Our family home is always a clean and happy one, thanks to our weekly raffle! With four children aged from 12 down to two, there is always so much to get done, so we started our very own 'family raffle' as an incentive to get the chores done.

A list on the fridge displays all the categories for a raffle ticket. Some examples are - clean bedroom floor, do a load of laundry, give a music recital, finish homework by 5pm, clean the windows, play with the baby and so on. Every time a chore is completed, the child fills in a raffle ticket with their name and the task done. Then, every week at the same time, we pull out the prize winner. They receive a prize from the discount store - some kind of age appropriate toy such as a pack of cards, fancy pencils and so on, to a maximum value of $5.00. The remaining tickets are pulled out and all are given five points each. Every child who has reached 20 points during the week also receives $5.00. We get so much housework completed this way! We deposit the money in the children's bank accounts online and they are encouraged to save it, or can spend it on something special. This really helps when they need to buy a birthday gift for their friends and can even pay for their own outings and movie tickets. I read every chore they complete out loud and the pride in their faces is worth every cent!

I only need to shop for food once a month and am saving $3000 per year on feeding our family of six.

With four children, I was spending at least $800 per month on shopping, so I came up with a plan to try and cut costs. I went through recipe books and chose meals that I was going to cook for dinner. I wrote a list on an A4 page for every day of that month and what I was going to cook for each day. Then, on another page I wrote all the food items that I needed for the recipes I had pre-chosen and that was my shopping list for the month.

The best thing is I now knew what I was cooking every day, without walking to the fridge and thinking 'what am I cooking?' I also put the A4 page of what we were having for dinner on the fridge and the family knew what we were having each day without asking me!

To start with I went shopping every fortnight for food, but now I do it once a month and only spend $550 each month.

Before I began this routine, I was spending $9600 per year on food for four children and two adults - now I am spending $6600 per year! The extra $3000 we save each year goes into our children's bank account, which they just love!

We all know how convenient it is to grab a packet of cake mix off the supermarket shelf, but you can save a lot of money by making your own. This recipe is really easy to make and you can store it in the fridge for up to three months or for longer in the freezer.

Ingredients:

250g self raising flour
185g caster sugar
2tbsp milk powder, skimmed or full cream
125g butter

Method:

Sift or process all dry ingredients until combined, and then rub in or process the butter.

To make the cake add:

2 eggs
1tsp vanilla essence
1/2 cup water

When these ingredients have been added to the cake mix, beat the whole lot until combined. Bake at 150C - 180C for 30 minutes if making one cake, or 20 minutes for smaller cakes. For variety, add coffee, cocoa or anything else you like. This is as good as shop bought cake mixes and half the price!

Making potato wedges at home is much cheaper than buying them frozen from the supermarket. I use my OXO Good Grips apple divider (bought from a kitchen shop) to cut up a 5kg bag of spuds. I give the spuds a wash before cutting them up into eight wedges and one cylindrical wedge (the kids all fight over these ones). After popping them in boiling water for a couple of minutes I put them onto paper towel to dry, then into freezer bags. These are quick, economical and you can vary the seasonings in different bags, and have them on hand in the freezer for a quick snack or side dish.

These bath bombs are great to give as gifts or to pamper yourself with! This recipe should give you at least four to five good sized 'bombs' and cost as little as $1.00 to make. All you need are the following:

1 1/2 cups bicarb soda

1/2 cup citric acid

Scent or fragrance of your choice (you can use essential oils if you have them)

Food colouring of your choice

Sweet almond oil or any cooking type oil

Flower petals if desired

NOTE: Make sure everything is dry. Even the smallest hint of moisture will make the ingredients fizz.

Sift the bicarb and citric acid into a large bowl, add petals if desired then divide mix into four separate batches.

In another bowl, mix one tablespoon of oil, enough fragrance to suit you and enough food colouring to get the desired colour. Mix well. This mix is enough for one of your small batches of dry mix.

Add the colour and fragrance mix to a batch of dry mix and mix in with fingers very quickly, making sure that it does not fizz. Mix well to make sure the colour and fragrance are distributed evenly.

