A frugal life is an easy life!

You are on your way to work, maybe you are sat in traffic or watching the same old faces get on and off the bus, as you all join the conveyor belt of life, all dreaming of the weekend or, more common in 2009, a single day off.

• Was this what you dreamed of when you were a child?
• Is this how you saw yourself after all those endless hours of exams and homework?
• How much are you paying each month to travel to and from work?
• How much of your life do you think is wasted in this way?

Perhaps you have come across this website, whilst online, searching for some advice on getting your bank charges back. You have a customer complaint about a company and you are sick of running around, wasting yet more of your time trying to sort it out?

I was just like you!
What's life all about? Why am I spending hours in traffic going to the same old job? Where does my money go every month? Why do my bills increase faster than my wages?
Reading stories about health and safety stopping people from doing things, where did all the fun in life go?

I might not be alive tomorrow, if I looked down from above would I have had a good life? I doubt it... so I changed!

I changed everything, moved to part time work, doing a job I thought I'd enjoy. Juggled all my bills around, so I pay them when I want, without interest or charges, that line the pockets of suits hidden away behind desks, who have three holidays a year whilst I struggle on.
I started cooking for myself, I started growing my own fruit and veg in the garden, I started sourcing locally grown produce and meat.
Family became the focus (it was before, but now even more so) friends who needed a hand, or jobs doing that they couldn't afford to shell out huge sums of money for so called "experts" to do.

I go out in the rain and the snow. I play many sports. I pick fresh fruit I find locally. I bicycle now and again. I reuse things, I refuse outright to pay over the top prices, etc, I point out rip offs and so called sales that are nothing of the kind.
I am thrifty, frugal, call it what you will, I don't have much money in my pocket, because I don't need it!

I eat healthier than I have ever done, I laugh much more, I get help when I need it, I have more friends and more fun.
Does this sound appealing?

Why don't you join in then :D

MORE:
More about frugal ways website really, but worthy of a mention on here.

As frugal ways slowly grows, with each posting, picture or comment from you, so the linking from other websites grows with it.
How does frugal ways differ from every other blog/forum website out there on the topic of being thrifty/frugal?

This website was set up for and always will be a vehicle, for sharing ways of being frugal.
It is not here to make profits for me (the website is not very frugal for myself, as I am paying out each month to pay for the webspace).
I don't believe in google ads, etc.
I could post every day of the week about "a great new offer from...." - I do not, simply because many of the offers I receive are not genuine offers at all!

Free delivery if you spend over £40 on any given day, does not sound like good value to me. If a company are encouraging you to shop on their website, then ALL deliveries should be free, ALL the time.
It's not like their delivery costs are not factored into their pricing, which I always get told when I ask why prices of items are so high. Of course this is complete rubbish. The ryan air approach of breaking down each individual cost factor and making profit on each one is a retail joke that the British public are getting sick and tired of.

I'm absolutely rubbish at SEO, I have no time for "marketing" - which I find most websites and forums do so often.
Contrary to marketing techniques, I block many websites (as spam) each month, which appear to the untrained eye, as genuine forums/websites that have the individual's interests at heart, linking to frugal ways, to get a link back in return and strengthen their own google ranking.
On closer inspection of these websites, a very different picture emerges.
One website forum on the topic of being "a place for people who live and used to live in [insert your own town here] to chat and share information about the area" copied so many ideas of my own, it has whole sections and topics that are identical to a former website of mine, actually raises (according to its owner's own seperate posts) around £3000 a year, it says, "to maintain server costs and keep the web forum running" - complete and utter rubbish of course.

I hope one day frugal ways will generate more tips and tricks for all of us to use, but if it doesn't, then I will continue to use it as a vehicle to improve and question things that I come across.