For money bloggers, good news comes in fivers

Fivers? Fives, I mean. You’ll have to excuse me: I’ve got money on the brain, sitting here on the train having just forked out for my crazy-ass expensive monthly season ticket.

Anyway, in this little corner of the internet I am beginning to wonder if we are on the brink of something special. When Miss Thrifty launched, back in the Paleolithic era, you could count the UK’s money-saving and personal finance blogs on one hand. Today, not only are there are more of them than ever before, but the bloggers behind them are having more success and recognition than ever before, too.

Skint Dad

Last week was the MAD Blog Awards, for parent bloggers. Who clinched the trophy for Best Thrifty Blog? None other than Ricky, from last year’s Savoo Smartest Shopper competition:

Since winning the Savoo competition, Skint Dad’s life – and his blog! – have been transformed.
My favourite Skint Dad posts are about his Saturday Night Fakeaways: takeaway meals for the family, recreated at home for a fraction of the cost.

If you read one Skint Dad post: Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.

I was in total shock and if I’m honest extremely green with envy. There was me making the decision to break the bad financial habits of a lifetime and thinking I was getting somewhere, only to come across people who had far exceeded what I had achieved.

It made me want to give up and not even bother trying to change. Why should I when compared to these people who made cutting back their outgoings seem like a piece of cake?

(NB. It looks like the Savoo Smartest Shopper competition, with its first prize of £10,000, will be back for a third year. Watch this space for further details.)

Frugal Queen

Skint Dad wasn’t the only money blogger to triumph that night. Cornwall blogger Frugal Queen, whose site is a paean to the simple life, walked off with the Best Food Blog award… for the second year in a row!

Let’s just allow that to sink in, for a moment: Frugal Queen’s budget recipes are rated over and above all those sumptuous, non-budget recipes. Not bad, eh?

If you read one Frugal Queen post: Homity Pie – a frugal recipe of yore, brought up to date.

The Money Principle

You may remember Maria, of The Money Principle, from what turned out to be a very popular guest spot on Miss Thrifty. Her post, Are you an extreme frugaller or a frugal artist?, made quite a splash with readers here. Posts on The Money Principle cover all aspects of personal finance and are always thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Although The Money Principle has been around for the while, Maria has always said that she wouldn’t feel like a “proper blogger” until she won an award. And at the weekend, all the way over in New Orleans, it happened.

At the annual Plutus Awards, which celebrate personal finance blogging from around the world, The Money Principle
was named Best International Personal Finance Blog. The last time a British blogger won this award was in 2011, so it’s good to have it back in our clutches again.

Here is a very happy Maria with her award:

If you read one Money Principle post: How much do you need? A retirement calculator. This post features a downloadable spreadsheet.

You can play with this tool – it will surprise you just how little money you actually need, particularly if you have some base pension and don’t want to live it up too much. Just as an aside, if you have £10 million and feel like spending £300k a year cash until you are 85, this tool shows that you can survive in an upmarket care home until you are 100! So now you know.

Couponshop

Congratulations are also in order for ‘Coupon Kid’ Jordon Cox, who has recently launched his new website: Couponshop. A one-stop shop for information about all the latest coupons and deals, Couponshop is one to check out if you are keen to make regular savings at the supermarket. Visitors are encouraged to add deal information to the website’s forum.

Finally, me…

…While I haven’t won any awards – well, not recently (coughs) – I do have some good news to share. We have found a buyer for our house in North Yorkshire and, just yesterday, had our offer accepted on a lovely house in Cheshire. Everything has been delightfully, but suspiciously swift and straightforward so far; please keep your fingers crossed for me!

I’ll be sorry to leave Yorkshire, but I won’t be sorry to leave this insane commute behind. It’s certainly pretty: this morning I drove to the rail station at sunrise, with the fog rolling down off the moors. Thrifty Kid and I, however, are both finding it hard – and it doesn’t help that winter is closing in. In the meantime, thank you for bearing with me: a return to normality (and a normal blogging regime!) can’t come soon enough.