Frugaltok is going viral — here's what happened when I tried some money-saving tips

After watching with interest the ‘Frugaltok’ accounts increasing in popularity on social media, Jess Casey decides to try it out for herself

Turning her nose up at one viral tip, Jess Casey reacts to the idea of eating Weetabix with water instead of milk — one of the more extreme frugal fads circulating online.

Economists, I see your lipstick and hemline indexes and raise you ‘Frugaltok’ as an emerging, accurate prediction of impending market uncertainty.

Just as harbingers of previous economic downturns, like Y2K skinniness and the Black Eyed Peas, are enjoying a current resurgence across Tiktok, so too is content focused on how to enjoy life while living on less.

‘Frugaltok’ can be applied to a wide range of trends and accounts that advocate for curbing your impulse spending, making use of every scrap, saving money and prioritising and appreciating what you already have.

Examples include things like ‘underconsumption core’ or ‘no spend days’ and asking for and sharing ‘unhinged’ tips on how to save money.

Some of these range from the aspirational, like keeping chickens to avoid high egg prices or making your own yogurt, to the practical, like making sure you get every last drop from your tubs and tubes or mending rips and tears, to the extreme, like dumpster diving.

Often, the switches amount to savings of just mere cents, but many of these accounts would argue that this all adds up over the course of years.

The rise of popularity behind ‘Frugaltok’ might have something to do with the fact that a euro no longer stretches as far as it should. Electricity prices are still up, and the days of cheap food seem long gone.

Now not only is Ireland the second most expensive country in Europe, it costs even more to pack your own lunch at home. The latest CSO analysis shows a pound of butter now costs €1.03 more than it did last year. Cheese is also more expensive, with Irish cheddar up 57c per kilo, and milk up by 27c per two litres of full-fat. An 800g sliced pan is up 5c this summer compared to 2024.

Jess Casey tucks into her homemade packed lunch in the Irish Examiner office canteen — pasta cooked with a low-energy method, tuna for protein, and supermarket own-brand mayo. 

With more people keeping an eye on finances, the rising popularity of this kind of thrifty content could be down to a wider kickback against the levels of over-consumption normalised over the past 10 years. I think it landed on my feed in the first place after I blocked someone suggesting you kit out your child’s mud kitchen by purchasing brand new, actual kitchen equipment from the Aldi Special Buy offers.

The emergence of this type of content during times of financial uncertainty is also not an entirely new phenomenon. During the 2008 financial crisis, people turned to YouTube, where a 90-year-old great-grand mother named Clara recounted her childhood growing up during the Great Depression and shared her family’s recipes. It was oddly reassuring to hear how her family recounted how her family survived then, just as Frugaltok offers something similar now against a backdrop of global uncertainty, layoffs, and war.

At least to me, that is. Watchers of this type of content fall into two categories: Those who find it fascinating or calming (there’s often at least one person in the comments exclaiming, ‘This is my guilty pleasure!’) and those who are so consumed with rage by it that they are on the verge of self-combustion. “If you regurgitate up your food, you can eat for free again tomorrow,” one lovely person roars in the comment section.

“I’m sorry how can you live like this,” Another asks. “Life is too short.”

But analysing these types of accounts for this piece, it’s clear living frugally isn’t about being cheap, which is what I associate with things like hoarding, meanness, and being ungenerous.

It’s more focused on living with less, happily. Still, even though I enjoy it, a lot of it does raise my eyebrows and make me question if it’s ultimately worth the hassle.

Jess Casey, reflected in a compact mirror, is determined to finish her current makeup stash before making new purchases.

American ‘Bradley On A Budget’ gained a following for sharing his extreme budgeting. A lot of his tips include things that are just part and parcel of daily life for many Europeans, like using a reusable water bottle or avoiding using the AC. Some of his more out there lifestyle tips include eating the same meals of chicken and potatoes or eggs to keep his grocery bills below $200 a month and unplugging all appliances, including his fridge, to keep his electricity bill low.

