Week 2 of summer holidays – Low Spend Week
We are already a third of the way through the summer holiday! And after an expensive first week we made the second week a low spend week. I have gone back to tracking every bit of spend and reviewing it at the end of each day.
Money and the summer holidays is a tricky one, there are lots of ideas out there for freebie ideas to keep the kids happy. But I don’t know about you but my kids always asks to do things that cost money, trampoline park, swimming, cinema. It was hard to say No. I didn’t want to say no. The mum guilt sets in and we ended up going to the cinema on Friday of last week.
Low Spend Week
Luckily last week our friends were not yet on holiday so we had a few days with play dates. The best free way to keep the kids amused and they get to see their friends. We did this 3/5 days and including lots of baking in those days too! We had to pop into Stevenage one day for a few errands. I had some things that I needed from Wilko and hair dye. I save a lot of money each year dying my hair myself! £4.50 for a permanent packet hair dye rather than £40 at the hairdressers, I need to redo it every 6 weeks due to extreme grey growth. I am not ready to embrace the grey at 42:-(
We also discovered the £1.95 Wilko meal deal, sandwich, walkers crisps and a bottle of water for £1.95. Bargain and way cheaper than any other meal deal. I know it would have been free if we had brought food from home, but we didn’t. I do love Wilko for bargains. They have a load of craft stuff if that interests you. I love crafting, but my boys are not as keen.
Looking back Mon to Fri I managed to spend just £100. This is a good week for us! This included three birthdays so £45 given to friends with gifts. £20 at the cinema, £15 at the Co-op, £10 at the Unikorn shop. £10 at Wilko.
Cinema Tickets
I often mention Kidspass in this Monday Money post and rave about their discounts. Using my Kidspass means that I can get 1 adult and 3 children’s cinema tickets for £21. Quite the bargain. You can try out Kidspass for £1 for a month, why not sign up and see if you like it? You can always cancel after the month is up;-) Use this link to get your first month for £1. After the initial trial period it is £2.99 per month.
Its not just cinema tickets there are discounts for days out and food. Kids can eat for half price or for free with this app. I mainly use it for cheap cinema tickets though!
To save some cash we took in a tub of Co-op ice-cream, that was big enough for three of us, plus some jelly babies on offer for £1 for Jack. Bargain.
UK Money Bloggers Giveaway
Its time for another huge UK Money Blogger giveaway and this time we have a huge prize bundle. We have five £50 M&S hampers plus 1 runner up £20 hamper. There are tons of ways to enter by following a list of bloggers on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Hop on over and get your entries in to be in with a chance of winning. I would loe one of my followers to win:-). Here is the post, just go to the Rafflecopter link at bottom of post to submit your entries.
Does completing Questionnaires Make Money?
I have always doubted that this was a good way of making money. I have tried it in the past and spent 20 minutes doing a questionnaire that has earned me 50p. No thanks. Anyway Zarina Macha, now a regular feature write on Mrs Mummypenny did some investigation for me. She signed up to five different questionnaire sites to see if indeed they did make her any money. Read more here, some were good, some not so good!
Kylie & Brighton Pride
Ending with a fun weekend. I am calling the summer of 2019, the summer of fun. I am arranging things that the boys will love, and things that I love. And this weekend I went to Brighton Pride. I have never been before and with the headliner of Kylie I was right there.
My partner in crime was Neilboy of course. We paid £100 each for golden circle tickets and we were so glad that we did. There were SOOOO many people. Too many if I am honest. The sheer volume of people caused a lot of issues. Queues and lack of mobile coverage and wifi. The card machines stopped working at around 7pm. There was a cash machine on site that first charged £3 for a withdrawal, also the queue was around two hours at the point I joined.
Everyone was raging, and I mean really angry. I was chatting a very lovely pub manager in the queue, customer experience is his job and he was beyond angry. I am expecting alot of complaints will happen. Anyway a long while later I eventually for some cash, and bought 10 bottles of rose (each bottle was 187ml;-) for £60 to keep us going for the rest of the night.
Anyways the music was great, Kylie was amazing, a true super star and very lovely person. And we were super close in the golden circle that wasn’t crowded. She did a similar show to the Glasto show if you saw that, that was made me book the tickets to Brighton pride! We really enjoyed it.
We did a runner as soon as she ended, or when played Locomotion, as I cant stand that song and pelted it to Brighton train station to get the train to London which in turn would mean we could both get our last trains home. Oh and BTW I used my network rail card to get my return ticket for just £16!
I will let you if I succeed in get any money back for the worst organisation of a festival ever. It was such a shocker going from a wonderfully organised cash-less festival, Standon Calling the weekend before to this.
This post contains affiliate links, if you click on the link and purchase I will receive a fee, but this in no way affects the price you pay.
