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This week I’ve been stocking up on these gorgeous tins of Steamcream, tracking down my favourite sink cleaner for the bargain price of £1.25 and snapping up gorgeous Birthday cards for under £1.

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Steamcream As you know I do love bargains on my beauty buys and I’m a big fan of these face moisturisers.

Made from natural ingredients, they’re not tested on animals and great for sensitive skin. Oh and did I mention they come in the most gorgeous funky tins too? Totally sold on these and at £13.95 a pop they’re budget friendly too!

My ‘best buy’ sink cleaner for £1 I’ve used all sorts of stuff over the years to keep the sinks sparkling. First discovered ‘Shiny Sinks’ in Lakeland but sadly it soon disappeared from their shelves; never to be seen again.

But after tracking it down, I’ve found you can buy it on Amazon, though it’s a bit pricey at over £4 a time; spares website espares also set it for £2.48, but I’ve found it for the bargain price of £1.25 at The Range.

Gorgeous cards for under £1 Always like to stock up on fabulous cards when I find them. And let’s be honest; Birthday cards can be super expensive.

Took a teeny weeny card to the till at WH Smith once, only to find it was about £4, so put it straight back and popped along the road to Card Factory where you can find fabulous ones as well as blank ones like these two sooooooo much cheaper.

Picked up these two when I popped by last week – just 99p each!

This week I saved a whopping £60 buying my favourite perfume. And I’ll be recycling the ’empty’ so I can bag £5 at Boots with its new recycling scheme. Plus an offer to slash the price of your takeaway with a little deal I’ve spotted at Waitrose.

Saved £60 on my favourite perfume…..

I’ve been a fan of Vera Wang perfume for years. My husband first bought it for me and I’ve been hooked ever since, but as with lots of perfumes, it can be super pricey.

The ‘usual’ price of a 100ml version of Vera’s ‘Eau de Parfum’ spray is around £80. But shop around and you can find it miles cheaper, and yes I do mean the real thing, not a cheap copy.

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As you can see from the screen shots above, I could have splashed out £82 buying it from the Perfume Shop But instead I shopped around and saved nearly £60 buying the same stuff from Amazon at just £23.50. Took the pic on the right after it arrived!

Other deals I spotted included AllBeauty.com who were also selling it at £23.50 and Argos just slightly more at £27.99.

Get a fiver from Boots for recycling

You can earn £5 at Boots with its new beauty recycling scheme.

For every five empty pots, tubes and containers you recycle, you’ll get 500 Advantage card points; worth £5.

Super simple to do. Just sign up to register, take a snap of your empties and pop them in the box in store. All the details here

Save on a Friday night curry

National Curry week starts on Monday 5th October and Waitrose has started the celebrations early with a deal on its Charlie Bigham’s Chicken Tikka Masala Comes with Pilau rice and serves two.

Usually £7.75 but now down to £6; saving £1.75 a time so works out at £3 a plateful; much cheaper than a takeaway. I’m a big fan of Charlie Bigham’s meals myself, tastes home made but without the hassle!

This week I’ve been snapping up, (and saving), on holiday souvenirs, bagging free photo prints and enjoying luxury chocolate at a discount…….

Funky mugs for under £20

We had a set of these in the kitchen at our Airbnb in Bournemouth so decided to prolong that ‘holiday feeling’ and buy a set of our own.

They’re ‘Air Cooled’, which is a range by independent artists, and you can buy these ones in different places, often at around £8.99 a mug, but I snapped these up on eBay for under £20 including postage.

Free photo prints

Been going through our holiday photos from our trip to Brownsea Island, which is where the shot below was taken. I’ve always been one to print out my snaps and pop them in albums collage style, and this time I’ve bagged my prints for free.

Here’s how you do it. Download the Freeprints app and you get 45 free ‘6 x 4’ cm prints each month. You only pay postage which starts from £1.49.

They’re great quality too plus you often get extra freebies like the option to order a free photo tile or free photo books.

Luxury chocolate with 10% off

Going to be honest here, this milk chocolate biscuit butter bar is one amazing chocolate bar but it’s super pricey choc at £6.99.

Ok so it’s probably not the stuff you’d scoff in one go, the way you’d tuck into a Twix, as it’s artisan handmade stuff and pretty rich.

I was given this as a gift, but you can get 10% off by signing up on the website and there’s heaps of other delicious bars to choose from too.

Save up to £10 on Zizzi pizza

Love Zizzi pizza? Sainsbury’s is now selling them for just £3.50 a time.

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Eat in at Zizzi and you can pay up to £13.10 a time to enjoy one of these, but pick them up from just £3.50 in the frozen aisle at Sainsbury’s and save nearly £10.

Discovering this gorgeous new shampoo bar, enjoying a half price lunch and escaping for a weekend away at a fabulous Airbnb.

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I’m loving this Coconut Milk Shampoo & Soap Bar – smells amazing and made by Flow Cosmetics, a company from Finland, who are big on making natural skincare stuff.

Packed this for my weekend away instead of my usual shampoo and works a treat. Ok so not cheap at £13, but if you’ve got an Amex card and buy from this website you get £5 back on spends of £10 or more with its ‘Shop Small’ deal which runs till 13th September.

Eat Out To Help Out – we booked up early for the last day of the official ‘Eat Out To Help Out’ scheme at this lovely place near St. Albans. Our first visit and thought we’d make the most of the Chancellor’s ‘meal deal’ to try somewhere new. Saved £20 between us.

And while the official scheme may be over, heaps of places are now offering their own half price deals or special discount days throughout September.

Staying Airbnb – I’m a huge fan of Airbnb. Not only do you get to stay in some great places but you meet some fabulous people too. Here’s a snap of my latest find in Lincolnshire which was a bargain at £50 a night.

