Your Cheapskates Club Newsletter 12:17
In this newsletter
1. Cath's Corner
2. In the Tip Store - Garlic Bread Made Easy; MOO Designer Gym Clothes; MOO Mayonnaise
3. Share Your Tips
4. On the Menu - Chicken Alfredo Roll-Ups
5. The $300 a Month Food Challenge with Wendy - Finding Room To Stockpile
6. Cheapskates Buzz - Cheapskaters are talking in the Forum and on Cath's blog
7. Member's Featured Blog - Progress
8. Last Week's Question - Ideas needed for cheap, reliable home internet
9. This Week's Question - Where to buy ready-made chair covers
10. Ask Cath
11. Join the Cheapskates Club
12. Frequently Asked Questions
12. Contact Details
1. Cath's Corner
Hello Cheapskaters,
I hope you are having a wonderful week living the Cheapskates way. The March Journal has been uploaded to the Member's Centre, so if haven't logged in yet, please do. It is huge this month, full of great ideas to save you money, time and energy and lots of amazing MOOs in honour of MOO Month.
If you need a sneak peek, click here. Or go straight to the Cheapskates Club to log in to the Member's Centre.
"Hi, Beejay here. Wow!!! What an information packed journal this month. It has taken me nearly an hour working my way through every category. Thank you Cath. I find every time I log into Cheapskates I spend hours reading the blogs and new items learning so much each time. "
Have a great week everyone, and keep on MOOing!
Happy Cheapskating,
Cath
PS: Love our site? We love referrals! Send a note to your favourite newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV stations, friends and relatives, and tell them about us!
2. From The Tip Store
Garlic Bread Made Easy
If you find yourself cooking a meal and realise you don’t have any garlic bread, then here's a cheap and quick way to make it!
1 – 2 slices of bread
1 – 2 tablespoons of olive oil
Crushed garlic and herbs (adjust amounts to your liking)
Simply spread the mixture on your bread and pop under the grill. Chop into small cubes for salad croutons!
Contributed by Chloe Johnson
MOO Designer Gym Clothes
Use an old black t shirt and bike pants. Lay them flat on the table. Have a small dish of bleach and draw with your index finger, flowers and ferns on the top and butterflies and birds on the thigh part of the pants.(Or any pattern you like). After each small application, wait to see the fabric fade and get a picture of what is needed. I wear this 'set' when I am gardening or doing outside work. It is a good talking point for connecting to the neighbours
Contributed by Lynn Dingley
MOO Mayonnaise
I find store bought mayonnaise too much salt, sugar and vinegar so I MOO it.
Just take a tin of sweetened condensed milk, (full fat or low fat and MOO condensed milk works too), add equal part of white vinegar, use the tin as a measure. Stir together. Additional optional extras such as salt and pepper, a teaspoon mustard powder or mixed herbs.
This mayonnaise keeps nearly indefinitely in the fridge. The mayo will thicken, but stirring again will thin it down.
Contributed by Norma Thornton
There are currently more than 12,000 great tips in the Tip Store
3. Submit your tip
The Cheapskate's Club website is over 3,000 pages of money saving hints, tips and ideas. Let's get together and make the Cheapskates Club Australia's largest online hint, tip and idea library. Share your favourite money saving, time saving or energy saving hint and be in the running to win a one-year membership to The Cheapskate Club. We publish a Winning Tip each Thursday, so enter your great money, time or energy saving idea now.
Share your favourite hint or tip that saves money, time and energy and be in the running to win a one-year subscription to The Cheapskate Journal.
Remember, you have to be in it to win it!
Submit your tip
4. On the Menu
Chicken Alfredo Roll-Ups
Ingredients:
12 uncooked lasagne sheets
3 cups cooked chicken, shredded
450ml jar alfredo pasta sauce (or MOO it)
Salt and pepper
1-1/2 cups grated cheese (mozzarella is good if you have it)
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
Method:
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Boil the lasagne noodles and rinse with cool water. Lay on a clean tea towel and pat dry. Add two tablespoons of sauce onto each noodle and spread evenly over each noodle. Add two tablespoons of shredded chicken onto the sauce on each noodle and spread out. Top with one tablespoon of shredded cheese. Add salt and pepper, as desired. Rollup each lasagne noodle and place into a well-oiled baking dish. Top with alfredo sauce, sprinkle with remaining grated cheese. Finish with grated parmesan. Bake in the preheated oven for about 15 to 20 minutes, or until cheese has melted on top and is golden brown.
