Adopting a frugal life, becoming more independent and relying less on others to provide for you every need results in an industrious life and the need to develop a broad skill set.

To some this may seem tiresome, after all why learn to cook when you can buy ready-made, why learn to mend clothes when it’s so cheap to buy new ones, why clean your own home when you can hire someone to do it for you.

To others like myself, a life of independence is not only something to work towards, but something to take joy in and something to be proud of. We reject to some degree the modern lifestyle of convenience, specialisation and cheap, readily available commodities and yet embrace the modern notion that life is all about continuous learning.

Below is a list of skills, some of which I would consider essential, others less essential for a frugal life. What frugal skills would you add?

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I’m in the market for some new bath towels. The plush, once white, wedding gift towels have grown a crop of mould like I’ve never seen, and it just keeps getting worse. It can’t be healthy. Moral of the story: don’t leave towels on the line in the rain for three days. 

I’ve tried everything to clean these towels: washing them in bleach, soaking them in bleach, rinsing them in tea tree oil, rinsing them in vinegar, hanging them in direct sunlight over the summer… all no good.

To me, towels are one of those items that are worth spending a bit more money and investing in quality. Quality towels dry better, are softer and last longer. You also don’t need to worry about good towels going rough and stiff. I have been waiting for the brand I know is good to go on sale, but after doing some research on what makes a good towel, I think I can venture out and look for other brand bargains.

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Of course, if I’d planned ahead and had been more organised, I wouldn’t have been standing in my underwear, grating soap at six o’clock in the morning. And if I had read my menu plan stuck right there on the fridge I would have remembered to defrost the mince this morning and we wouldn’t be eating Dominos.

So many aspects of being frugal require planning ahead and being organised.

Take shopping for example. Finding the best bargains means knowing what you need in advance before it runs out and waiting / shopping around for the best price.

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I’ve always had a fascination with ants. Did you know that they farm fungi underground and that they can lift 20 times their own weight? Did you know that they love cat food? And cheese? No, neither did I until they invaded our kitchen.

Oh, they come for other crumbs inadvertently left behind, but they swarm for the food kitty flicks all over the floor and the cheese grater waiting to be washed.

As far as pests go, I don’t mind ants too much. However, in the days leading up to the wet season and throughout summer, the kitchen invasion becomes too much to ignore.

A few ideas that I found on dealing with ants naturally:

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I like being productive. The best days are ones where I feel like I have ‘achieved something’. If I’m feeling down, the number one pick-me-up is to get something done. It’s a control thing probably.

When I was in the workforce, I became obsessed with the study of time management. If there is a book written on the subject, then I’ve probably read it (and made notes).

Now full time with infant and COO of our household, the time management skills that I used at work are even more useful now.

Previously I wrote about having a tidy house without effort – well that was pre-baby, pre-sleep deprived days. Now that I have less time, I find that I get more done. I think because I have less excuses to be lazy (and I prioritise more). These are some of the things that I do (and am trying to implement) to get through the thousand things that each day brings.

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I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling the heat this summer. We live in South-East QLD without air conditioning and I’m 33 weeks pregnant. Mostly the temperature has sat around 30°C (86°F) since the beginning of November, apart from the few days it was up closer to 40°C (104°F). And it’s humid, very humid.

So how do you keep cool while keeping your electricity bill and your carbon footprint down? You could avoid the heat as much as you can by going to the shops or local library (and work is usually air conditioned) but here are some tips for staying cool at home.

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Have you seen the Glad Wrap ad lately? The one where Julie from Masterchef covers her potato salad with cling wrap and then puts it on the table. Then the family immediately sits down to eat but not before the cling wrap saves the day by protecting the salad from a wayward cricket ball?

What happens to the cling wrap when dinner is finished? Thrown in the bin?

I think I’ve said this before, but our disposable mentality is kind of funny, except that it has a serious ramification. Waste.

I mean, we pay good money to buy something that we use only once, then throw it away so that we can go out and spend more money buying exactly the same item again to use once and so on…

And we wonder why we have no money. Does this seem ridiculous to you? Apart from a few valid exceptions, surely it makes more financial and environmental sense to steer clear of disposables and save money on our food storage. I think the two whole extra minutes (or less) it takes to wash up a container or a baggie is worth it.

So when storing food in the fridge or freezer, what are some alternatives to using plastic cling wrap?

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We have been doing a lot of decluttering lately. I’ve been going through everything in the house, every cupboard, drawer, box, nook and cranny clearing out stuff and generally getting things in order and making room for our new addition.

We have been living in this house for nearly 3 years now. Some of our cupboards are packed the same way as when I first shoved things in them after we moved. Some cupboards desperately needed cleaning. The cupboard under the bathroom sink was full of gecko poo and I chucked out a lot of old out of date stuff from my pre-natural only days.

I love decluttering. It’s cathartic and invigorating. I read once that a cluttered house is a cluttered mind and by decluttering your possessions, you are also clearing away the cobwebs in your mind. That’s how I feel. Less burdened by stuff.

Some people rent storage units for their extra stuff. Our local storage centre has an ad up starting at $80 per month for a storage unit. That’s nearly $1,000 a year to store stuff you probably won’t ever look at again.

To make more room, there are a few steps that we took to deal with our ‘stuff’.

1. Sell it

We sold an old telly through our local paper for $100. This should be just about enough to buy a cot – second hand from the local paper.

I also have stuff on eBay, but I am finding that I’m having better success selling through the local rag than on eBay (and it’s free whereas eBay and PayPal aren’t.)

