Mummy on a budget...

I don't know about you, but I find paying for everything that children need on small budget takes more than a little bit of planning.

We don't have a lot of spare cash each month, and that's fine, we're perfectly happy and we get by.  When I look back at my old life I can't work out where all my money used to go?  Having a disposable income seems to be a thing of the past and little treats for myself, a few pairs of shoes to cheer myself up or new dress every week, maybe a couple of takeaways if we're feeling lazy, well, they're all distant memories!

But I'm not complaining, I get quite a lot of satisfaction from actively seeking out good deals and saving money where we can.   Before Wiggles' was born I did quite a lot of research into finding the best possible price for nappies, because they're not something you can do without really are they?  I always knew that we would be going down the disposable route, for us it just isn't practical to use cloth nappies.  We share part of our house with my parents and my brother, one of the rooms we share is the utility room which houses the washing machine and the tumble drier.  Our allocated wash days are Tuesdays and Thursdays with access at the weekend for emergency washes....all very regimented, but we know where we are with that!  With this in mind there was no way I wanted to have to live with buckets of smelly nappies potentially hanging around from Thursday until Tuesday, no thank you!

Wiggles is now a whole year old and I would say on average she uses approximately 5 - 6 nappies a day.  Sometimes more, sometimes less.  Back in the day when Biscuit was a baby we would buy our nappies from the supermarket and we would choose what ever was the best offer.  This meant we used a lot of a different brands of nappies and to be honest, most of these were fine.  The only downside was that because our little girl slept through from quite an early age we needed an overnight nappy that could cope without being changed for anything up to twelve hours.  Most brands are alright at this, but my personal favourite brand was always Pampers.

On a side note whilst researching this post I discovered that you can no longer buy Huggies nappies in the UK or Ireland, I'd missed that one!  I can't really understand why Huggies would suddenly stop selling nappies as they always seemed to be a popular brand, but there you go. I believe they're still making Pull Ups, Swim Pants and wipes so they've not disappeared entirely.  We used some free Huggies Newborn nappies when Wiggles was born so it must be a fairly recent thing....

Anyhoo.....I would find that we spent a lot more on nappies by buying them from the supermarket as there wasn't always a good offer available.  Plus I almost never come out having only bought nappies, usually something else will have found its way into my basket and these unnecessary expenses can really add up.

Following a lot of research we've switched from buying supermarket nappies to having them delivered through Amazon's Subscribe and Save service.  The difference it makes is incredible!  They're the cheapest by far at £13.71 for 132 nappies (we use size four).  They are delivered to the door for no extra charge, so I save on petrol and I don't end up buying anything that I don't need. I can set the delivery schedule so that they're delivered every month, or at any other interval that suits and I don't have to think about it, I know we'll never run out.

We've just discovered that we can also get Wiggles' baby formula through Subscribe and Save as well, she has Hipp Organic Follow On Milk, which has worked really well for us, and having it delivered this way recently saved us an amazing £3 PER BOX!  Although annoying this has recently gone up a little again, Amazon prices do tend to fluctuate a little occasionally, but it's still a lot cheaper there than the shops.  You can also bulk buy Ella's kitchen pouches, vitamins and all sorts of other things, even coffee, so it's very much worth a butchers!

This isn't a sponsored post,  I am just really, really cheap!  Anything that saves us money completely wins my vote!  Has anyone else ever tried Subscribe and Save?  Or do you have a nappy secret you can let me in on?  I'd love to hear from you!

I don't really like a completely picture-free post, so here's Wiggles with a very reasonably priced nappy on her head!