This recipe comes from the Chicken Recipe File
This week we will be eating:
Sunday: Roast Chicken
Monday: Meatloaf, salad
Tuesday: Chicken Alfredo
Wednesday: Shepherd's Pie, carrot, peas, corn
Thursday: MOO Pizza
Friday: Hamburgers
Saturday: Tacos
In the fruit bowl: bananas
In the cake tin: Blueberry muffins, banana cake
There are over 1,500 other great money saving meal ideas in the Recipe File.
5. The $300 a Month Food Challenge with Wendy
Finding Room To Stockpile
Welcome to a new week of the food challenge. I hope you are starting to reach your goals for the year.
It's been wonderful to have a few members start their food stockpile. I'm hoping more of you will jump on board and enjoy the benefits of being prepared for any emergency - medical, climate or financial.
Continuing on from last week's discussion, it can be challenging to find spare room to store a stockpile.
Quite often people ask me where I find the room to stockpile. The answer is simple - I make the room. I'm not a hoarder by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I love order and neatness and this helps me to make the most of the room I have. My home is 15.23 squares or 141.57m2. With four of us living here that doesn't allow for large amounts of storage.
Our kitchen is quite small and classified as a hostess kitchen which I think is a polite term for a small kitchen that does the job. Our kitchen builder tells me that my pantry is quite a good size compared to others he sees. My pantry is 88cm wide x 57cm deep x 2.06 metres high. Not large at all but I can fit so much in there. At the Adelaide workshop Cath and I held last year I showed a photo of my very tidy pantry. There were a few giggles about how neat it is, how many containers I have and how everything is in neat rows with ALL labels facing the front. A bit OCD? Maybe, but when everything is neat and well stacked I'm making the most of the space.
I mentioned at a workshop that I only use my pantry to store food in. There are no empty containers, no extra rolls of paper towel, no toilet paper, no appliances, no cleaning products, no boxes of tissues, no canning jars and no cat food. These items are either stored in my garden shed or in the appropriate room (cleaning products in the laundry etc.).
I also use everything in my kitchen on a regular basis and all my casserole dishes, chopping boards, dinner sets etc. are stacked neatly and efficiently. This gives me the extra space to store supermarket specials. Before I had children, I worked in retail (mostly toy shops) and my specialty was merchandising shelves to fit more stock in when there was no space. I've just continued this at home and especially in my kitchen. I'm always sorting and rearranging my kitchen cupboards and drawers.
For those of you who think they can't find any more space to stockpile, just take a few moments to look at what you are storing.
* Do you use it all the time?
* Are you keeping things you really shouldn't?
* Do you have too much of the wrong type of foods in your pantry? This question is targeted more towards junk food or food with too much packaging. Think about those packets of chips that are full of air or the individual serves of popcorn, chips etc. etc. A jar of corn kernels takes up a fraction of the space compared to a packet of individual serves.
* Could you store items in your linen cupboard, under your bed, in the top of your wardrobe?
* Could you fill up all your containers to get rid of half empty packets taking up space?
By doing a little reorganising and decluttering, you might be surprised at the space you can find.
Does your pantry and kitchen need a tidy up?
Where do you store your extra stockpiling items?
Have a great week and BE ENCOURAGED!!!
The $300 a Month Food Challenge
The Post that Started it All
6. Cheapskates Buzz
Most popular forum posts this week
Decluttering Tally Game 2017
http://www.cheapskatesclub.com.au/memberforum/showthread.php?3480-Decluttering-Tally-Game-2017
Winter Veggies
http://www.cheapskatesclub.com.au/memberforum/showthread.php?3501-Winter-Veggies
$150 Clothing Challenge
http://www.cheapskatesclub.com.au/memberforum/showthread.php?83-150-clothing-challenge
Most popular blog posts this week
What's in the Fridge?
http://www.debtfreecashedupandlaughing.com.au/2013/12/whats-in-fridge.html
Orange Skins and Drink Bottles
http://www.debtfreecashedupandlaughing.com.au/2010/12/orange-skins-and-drink-bottles.html
Waste Not, Want Not
http://www.debtfreecashedupandlaughing.com.au/2008/11/waste-not-want-not.html
7. Members Featured Blog
Platinum Cheapskates Club members have their very own Cheapskating blogs, and they are wonderful and inspirational and encouraging and even funny. This week's featured blog is written by sube60.