Selling unwanted items is a great way to get rid of things that you don’t need or want anymore, while making a few extra bob on the side. If you have a lot of stuff, you could consider having a garage sale.

The surprise benefit of selling your stuff is that you meet new people. I met a lovely person last week when we sold her something and she told me all the good places to get second hand baby clothes.

2. Donate it

Whatever wasn’t worth selling, we are giving away. I’ve finally decided to part with about 100 cooking magazines that I collected in my spendthrift days but no longer read. I did harvest a few recipes from them that I thought I might like, but someone else will get some use out of the mags, which is better than them sitting in a cupboard. As well as mags, we cleared out clothes and books and stationary and kitchenware, whatever we didn’t want but was in good condition.

3. Bin it

The rest of the stuff we didn’t want that didn’t meet donate standard got either recycled or trashed.

Old clothes, towels, sheets etc got recycled into rags. I kept some old towels to cut up into baby wipes and I’m repurposing some sheets no longer in sets as cot sheets by cutting them up and rehemming them. We also recycled and old PC tower and whatever else could be.

The rest went.

4. Get creative with storage solutions

With everything that we kept, it all got a rethink. Where is the best place to store things? As a lot of our stuff was just placed willy nilly when we moved in, I’ve been thinking about more logical places to store things. I also thought about how I use things. If I found myself going from one end of the house to another collecting items for a project, then I stored these things together.

We stored some things up in the roof particularly empty boxes for the next time that we move. Hopefully rats don’t nest in these. Other things like winter clothes we stored in suitcases under the bed.

5. Stack and Pack

I have found so much more space in the cupboards just by organising things better. For example, sheet sets that we don’t use but keep in case of visitors, got folded and stored in a pillow slip to keep the set together and prevent sheets from slipping out of the cupboard when things get pulled out.

In order to keep things organised and tidy in the future, I’ve tried to make the items we use frequently accessible and as easy to put away as possible, otherwise things get jumbled back into cupboards higgledy-piggledy. The items that we don’t use often are packed in quite tightly.

We have a lot of stuff like school memorabilia, college year books, photo albums and letters etc that we don’t want to get rid of, but they don’t need to be accessible either. I’ve packed all of this kind of stuff into boxes and stuck a piece of paper on the box with the list of contents, and stacked the boxes away label facing outward, so if we want something in the future, we will be able to find it easily.

All in all, not only have we freed up more space, we’ve made things easier to get to, easier to put away and easier to use. Now I just have to stay organised. Oh, and I’ve got more room for new stuff – just kidding.

Yesterday was cleaning day. Lately I feel that there is a lot to do and I’m running out of time, even though the birth of our first bub is not until February next year. The curtains need cleaning, the bedding needs washing, the cupboards need emptying, the windows need washing, I want to pull out furniture and vacuum in long forgotten corners.

But there is only so much energy in one day. Yesterday I got down and hand scrubbed the kitchen floor. We have porous tiles and stains in the texture don’t come out with regular mopping. By the end of that I was pooped. Time for a nap – the rest can wait until tomorrow.

Over the years I have read a lot of books about time management. I remember reading about one pioneer Frank Gilberth, who spent a good deal of his life working out how to do everyday activities in the most efficient way possible by reducing the number of movements (not always the best idea  – I read once that he tried it with simple things like shaving and found that the time it took to clean up the shaving cuts outweighed the time saved shaving with the least amount of strokes!)

I usually try to think about how I can do everyday tasks with the least amount of steps, or in the least amount of time. This applies particularly to housework. Who wants to spend all their time cleaning?

I have found over the years that there is no right or wrong way to be most efficient. When it comes to cleaning, the most efficient way of getting the house clean can really depend on the layout of your house. When we move house, the way I clean changes and adapts. We live in a two storey townhouse now, so the most efficient way that I have found to clean is downstairs first then upstairs while the kitchen floor is drying. I try to clean with the least amount of stair climbing. Efficient, but not necessarily a good workout! In other houses I used to do all the dusting, then all the vacuuming etc. For others, it might be more efficient to do one room at a time as suggested in the book Speed Cleaning.

Some things make more sense than others. Tidying up a room before cleaning makes dusting and vacuuming easier. Dusting before vacuuming means that you can wipe stuff onto the floor and vacuum it up. I usually vacuum out the bath before cleaning it, to get rid of all the hair. Carrying a basket around to pick up things that belong in other rooms and depositing them when you get there saves running back and forth.

What has this got to do with being frugal? By doing things in the most efficient way we are saving time, leaving more time for more important things. Sometimes we opt for expensive conveniences because we run out of time. Efficiency is a great way to conserve both time and energy. And it is a practice that can be used not only with the housework but with all less than fun tasks.

Do I work like this all the time? No. Sometimes it is relaxing doing things at a leisurely pace and enjoying the moment (even if it is washing up!). It can be grounding and satisfying. But mostly I like to get the chores out of the way and move onto much more interesting stuff.

Photo by playing with brushes

Doing the laundry is one of those repetitive weekly chores that can eat into the budget. However, there are many ways to reduce the cost of laundry. These are some of the ways that we use to save money and time doing the laundry.

1. Use less detergent

Try experimenting with the amount of powder that you use with your washing. Often the recommended amount has more to do with marketing than getting clothes washed. In fact as little as 1 tablespoon per full load can be just as affective at washing clothes as a full scoop, and you avoid residue problems and excess detergent clogging up in your machine.

Depending on what I wash and how soiled it is, I use between 1 tablespoon to 1/4 cup of detergent and find that this is just as effective as using a full scoop.

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