As we welcome the New Year, I thought it would be a good time reflect on my top 6 posts that have been viewed, liked, shared and commented on the most in 2016!

Thank you to everyone who has visited my blog, subscribed to my Newsletter, liked my page on Facebook and followed me on Twitter in the past year. I look forward to interacting with you even more in 2017.

For now, here are my top 6 posts in 2016!

1. Make Sushi at Home: It’s Much Cheaper

If you’re a fan of sushi but not quite the fan of paying for sushi takeaways, which can be a bit heavy on your budget, then this is the post for you! Watch my video tutorial and learn how to make sushi at home. The ingredients you need are affordable and all it takes is a couple of fun (and messy!) practice sessions until you get the hang of it! But when you do, I promise you’re going to enjoy making sushi and afterwards savouring the delicious taste of homemade sushi on a budget! Read the post here…

2. How We Reduced Our Monthly Expenditure

‘Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.’ – Benjamin Franklin

In order to find “extra” money in our budget, we had to reduce our monthly expenditure. We wrote down all our expenses on a piece of paper so that we could see very clearly how much we spent, where, when and on what exactly. Once we had these figures on paper, it was easy to see how much was too much and where the leaks in our wallets were! We then had a better idea of which leaking tap we needed to tighten or close for good. In this post I share with you how we fixed those expenditure leaks so that we could find “extra” money in our budget. Read the post here…

3. Homemade vs. Store-Bought

Have you ever wondered whether it would be cheaper to buy something or to make it at home? I know I have. In fact, it’s something that’s almost always on my mind. I love to do things at home – to cook, bake, sew, crochet and I enjoy all sorts of DIY projects. So I always have to ask myself whether it would be cheaper to buy something or to make it at home. Let’s look at the pros and cons. Read the post here…

4. Becoming Credit Card Free: Our Journey

Proverbs 22:7 ‘The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is a slave to the lender.’

Becoming credit card free and living life more frugally hasn’t been an easy journey for us. But the option of living life as borrowers, ‘servants to the lender’ and to credit card debt certainly didn’t feel that great for us either. This post details the beginning of our journey to becoming credit card free and living live more frugally and more economically. Our journey inspired me to start my blog. Read the post here…

5. Stick to Your Grocery Budget

South Africans spend, on average, 12,8% of their income on food and beverages per month, making this one of the top 3 expenditures in South African households along with transport and housing. We used to spend roughly the same amount of our income on food, and sometimes even more than that, if truth be told. We now spend about 10% of our income on food and beverages each month, and in this amount I also include all the food and treats for our 4 doggies as well as all our household cleaning items and our toiletries. And we pretty much stick to our grocery budget each month. This post tells you how we do that. Read the post here…

6. How to Save Money Grocery Shopping

Statistics show that food is the 3^rd highest household expenditure, after housing and transport, in South Africa. As I do most of the grocery shopping in our household I pay attention to the prices and it seems to me that each time I go to the shops something else has just gone up again. I try my best to be as frugal and careful as I can be when it comes to grocery shopping and here’s how I save money on our monthly grocery shopping. Read the post here…

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these top 6 posts and thank you again for your support in 2016! I wish you all a very Happy New Year.

If you’d like to stay in touch in 2017, and beyond, consider subscribing to my Newsletter to receive an email when I publish new blog posts or like my page Frugal in SA on Facebook or follow me on Twitter and Instagram. I look forward to staying in touch and hearing from you, my lovely readers.

Happy Frugal Living in 2017!

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During our debt-free journey, we used to spend hours and hours reading other people’s success stories. These stories inspired us and helped to keep us going and motivated throughout our journey! However, as fascinating and motivating as all these stories were, none of them featured South Africans who have conquered their consumer, or other, debt and are now living debt-free!

So today, I’m very excited to be bringing you a new feature series on the blog, Debt Free SA Stories, where I interview South Africans who have become debt-free and who would like to share the details of their debt-free journey, and their wisdom, with the rest of us.

You can read the very first Debt Free SA Story in this feature series:

Mylky’s Debt-Free Story. She paid off her entire student loan in less than a year!

Are you debt-free in SA? Would you like to share your story to inspire others? Do you have any advice that you would like to give to those who are still on their journey to becoming debt-free? If so, I would love to feature your story on Frugal in SA. You don’t have to be a blogger to participate in this series. If you are though, I will include a link to your blog and any social media channels that you use.

Let me know if you would like to be part of this exciting new series by emailing me info(at)frugalinsa(dot)com and I will send you a list of interview questions to complete.

And before you go, you can read more about our Debt-Free Journey.

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I haven’t done an update on our credit-card debt free journey in quite a while. It’s been nearly 3 years since we first started our journey to becoming credit-card debt free and we paid off our first credit card debt in November 2014. We are now almost completely debt-free on the second credit card debt which was much, much higher and as a result, much, much more difficult to pay off. Yet, here we are now, two more months, or two more payments, away from credit-card debt freedom so we are nearly there! This is the final stretch!

The reason I’ve been a bit quiet about this on my blog is because I think we’d probably hit the debt-payment plateau over the last few months, financially as well as emotionally. We’d reached our maximum stretch. We’d cut down as much as we could and wherever we could (read more about How we reduced our monthly expenditure and 10 ways we save money everyday). There was nothing more to cut down on so that we could find extra room in our budget for additional payments. We made the same, steady, monotonous extra payments each and every month.

We were working as much as we could and there were literally no more extra hours left in the day, Monday to Friday, or the weekends, for us to earn extra money. While we haven’t lost heart, and we are still as focussed as we can be, we’d just flat-lined a bit. Now that we are two more months, or two more payments, away from credit-card debt freedom, it feels a bit surreal. I almost didn’t even want to write a blog post about it in case… well, in case, something went wrong.

Can we relax a bit now? I think so. There are going to be no more crazy working hours and working over the weekends, at least not for a while and certainly not for me. Working non-stop is not fun, especially when it carries on for a bit longer than what your body can take. I’ve been walking around exhausted for months now, and this has affected my health and general well-being. This month, for example, I got my second bout of flu in less than 3 weeks and the second time round I was literally ordered to stay in bed for several days (which I did) so that I can recover completely and get some of my energy back.

But despite hitting the debt payoff plateau, so to speak, we still made the same additional payments every month for the last few months and it’s now down to just two more of those payments, and at this point, it doesn’t even matter that we cannot increase those extra payments. What matters, and what sounds awfully good as I say it to myself, is that those two extra payments will get paid. Saying that to myself, I actually feel lighter. Happier. Less burdened. Freer. Not yet completely free but freer. I even sleep better, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that.

So what’s next for us? The first step I’m looking forward to is seeing a ZERO balance on the second credit card very, very soon. The second step I’m looking forward to even more is closing that account for good. And after that? All I can say is – stay tuned, frugal friends…!

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