Progress
Hi everyone,
Well, I thought I'd keep you all up to date as to how I'm traveling. Financially, I am so proud of this family. We haven't used the credit card since the beginning of January and the interest alone has now dropped by half, so there is more $$ going into the principal. Still on track hopefully for a Xmas zero balance. I MOO'd a few things this week. Laundry soap, dish washing liquid, white sauce mix and taco seasoning mix. So that'll help. And we got some lambs!! To keep the grass down, though when they are ready to eat, not long, we'll kill. At about ?$3/kg that is going to be a massive saving on our meat bill.
Healthwise, everybody is good or improving and I have managed to keep motivated in my office because the weather has been cooler or overcast. I'm doing little chunks each morning and I have 2 shelves to go. Whew. And guess what, I found under one of the shelves, a missing photo (the only one) of my husband's grandfather. So I am really happy. Number one daughter has her graduation next week. So well done to her (5 hard years of working and studying (both full time)). I'm going to have a few things to sell on eBay/gumtree too. So all in all, progress is good.
I hope you all have a great week. Keep MOOing and Cath's Journal this month is super.
Login to read more Cheapskates Club Member blogs
8. Last Week's Question
Last week's question was from Marg who wrote
"Any ideas on cheap home internet with good amount of GBs? I have currently a Telstra Pre-Paid which is not enough so go to the library or McDonalds. This is not always convenient.
Jill Parker answered
This is a difficult question to answer as there are so many variables that will affect your situation. Have you tried looking on the Choice website for their recommendation? Or there are comparison sites like Finder that include telecommunications. Recently our household had a massive reorganisation of our internet requirements and that of our mobile phone plans. I ditched my old mobile provider and got a Virgin mobile PostPay plan that included generous amounts of data that rolls over every month. I am able to use this data to hotspot my tablet and share it with several other devices in the household. There is even a facility to gift data to another mobile. It costs around $40 a month for calls and data and I currently have 23GB accumulated after gifting 12GB. One of the benefits of this arrangements is that it goes with you everywhere. As the service is 5G I have found it to be faster and more reliable than our home broadband, this may not be the case for everyone though. In our last house we could only have service with Telstra as no other provider had cover in that area.
Susan Czermak answered
Prepaid is not cheap per MB, but depending on whether you need a lot of download or not, can be the cheapest over a year without a plan. I use prepaid Telstra or Prepaid Optus long expiry. This works out better than prepaid monthly if your usage is different month to month. I generally use 1 x one year lot per 8-9 months which is about $15.00 per month and averages access to around 2GB per month. Although I have not used it yet as I don't know whether where I live can receive Vodaphone mobile broadband (Optus is slower than Telstra where I live), Vodafone may have the best value at 25Gb for 12 months, $125.00. Sometimes Optus and Vodafone offer half price deals or double data for the same money. Currently Vodaphone is offering an 8gb 180 days starter pack for half price $25.00.
Franca Notarianni answered
I've just signed up with 'Belong', which is part of Telstra. It is a contract but a flexible one. I only wanted internet, not a home phone, so I was sent the modem AT NO CHARGE as a lot of other companies charge for theirs. It's a 12 month contract but I am receiving the first month free. $50 for 100 gb or I can change to $65 for unlimited gb. That's what I mean by flexible. If my gb aren't enough, or too much, I can change from month to month and there are NO set up or modem fees.
Glen Burdekin answered
Aldi has a prepaid plan mobile plan. $249.00 a year unlimited everything except national calls and 45gb of data.
9. This Week's Question
Janie-Lee writes
Hi Cath, Just wondering if any Cheapskaters know where I could get a couple of Tub chair covers. The chairs are brand new white Tullstas from Ikea but we have 1 ea black , ginger and tortoise shell cats who do lay on the chairs and they are previously abused cats so they are with us for life. I've looked online but the prices are nearly what the chairs are worth and I don't sew- at all apart from basic button replacement- so I'm hoping for some fabulous ideas from our lovely- and brilliant- Cheapskaters. I'm pretty handy at painting etc. but would really like to buy covers rather than re-cover as I like to wash them to keep our home smelling nice and not like a cattery. Thanks for any ideas!