‘Diary of A Cheapskate’, a no-nonsense Northerner in England, has also gained a following from sharing her daily life as a self-professed person who doesn’t like to spend any money. She recently enraged her critics by watering down her Weetabix with water (and a dash of almond milk) cheerfully explaining that she doesn’t really like cow’s milk anyway. Her house and nails are immaculate, but she often has days where she eats for free from food rescued from a food waste app called OLIO. For several weeks, her tea often consisted of pasta mixed with BBQ sauce and expired vegan mayo she had gotten for free, sometimes with a little bit of cheese.

In a world where the overconsumption of cosmetics and clothes has become so normalised, she owns just one going-out top and one bottle of perfume she bought for her wedding, preferring to use a selection of the free sample bottles she’s collected over the years.

Part of her charm is that she genuinely does not seem to mind living like this, and is bemused that people are fascinated by her way of life.

Keep in mind, by living like this, she can work part-time so she gets to spend a lot of time with her children, and she’s mortgage-free in her 30s. That to me is the definition of rich.

Jess Casey tucks into her homemade packed lunch in the Irish Examiner office canteen — pasta cooked with a low-energy method, tuna for protein, and supermarket own-brand mayo.

I’m a recent-ish new mom, and there was lots about motherhood I was unprepared for, no less how time-poor I’d become, especially when I returned to work after maternity leave. One of the ways I’ve been unconsciously making up for this has been through quick-fix consumerism.

I coined the term ‘mom tax’ for the odd little bits that end up in my trolley that help to make the days go by easier: A jar of fancy olives, a new type of serum when I’m looking tired, lots of overpriced coffees.

Anybody who is pressed for time will often prioritise convenience over everything else when they can, happy to spend the money if it means they can get dinner on the table 20 minutes quicker while also not adding any more to their already overburdened mental load. I wondered if living this way would ultimately save our household money, or, like I suspected, add to a never-ending list of jobs on a rolling to-do list.

I decided to put some of the most popular frugal tips to the test, to see which ones are worthwhile for busy working parents. Everyone I told was immediately supportive, which goes to show everyone is feeling the pinch, but also quick to add a “not me though, but good luck”.

Check your food bill

The first area to tackle was the weekly food shop. It meant cutting out mid-week dashes to the shop for top-ups and making lists before going shopping of what we already had and what needed to be used up. While keeping our food nutritious, and including options my toddler was guaranteed to eat, we did see a reduction here in our spending here but it was difficult at times.

Part of this involved taking stock of what we could do without (kitchen roll for example, which weirdly seemed to make its way into our lives in a big way almost the second we became new parents).

It also involved eating less meat or going for options like a whole chicken and making it last over the course of a few days and mixing mince with lentils or beans to make it go longer. Working from home, my lunches were often pretty sad, a medley of fridge leftovers that needed to be used up. It was really difficult to cut out convenience dinners completely; We broke our frugality once after a late-night trip to the doctors with the toddler, where we missed dinner and got drive-through burgers on the way home. Life happens.

Eat for free

When I first downloaded the food-waste app OLIO, which is designed for giving away, borrowing, or lending things in your community, I was sceptical about what I might find. I didn’t understand how the app worked, thinking it was just people trying to save the contents of their fridge by giving away bags of unwanted wilted salad.

After my experience using the app, I was converted. Food ‘heroes’ sign up as volunteers to rescue surplus, edible food nearing its best-before or use-by date that retailers will have no other choice but to dump. Uploads to the app tend to happen in the evening, and the food is free to anyone to pick up.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I went to collect my order, but was pleasantly surprised to be presented at a volunteer’s house with about a dozen croissants and pains au chocolat, along with a load of sourdough bread. They weren’t fresh out of the oven, but far from stale and made nicer breakfasts for me for the week than watered-down Weetabix. The app is open to anybody and it can be used to give and get items you need or no longer have any use for.