This week I’ve found designer kitchen gadgets at budget prices, got a savvy trick to boost your holiday protection and spilling the beans on my best buys and freebies.

This week’s moneysaving diary

Here’s what I’ve been spending and saving on this week…………..

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Honey Scrub I love this honey and sugar body scrub which I got from Victoria’s Secret. Smells amazing, and yes it’s a body scrub, but I’ve found it doubles up as a great face scrub too. Was £15; now £5.99.

New York bathroom scales So love New York and lucky enough to have made a few trips there. The buzz never wears off so this is my way of seeing it every day from our bathroom! And soooooo much cheaper than a plane ticket! Spotted these for £14.

Free university courses Yep you heard that right. University courses usually come with a big price tag but I’ve found lots of unis around the world offering short online courses for free. Just about to start my second course on mindfulness with FutureLearn Heaps to choose from and you can learn languages, study fiction writing and psychology.

Designer kitchen gadgets without fancy prices

Love it when I find a budget version of top dollar stuff. When it comes to kitchen appliances, Smeg do make pretty funky stuff; but it comes with fancy prices. A kettle comes in at around £160 and a toaster £130.

But there’s a crafty way to save, as Aldi has just launched a super similar style version with a kettle, toaster and microwave from just £19.99.

Its retro kitchen range, which you can see here, is available for pre-order online and in stores from 23rd August. Kettle and toaster are £19.99 each and the microwave’s £44.99.

My quick trick to boost holiday protection

Still want to book a trip abroad? Here’s a quick and easy way to boost your holiday protection.

Book a package trip. Doesn’t have to be an ‘off the peg’ deal with airport transfers and a rep in the resort, as you can turn a ‘flight only’ deal into a package, just by adding in one other part. Can be car hire, (even just 24 hours to get you from the airport to where you’re staying), or a night in a hotel, and if you buy both chunks in one go, from the same company, at the same time, it counts as a package.

This then means extra protection, say if the Foreign Office changes its travel advice and warns against all but ‘essential’ travel to your destination; you should get a refund or be allowed to rebook. And do make sure you pack travel insurance too.

Eat out to help out

Have you been out and saved some cash this month?

Restaurants, pubs and cafes have dished up a whopping 35 million meals over the last two weeks with millions of us enjoying half price meals.

Here’s a quick reminder on how it works. Available Monday to Wednesday until the end of August, including bank holiday Monday. No vouchers needed to snaffle the discount as cafes, pubs and restaurants taking part flag this up on their website.

The 50% discount, (up to £10 a head), is taken off the bill automatically, and the restaurant claims its cut from the Treasury. Book ahead as lots of places are getting busy and the deal’s only on for another couple of weeks!

Way back in the early days of lockdown I went out for a walk every day, and while I’m lucky enough to live near the countryside; my daily walk over the fields and round the woods did start to feel a bit like ‘Groundhog Day’ after a while.

So once lockdown eased, I set myself the challenge of finding somewhere new every weekend. Didn’t mean driving for miles, in fact took me under an hour to get to any of the places here. Plus it doubled up as a moneysaving challenge; as most days I packed a picnic. And even paying for the occasional car park still meant days out for less than a fiver!

Here’s some of my favourite discoveries.

Grafham Water – Cambridgeshire

Ok so it may not be a proper beach but just forty minutes from home and I was on the banks of Grafham Water; England’s third largest reservoir.

You can walk all the way round, but at nine miles, we thought we’d save that for another day, so went for the picnic option as there’s heaps of picnic tables around as well as special BBQ areas.

Footpaths and tracks are traffic free and easy to follow; and you can hire, or bring your own bike, and there’s toilets, a cafe and water sports on offer.

Grafham is owned by Anglian Water, and only our spend was the car park, which cost £3.70 for three hours and up to a maximum of £6 if you stay five hours or more.

Stanwick Lakes – Northamptonshire

I got to discover lots of great places across Northamptonshire when I did a stint presenting on BBC Radio Northampton a few years back. But I certainly never found this little gem.

Stanwick Lakes has something for everyone; with a kids’ adventure playground to trails and walks round the many lakes. Follow the trails beyond the park and you can walk to Rushden Lakes one way or Irthlingborough the other.

This place is just so clean and well looked after and all thanks to Rockingham Forest Trust; the charity that manages Stanwick Lakes.

On a sunny day the kids’ play areas get busy, but just a few minutes away you can be the only one in sight walking round the lakes.

You do pay for parking, unless you arrive on foot. Costs from £3.80 for two hours to £5.80 for all day. Take a ticket at the barrier as you come in and pay at the ticket machine before leaving.

Tring Park – Hertfordshire

Tring is a lovely village with a mix of coffee shops, (don’t miss Black Goo), and gift shops that you can happily wander round for hours.

On my last visit I set out for Tring Park, a ten minute walk from the main street. Tring isn’t a big place but this was no tiny park. It was huge; with a mix of woodland, open grassland and even cows roaming freely. It’s just one of many parks, woods and open space managed by the Woodland Trust

I parked in the town centre and nipped down the lane beside Lussmans restaurant that eventually leads you into the park, but you can often get free parking in the surrounding roads.

The Chilterns – Herts/Beds/Bucks

I live at one edge of the Chilterns and while I’ve always done lots of walks around my area; it took me till lockdown to really get out and make more effort to explore more footpaths, hills and tracks within my local patch.

My poor trainers have paid the price though, as one of the soles started to come away the other week. Ok so I’ve got a couple of new pairs, but I could walk forever in my ‘tried and tested’ Esprit ones, so a spot of super glue and I’m good to go again!