Do you have the answer?
If you can help Janie-Lee let us know. We'll enter your answer into our Tip of the Week competition, with a one-year membership to the Cheapskates Club as the prize too.
Send your answer
10. Ask Cath
We have lots of resources to help you as you live the Cheapskates way but if you didn't find the answer to your question in our extensive archives please just drop me a note with your question.
I read and answer all questions, either in an email to you, in my weekly newsletter, the monthly Journal or by creating blog posts and other resources to help you (and other Cheapskaters).
Ask Your Question
11. Join the Cheapskates Club
For just 10 cents a day you can join the Cheapskates Club and get exclusive access to the Cheapskate Journal, the monthly e-journal that shows you how to cut the costs of everyday living and still have fun.
Joining the Cheapskates Club gives you 24/7 access to the Members Centre with 1000's of money saving tips and articles.
Click here to join the Cheapskates Club today!
12. Frequently Asked Questions
How do I change my email address?
This one is easy. Members can update their email address or any other details by clicking on "Edit Profile" directly under their membership number after they have logged in to the Member's Centre. Subscribers to our free newsletter can use the Change Your Address form (under Customer Service in the menu) and fill it out. Once you've filled it in click the send button and we'll do the rest. Please remember to include your old email address so we can find it in the list as well as the new one.
How do I know when my membership should be renewed?
When you login to the Member's Centre you will be told how many days of membership you have left once you have 30 days left. Just click on the link to renew and your membership will just continue on, uninterrupted.
What will you do with my email address?
We never rent, trade or sell our email list to anyone for any reason whatsoever. You'll never get an unsolicited email from a stranger as a result of joining this list.
Read our privacy policy
How Did You Get on Our List?
You signed up to receive our Free Newsletter at our Cheapskates Club Web site or are a Platinum Cheapskates Club member
13. Contact Details
The Cheapskates Club -
Showing you how to live life
debt free, cashed up and laughing!
PO Box 5077 Studfield Vic 3152
www.cheapskatesclub.net
1. Cath's Corner
2. In the Tip Store - Garlic Bread Made Easy; MOO Designer Gym Clothes; MOO Mayonnaise
3. Share Your Tips
4. On the Menu - Chicken Alfredo Roll-Ups
5. The $300 a Month Food Challenge with Wendy - Finding Room To Stockpile
6. Cheapskates Buzz - Cheapskaters are talking in the Forum and on Cath's blog
7. Member's Featured Blog - Progress
8. Last Week's Question - Ideas needed for cheap, reliable home internet
9. This Week's Question - Where to buy ready-made chair covers
10. Ask Cath
11. Join the Cheapskates Club
12. Frequently Asked Questions
12. Contact Details
1. Cath's Corner
Hello Cheapskaters,
I hope you are having a wonderful week living the Cheapskates way. The March Journal has been uploaded to the Member's Centre, so if haven't logged in yet, please do. It is huge this month, full of great ideas to save you money, time and energy and lots of amazing MOOs in honour of MOO Month.
If you need a sneak peek, click here. Or go straight to the Cheapskates Club to log in to the Member's Centre.
"Hi, Beejay here. Wow!!! What an information packed journal this month. It has taken me nearly an hour working my way through every category. Thank you Cath. I find every time I log into Cheapskates I spend hours reading the blogs and new items learning so much each time. "
Have a great week everyone, and keep on MOOing!
Happy Cheapskating,
Cath
PS: Love our site? We love referrals! Send a note to your favourite newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV stations, friends and relatives, and tell them about us!
2. From The Tip Store
Garlic Bread Made Easy
If you find yourself cooking a meal and realise you don’t have any garlic bread, then here's a cheap and quick way to make it!
1 – 2 slices of bread
1 – 2 tablespoons of olive oil
Crushed garlic and herbs (adjust amounts to your liking)
Simply spread the mixture on your bread and pop under the grill. Chop into small cubes for salad croutons!