Press firmly into lightly oiled moulds. You can use just about anything as a mould. Try using the plastic lid from a can of hairspray or jelly moulds if you have some. You can buy bath bomb moulds from some craft shops. Make sure that you press the mix firmly into the mould, otherwise it will crumble.

Leave in a dry spot for about 24 hours, then gently press them out and enjoy!

This idea is for those who live in a home with a garden that is too small to have a compost bin. I use an empty garden pot, cut a square of one of those net bags oranges come in to cover the hole of the pot. Put in a layer of old potting soil (from a pot where the plants have had their day). Each day save your fruit and vegetable scraps in a container. Place in a layer of scraps, then cover with another layer of old soil. Repeat layer by layer until the pot is nearly full, ending with a layer of soil (water as you go).

Then, while the compost is breaking down and baking, plant some seasonal seedlings on top and in no time you will have potted colour and compost underneath, not only feeding your seedlings but ready for the garden when the flowers are spent at the end of the season. I sometimes benefit from crops of vegetables germinated from the seeds in the compost such as tomatoes, cucumbers, capsicum and butternut pumpkin.

This is a multi recycling exercise using unwanted orange bags, unused pots, old soil and fruit and vegetable scraps and, of course, it is a great medium for the latest seedlings. Instead of flowers on top you could plant your favourite herbs while the compost is baking.

I make these Cheesy Ham and Corn muffins, which are delicious and at only $0.44 each to make, give me and my family something tasty, cheap and healthy in our lunchboxes. They are yummy cold, or heated up in the microwave.

Makes 12

Ingredients:
1 x 310g can of corn (reserve can for measuring)
½ cup reduced fat milk (1/2 ‘can’)
2 eggs
2 cups of self raising flour - I use wholemeal (2 ‘cans’)
Pinch of salt
2 cups reduced fat grated Australian cheese (2 ‘cans’)
2 slices ham, cut into strips
2 teaspoons English mustard

Method:

Whisk together corn, milk and eggs in a large bowl until combined. Add remaining ingredients and stir until just combined.
Spoon mixture into non-stick ½ cup muffin tray.
Bake at 200c for 15-20 minutes or until golden brown and cooked through.

I add a supermarket gift card to my weekly grocery list and use them all up to shop for Christmas! After doing some calculations I realised that the ready-made Christmas hampers that you pay for weekly cost three times their actual value, not to mention the fact that they can include many products you won't ever use. My new system for buying Christmas groceries lets me buy my own hamper full of items at the current price or on special.

I make this vegetable pasta sauce for three reasons - it's cheap and healthy and it uses up leftover vegies (cooked and uncooked) so I save three times!

Whenever I serve up a dish of vegies for dinner (usually broccoli, carrots, beans and zucchini in my house) and it isn't all eaten, I put the leftovers in a ziplock bag and throw it in the freezer. Then, when my fresh vegies are starting to get to that 'oh dear' stage, I start cooking!

In a big pot, with a bit of olive oil, I fry onion and garlic and add all the 'oh dear' vegies - sometimes there is a fiddly bit of broccoli that is too small to use in a meal or carrots that are starting to wilt. Other vegies I have added include celery, cauliflower, broad beans, spinach, cabbage and capsicum. I chop and cook all of this - in summer I add fresh tomatoes, in winter I throw in a couple of cans of Home Brand tinned tomatoes. To this I add the frozen leftover vegies, a squeezie stock concentrate or stock cube and some water.

I cook the whole lot until everything is soft, and then I blitz it in a food processor or with a Bamix until it looks like pasta sauce. I then freeze this in meal-size portions and use it for everything - I add it to mince for bolognese, or just use it neat. My kids don't know it's full of vegies - they just think it's another jar of commercial pasta sauce!

My kids love doing things on Saturdays but even a trip to the movies for our family costs $70. So I invented '$20 Saturday'. We could go anywhere and do anything as long as it didn't cost more than $20 for the whole day. One Saturday each month we would find a spot in the street directory that looked interesting and take a picnic, other times we visited free places such as museums or community festivals and the $20 bought a drink, small snack or ice cream. Not every place was terrific but we gave each place or activity a score to rate whether we would like to do it again. My boys talk fondly of things we did together and places we visited on $20 Saturdays and they learn that you don't have to spend up big to have fun.