worked out this in an average £4 saving per meal per week.
Monthly Saving = £17.20
Use a Slow Cooker
A typical electric oven uses around 2.5 kWh per hour, so cooking a meal for an hour costs roughly 70p at 28p per kWh. A slow cooker uses closer to 0.25 kWh per hour. Even running it for six hours only uses around 1.5 kWh, costing about 42p.
We use ours about 3 times a week saving 28p per meal. It’s not huge, but is a million times easier, and the food usually tastes better slow cooked too.
Monthly Saving = £3.61
Reduce Water Temperature
Most boilers have the hot water temperature set too high. Every time you run a tap, have a shower or wash up, you end up mixing cold water in to make it usable. In other words, you’re paying to heat the water hotter than you ever actually use it.
We turned the hot water temperature down slightly on the boiler. Not cold, not lukewarm, just less extreme. Showers feel exactly the same. Baths are just as hot. Washing up hasn’t changed at all.
The difference is that the boiler now uses less energy to heat every litre of water. Easy win.
Monthly Saving = £3.00
Cash Back Bank Account
We have been using the same joint account for household bills since forever. So recently, we checked out what was available and found a Nationwide account that will pay us cashback on our household bills.
We’re paying them anyway, so if we can get a bit of free money for paying them via one account over another, why wouldn’t we?
It’s not a huge amount, but it all helps.
Monthly Saving = £5
Downgraded Broadband
People never want to do this. However, if you are paying for the fastest possible broadband there is, you are probably wasting your money. We were.
We had super fast with bells on whatever it’s called, but ten years ago we had whatever the fastest used to be, and it was fine. So why did we upgrade?
We downgraded to a slower speed, and guess what? We can’t tell the difference. We stream all the time, both work from home a lot, my eldest has started downloading games, and it’s great. I don’t think most people need the very fastest internet speeds. It’s a bit like buying a MacBook if all you use it for is going on Instagram. Total waste of money.
Monthly Saving = £30
Pay Council Tax Over 12 Months
Did you know you can pay your council tax bill over 12 months instead of 10? You can. You just need to contact your council to arrange it.
Our monthly bill was £205 over 10 months, so we had it reduced to £170.83 a month over 12 months instead. I suppose this one is about cash flow more than money saving, because this doesn’t reduce the annual bill, it just smooths it out.
Monthly Saving = £34.17
The Mindset Savings You Can’t Easily Measure
There are loads of other savings you can make but they can be hard to put a monthly figure on.
For example, I shop for clothes almost exclusively on Vinted these days. Some months I don’t buy anything, but some months I spend quite a lot. Add to this different people’s needs and tastes in fashion and it isn’t possible to come up with a monthly figure in terms of savings, but it’s a lot.
I also have a core group of food products I always buy as home brands, like tuna and baked beans. Things that really are indistinguishable from their more expensive branded counterparts. We also buy refills where possible (hand soap, washing up liquid) which saves a few quid each per month. This leaves us roughly £50 a month better off. That’s massive!
At the other end, you can buy in bulk to save a pound or two a month on each item. Buying the biggest packs of loo roll saves us about £2 per month, for example, and we take this approach with other things too. Bulk buy savings might only add up to maybe a tenner a month, but I hope you can see that scalping these tiny savings in lots of places creates a significant saving overall.
So work on your money saving mindset and take every easy opportunity to cut your costs. You won’t feel the difference in your day to day life, but you will definitely feel it in your pocket 🫰💵