Contributed by Chloe Johnson
MOO Designer Gym Clothes
Use an old black t shirt and bike pants. Lay them flat on the table. Have a small dish of bleach and draw with your index finger, flowers and ferns on the top and butterflies and birds on the thigh part of the pants.(Or any pattern you like). After each small application, wait to see the fabric fade and get a picture of what is needed. I wear this 'set' when I am gardening or doing outside work. It is a good talking point for connecting to the neighbours
Contributed by Lynn Dingley
MOO Mayonnaise
I find store bought mayonnaise too much salt, sugar and vinegar so I MOO it.
Just take a tin of sweetened condensed milk, (full fat or low fat and MOO condensed milk works too), add equal part of white vinegar, use the tin as a measure. Stir together. Additional optional extras such as salt and pepper, a teaspoon mustard powder or mixed herbs.
This mayonnaise keeps nearly indefinitely in the fridge. The mayo will thicken, but stirring again will thin it down.
Contributed by Norma Thornton
There are currently more than 12,000 great tips in the Tip Store
3. Submit your tip
The Cheapskate's Club website is over 3,000 pages of money saving hints, tips and ideas. Let's get together and make the Cheapskates Club Australia's largest online hint, tip and idea library. Share your favourite money saving, time saving or energy saving hint and be in the running to win a one-year membership to The Cheapskate Club. We publish a Winning Tip each Thursday, so enter your great money, time or energy saving idea now.
Share your favourite hint or tip that saves money, time and energy and be in the running to win a one-year subscription to The Cheapskate Journal.
Remember, you have to be in it to win it!
Submit your tip
4. On the Menu
Chicken Alfredo Roll-Ups
Ingredients:
12 uncooked lasagne sheets
3 cups cooked chicken, shredded
450ml jar alfredo pasta sauce (or MOO it)
Salt and pepper
1-1/2 cups grated cheese (mozzarella is good if you have it)
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
Method:
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Boil the lasagne noodles and rinse with cool water. Lay on a clean tea towel and pat dry. Add two tablespoons of sauce onto each noodle and spread evenly over each noodle. Add two tablespoons of shredded chicken onto the sauce on each noodle and spread out. Top with one tablespoon of shredded cheese. Add salt and pepper, as desired. Rollup each lasagne noodle and place into a well-oiled baking dish. Top with alfredo sauce, sprinkle with remaining grated cheese. Finish with grated parmesan. Bake in the preheated oven for about 15 to 20 minutes, or until cheese has melted on top and is golden brown.
This recipe comes from the Chicken Recipe File
This week we will be eating:
Sunday: Roast Chicken
Monday: Meatloaf, salad
Tuesday: Chicken Alfredo
Wednesday: Shepherd's Pie, carrot, peas, corn
Thursday: MOO Pizza
Friday: Hamburgers
Saturday: Tacos
In the fruit bowl: bananas
In the cake tin: Blueberry muffins, banana cake
There are over 1,500 other great money saving meal ideas in the Recipe File.
5. The $300 a Month Food Challenge with Wendy
Finding Room To Stockpile
Welcome to a new week of the food challenge. I hope you are starting to reach your goals for the year.
It's been wonderful to have a few members start their food stockpile. I'm hoping more of you will jump on board and enjoy the benefits of being prepared for any emergency - medical, climate or financial.
Continuing on from last week's discussion, it can be challenging to find spare room to store a stockpile.
Quite often people ask me where I find the room to stockpile. The answer is simple - I make the room. I'm not a hoarder by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I love order and neatness and this helps me to make the most of the room I have. My home is 15.23 squares or 141.57m2. With four of us living here that doesn't allow for large amounts of storage.
Our kitchen is quite small and classified as a hostess kitchen which I think is a polite term for a small kitchen that does the job. Our kitchen builder tells me that my pantry is quite a good size compared to others he sees. My pantry is 88cm wide x 57cm deep x 2.06 metres high. Not large at all but I can fit so much in there. At the Adelaide workshop Cath and I held last year I showed a photo of my very tidy pantry. There were a few giggles about how neat it is, how many containers I have and how everything is in neat rows with ALL labels facing the front. A bit OCD? Maybe, but when everything is neat and well stacked I'm making the most of the space.
I mentioned at a workshop that I only use my pantry to store food in. There are no empty containers, no extra rolls of paper towel, no toilet paper, no appliances, no cleaning products, no boxes of tissues, no canning jars and no cat food. These items are either stored in my garden shed or in the appropriate room (cleaning products in the laundry etc.).
