Lock in fuel savings and make them last!

Our household has found a super easy way to make the most of cheap fuel prices. We watch the fuel cycles with the ACCC petrol price cycles website (https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/petrol-diesel-lpg/petrol-price-cycles). When it is getting to the lowest point of the cycle, as well as our vehicle, we also fill up five 20 litre fuel containers. If it is inconvenient to do so, we prepay and lock in the fuel price on both of our phones on the 7/11 app. This guarantees that locked price for seven days. We then use that fuel through the next 3-4 weeks (the length of the fuel cycle generally). It's like having our own petrol station at home!

Fuel containers cost around $20-$25 at BCF and the savings per cycle paid for each container. Now it's pure savings of $30 per cycle. Petrol works out around $520 per year less for us, for very little effort! At first, my husband was concerned that the fuel may not last (he is a qualified mechanic), but I showed him some tests BP had done on this matter, finding that six months later, the values were still the same. We notice zero difference in fuel consumption, km/L, or parts wearing out any faster.

Everyone we tell thinks this is an amazing idea, we find it strange that no one else seems to have thought of it!

No more shopping lists with free app

We have eliminated paper shopping lists by using a free app called Our Groceries. You can link the app via entering one email address, so everyone who does the shopping at your house has the up to date grocery list at any time. The best thing is, you can customise the list to be very specific about what you want. There is a paid version of the app but we have been successfully using the free version and love it. No more wasted paper and no more forgetting things as the list is always with us!

14 meals from one chicken!

Imagine getting 14 meals out of a single cooked chicken! It's my biggest food saving and this is how I do it.

Buy a whole chicken (on special of course)! Get a large pot. Place chicken in it and add chunky chopped carrot, onion, celery and mixed herbs (I grow my own so save more money here)!

Boil until the meat is starting to fall off the bone (I have a wood heater so I cook on that, saving gas in winter) Take the meat and vegetables out, reserving the liquid. Serve some of the meat and all the vegetables with mashed potato and white sauce.

With leftover meat, make up some chicken sandwiches and freeze them for quick lunches. Use the rest in curries or whatever other suitable recipes you have.

Back to the liquid. Add a little more water, chop up whatever soup vegetables you have or add lots of lentils, a dash of paprika and salt and slowly simmer to make a few meals of wonderful thick soup. This way, I feed two of us 14 meals out of the one chicken! Not only is it cheap, it is good for you and has helped the purse strings through many tight times over the years.

Devious savings

Changing circumstances and a growing familly all added up to us paying a whole lot less off our mortgage than we would have liked. Pretty soon we would have started to go backwards. It was crunch time!

Using the Simple Savings calendar I identified our most expensive habits, and was astounded to see the amount of money that could have been saved. Our grocery bill was always around $200 or more per week. This amount did not include meat or bread that we get from the butchers and bakery.The trouble was, my husband loved all the expensive name brands for items such as chocolate biscuits, lollies and savoury snacks and was convinced that the cheaper or no name products would be tastless and boring. Week after week I would just automatically reach for these items, without even glancing at the alternatives. I knew as soon as my husband saw the packaging, the goods would remain in the pantry unopened, and he would then go and buy the brand name items anyway.

One week I kept mentioning to him that I was going to do a big clean up of the pantry and I was finally going to utilise all those assorted Tuppaware containers that I had never used. That week I substituted his expensive brand of snack foods with cheaper versions, emptied them into the assorted airtight containers and threw the plain packaging out before he could see them!

I also applied this technique to several other items; I would fill cheaper dishwashing liquid into Morning Fresh bottles, no-name hand wash into saved Palmolive dispensers, you get the picture. Our grocery bill went down from $200 to $140 per week - a saving of $240 a month!

When I finally fessed up to what I had been doing, my husband admitted that most of the snacks were just as good as the name brands, you just have to try a few out. All it took was some creative (OK, and somewhat deceitful) way to present the changes, but we have never looked back. Why would we, with a saving of $3120 a year? Plus of course, one very neat pantry!