Use a 30-day list

I wouldn’t have considered myself much of an impulse spender, but this turned out to be one of the most effective Frugaltok tips I implemented as part of this experiment. If you set a rule to wait 30 days before making a non-essential purchase, you might find you save yourself a nice bit of money and a house full of clutter.

I kept a note of every time I thought about spending outside of our essentials budget and was shocked to see it all amount to just under €200 in a short space of time. Not that I would have bought everything on that list, but it was a good reminder of how easy it is to get suckered into mindless spending. At the end of the day, there wasn’t one thing on that list that I thought twice about since.

Irish Examiner reporter Jess Casey pictured at the Examiner offices with a selection of money-saving tips she’s trialling for her new feature Diary of a Cheapskate.

Sell your clutter

Second-hand selling platform Vinted launched in Ireland late last year and while I had bought a few bits, I had yet to try selling anything. Over the course of two weeks, I listed eight items and made two sales, coming to about €20. It wasn’t bad, but at times I did feel a bit like a customer support rep and wondered if the effort was worth the return. Postage is free as a seller and you can also use it to sell old toys, bric-a-brac, and books.

Buy-nothing groups

These are localised groups online where people can pick up items or ask for what they need for free. Intended to help reduce waste, members can post items they are giving away for free, or ask if anyone has what they need nearby. Some of the items being given away in my local group included a dollhouse, a washer/dryer, a Bosch fridge freezer, couches, prams, and firewood.

In the spirit of this article, I didn’t take anything we didn’t need, but will be checking these groups out in future before I need to make a purchase.

No-spend days

Another viral trend to take off among the frugally minded in recent years, no-spend days or no-spend months see you set aside calendar days where unnecessary purchases are cut, and any spending is kept to the bare essentials such as rent, groceries, or travel costs.

I factored in three of these days, one was an in-office day, the other two I was at home with the toddler. I was surprised to find my office day harder to commit to a ‘no spend’; I’d usually treat myself to a coffee.

For my days off, I was determined we’d still have fun so packed picnics and made use of nearby playgrounds and parks. When it rained, I took my toddler to the library and to a playdate with a friend. These worked well for us, but I’m conscious it would be harder with an older child. My toddler hasn’t discovered the concept of money just yet.

Get creative with your electrics

One tip often touted by frugal accounts is to make use of your most energy-intensive electrics during off-peak hours or to swap appliances — the electric cooker to a slow cooker or airfryer. But peak hours are often peak hours because it’s the most popular time to get jobs done.

Life with a toddler is just a never-ending pile of washing and we tried for a few nights to keep our washer use to off-peak hours before packing it in. Between the frantic dash that is dinner time, bath time, and bed time, we’d often be too tired to remember to get the washing on late.

Another tip I borrowed from Diary of a Cheapskate was bringing the water up to a boil on the cooker, before adding my pasta and turning off the power at the mains and letting the residual heat cook the pasta. When talking about trying these tips, everyone was on board, except for the pasta. “Does it not end up all waterlogged?” more than one person exclaimed. It did, a small bit, and also seemed to stay a bit undercooked too. It took about 30 minutes to cook this way all in all. But, weirdly, when mixed with tuna and sweetcorn and a bit of mayo, it was actually strangely tasty, although it could have been the hunger waiting for it to finish cooking.

Following night after night of unplugging unused plugs, keeping lights off, and generally monitoring our electricity use, our monthly bill is projected to go up by €100. We have absolutely no idea why. Go figure.

My overall conclusion? I’m glad this frugal experiment is over. While we definitely saved and could continue to do so, it was like having another full-time, unpaid job on top of work and motherhood. There have been times in my life when I have been painfully broke and having to account for every cent reminded me of that claustrophobic, overwhelm-ing feeling.

Still, it also made me grateful for what I do have, and definitely showed where savings can be made. But what’s life without a few little treats to get through the day? I won’t be giving up ‘mom tax’ anytime soon.