I also use everything in my kitchen on a regular basis and all my casserole dishes, chopping boards, dinner sets etc. are stacked neatly and efficiently. This gives me the extra space to store supermarket specials. Before I had children, I worked in retail (mostly toy shops) and my specialty was merchandising shelves to fit more stock in when there was no space. I've just continued this at home and especially in my kitchen. I'm always sorting and rearranging my kitchen cupboards and drawers.
For those of you who think they can't find any more space to stockpile, just take a few moments to look at what you are storing.
* Do you use it all the time?
* Are you keeping things you really shouldn't?
* Do you have too much of the wrong type of foods in your pantry? This question is targeted more towards junk food or food with too much packaging. Think about those packets of chips that are full of air or the individual serves of popcorn, chips etc. etc. A jar of corn kernels takes up a fraction of the space compared to a packet of individual serves.
* Could you store items in your linen cupboard, under your bed, in the top of your wardrobe?
* Could you fill up all your containers to get rid of half empty packets taking up space?
By doing a little reorganising and decluttering, you might be surprised at the space you can find.
Does your pantry and kitchen need a tidy up?
Where do you store your extra stockpiling items?
Have a great week and BE ENCOURAGED!!!
The $300 a Month Food Challenge
The Post that Started it All
6. Cheapskates Buzz
Most popular forum posts this week
Decluttering Tally Game 2017
http://www.cheapskatesclub.com.au/memberforum/showthread.php?3480-Decluttering-Tally-Game-2017
Winter Veggies
http://www.cheapskatesclub.com.au/memberforum/showthread.php?3501-Winter-Veggies
$150 Clothing Challenge
http://www.cheapskatesclub.com.au/memberforum/showthread.php?83-150-clothing-challenge
Most popular blog posts this week
What's in the Fridge?
http://www.debtfreecashedupandlaughing.com.au/2013/12/whats-in-fridge.html
Orange Skins and Drink Bottles
http://www.debtfreecashedupandlaughing.com.au/2010/12/orange-skins-and-drink-bottles.html
Waste Not, Want Not
http://www.debtfreecashedupandlaughing.com.au/2008/11/waste-not-want-not.html
7. Members Featured Blog
Platinum Cheapskates Club members have their very own Cheapskating blogs, and they are wonderful and inspirational and encouraging and even funny. This week's featured blog is written by sube60.
Progress
Hi everyone,
Well, I thought I'd keep you all up to date as to how I'm traveling. Financially, I am so proud of this family. We haven't used the credit card since the beginning of January and the interest alone has now dropped by half, so there is more $$ going into the principal. Still on track hopefully for a Xmas zero balance. I MOO'd a few things this week. Laundry soap, dish washing liquid, white sauce mix and taco seasoning mix. So that'll help. And we got some lambs!! To keep the grass down, though when they are ready to eat, not long, we'll kill. At about ?$3/kg that is going to be a massive saving on our meat bill.
Healthwise, everybody is good or improving and I have managed to keep motivated in my office because the weather has been cooler or overcast. I'm doing little chunks each morning and I have 2 shelves to go. Whew. And guess what, I found under one of the shelves, a missing photo (the only one) of my husband's grandfather. So I am really happy. Number one daughter has her graduation next week. So well done to her (5 hard years of working and studying (both full time)). I'm going to have a few things to sell on eBay/gumtree too. So all in all, progress is good.
I hope you all have a great week. Keep MOOing and Cath's Journal this month is super.
Login to read more Cheapskates Club Member blogs
8. Last Week's Question
Last week's question was from Marg who wrote
"Any ideas on cheap home internet with good amount of GBs? I have currently a Telstra Pre-Paid which is not enough so go to the library or McDonalds. This is not always convenient.
Jill Parker answered
This is a difficult question to answer as there are so many variables that will affect your situation. Have you tried looking on the Choice website for their recommendation? Or there are comparison sites like Finder that include telecommunications. Recently our household had a massive reorganisation of our internet requirements and that of our mobile phone plans. I ditched my old mobile provider and got a Virgin mobile PostPay plan that included generous amounts of data that rolls over every month. I am able to use this data to hotspot my tablet and share it with several other devices in the household. There is even a facility to gift data to another mobile. It costs around $40 a month for calls and data and I currently have 23GB accumulated after gifting 12GB. One of the benefits of this arrangements is that it goes with you everywhere. As the service is 5G I have found it to be faster and more reliable than our home broadband, this may not be the case for everyone though. In our last house we could only have service with Telstra as no other provider had cover in that area.
