Live your best (and cheapest) life: 11 top tips from money-saving influencers

theguardian.com:

Mimi Harrison started Beat the Budget at university, where she found herself barely subsisting on late-night chips. She’s since shared 400 budget recipes with 260,000 Instagram followers, for everything from caramelised shallot pasta to peanut butter chicken satay curry (now arranged on her website by dietary needs or meal type). She never spends more than £20 on her weekly shop. A Beat the Budget book is due out in June. Many recipes cost £1 a portion or less.

Top tip “It’s all about the planning.” Harrison shares her weekly shop receipts, and keeps her spending down by sticking rigidly to a meal plan and shopping list, even grouping items together on the list to mimic the supermarket’s layout so she won’t get distracted and buy things she doesn’t need. Each week’s dishes are carefully chosen to make use of overlapping ingredients such as halloumi or butternut squash, so nothing goes to waste.

Budget TravellerKash Bhattacharya has been staying in cool hostels and other budget places to stay since 2009 (his book, The Grand Hostels: Luxury Hostels of the World, was published in 2018). He also flags up good-looking co-working spaces and cheap transport, particularly train and bus, on Twitter and Instagram.

Top tip Save money on your travels by using buses rather than planes or trains; eat out at lunchtime, when restaurants are more likely to offer deals and set menus; head to lesser-known places such as Vilnius, Riga, Brno or Gdańsk, and get a bank card that doesn’t charge for overseas transactions.

Flora Collingwood-Norris’s Visible Creative Mending will teach you how to darn your socks beautifully. She is a designer-maker based in the Scottish Borders who works with yarn and thread, and has knitted for Christopher Kane and