Can you believe we are in the last week of September already. No, me either. I am happy to say that we have had a fairly productive, frugal and thrifty time this month. Here are our five frugal things for this month.

• Free books.I can often be found perusing the pages of Freegle and Freecycle looking for things we can make use of. Things that previous owners have fallen out of love with. I took a chance on asking for a pile of pre-school books and I’m so glad I did. It turned out to be a huge box of books suitable for both the children with titles that were on my ‘to-buy’ list all in fantastic condition. There was also a little surprise of a Leap Frog write and learn toy which Daisy hasn’t put down. Daisy also brought home a free book from school from BookTrust which was nice.

• Less Waste. I really wanted to focus on waste and as Zero Waste Week falls in September. I thought it was the perfect time to make a conscious decision to reduce our household waste. I’ve been cooking exactly the right portion sizes, buying the exact amount of fresh produce we need for a week. Recycling as much as we possibly can. I used to be guilty of putting gallons of milk on my cereals then tipping it away. I’ve been using a lot less and it’s saved us money as we don’t need to buy milk as often as we were.

• Budgeting. We had a lot of events and celebrations to attend this month which could have gotten quite expensive. We sat down at the beginning of September and wrote a budget which we have stuck to. Sometimes we have even come in under budget which is fantastic.

• Online Earning. Although I’ve not been hammering the surveys as much as I would have liked I still earned a nice little pile of money and vouchers. I’ve put them towards Birthday and Christmas presents meaning that we don’t have to dip into Chris’s wages which is always a bonus.

•  Selling Stuff. After having a good old declutter we were left with a few things to sell. We donate most of our unwanted’s to a local charity shop. They use the profits to support people back to work. Which I think is such a worthy cause. We sold a couple of things on Facebook selling pages and used the money towards a day out. I’m going to use Gumtree for the things that are yet to sell.