Susan Czermak answered
Prepaid is not cheap per MB, but depending on whether you need a lot of download or not, can be the cheapest over a year without a plan. I use prepaid Telstra or Prepaid Optus long expiry. This works out better than prepaid monthly if your usage is different month to month. I generally use 1 x one year lot per 8-9 months which is about $15.00 per month and averages access to around 2GB per month. Although I have not used it yet as I don't know whether where I live can receive Vodaphone mobile broadband (Optus is slower than Telstra where I live), Vodafone may have the best value at 25Gb for 12 months, $125.00. Sometimes Optus and Vodafone offer half price deals or double data for the same money. Currently Vodaphone is offering an 8gb 180 days starter pack for half price $25.00.
Franca Notarianni answered
I've just signed up with 'Belong', which is part of Telstra. It is a contract but a flexible one. I only wanted internet, not a home phone, so I was sent the modem AT NO CHARGE as a lot of other companies charge for theirs. It's a 12 month contract but I am receiving the first month free. $50 for 100 gb or I can change to $65 for unlimited gb. That's what I mean by flexible. If my gb aren't enough, or too much, I can change from month to month and there are NO set up or modem fees.
Glen Burdekin answered
Aldi has a prepaid plan mobile plan. $249.00 a year unlimited everything except national calls and 45gb of data.
9. This Week's Question
Janie-Lee writes
Hi Cath, Just wondering if any Cheapskaters know where I could get a couple of Tub chair covers. The chairs are brand new white Tullstas from Ikea but we have 1 ea black , ginger and tortoise shell cats who do lay on the chairs and they are previously abused cats so they are with us for life. I've looked online but the prices are nearly what the chairs are worth and I don't sew- at all apart from basic button replacement- so I'm hoping for some fabulous ideas from our lovely- and brilliant- Cheapskaters. I'm pretty handy at painting etc. but would really like to buy covers rather than re-cover as I like to wash them to keep our home smelling nice and not like a cattery. Thanks for any ideas!
Do you have the answer?
If you can help Janie-Lee let us know. We'll enter your answer into our Tip of the Week competition, with a one-year membership to the Cheapskates Club as the prize too.
Send your answer
10. Ask Cath
We have lots of resources to help you as you live the Cheapskates way but if you didn't find the answer to your question in our extensive archives please just drop me a note with your question.
I read and answer all questions, either in an email to you, in my weekly newsletter, the monthly Journal or by creating blog posts and other resources to help you (and other Cheapskaters).
Ask Your Question
11. Join the Cheapskates Club
For just 10 cents a day you can join the Cheapskates Club and get exclusive access to the Cheapskate Journal, the monthly e-journal that shows you how to cut the costs of everyday living and still have fun.
Joining the Cheapskates Club gives you 24/7 access to the Members Centre with 1000's of money saving tips and articles.
Click here to join the Cheapskates Club today!
12. Frequently Asked Questions
How do I change my email address?
This one is easy. Members can update their email address or any other details by clicking on "Edit Profile" directly under their membership number after they have logged in to the Member's Centre. Subscribers to our free newsletter can use the Change Your Address form (under Customer Service in the menu) and fill it out. Once you've filled it in click the send button and we'll do the rest. Please remember to include your old email address so we can find it in the list as well as the new one.
How do I know when my membership should be renewed?
When you login to the Member's Centre you will be told how many days of membership you have left once you have 30 days left. Just click on the link to renew and your membership will just continue on, uninterrupted.
What will you do with my email address?
We never rent, trade or sell our email list to anyone for any reason whatsoever. You'll never get an unsolicited email from a stranger as a result of joining this list.
Read our privacy policy
How Did You Get on Our List?
You signed up to receive our Free Newsletter at our Cheapskates Club Web site or are a Platinum Cheapskates Club member
13. Contact Details
The Cheapskates Club -
Showing you how to live life
debt free, cashed up and laughing!
PO Box 5077 Studfield Vic 3152
www.cheapskatesclub.net