With a combined effort, we have been able to purchase the majority of required household items for several families in our community, without incurring any extra debt. By using a common practice from our country of Papua New Guinea, we have been able to join together as families to help each other with basic needs.

Along with other women from Papua New Guinea, we have moved to Paraburdoo, a mining town in Western Australia, due to our husbands'
jobs. In the first month, all families contribute to buy one family's basic need; like a washing machine, freezer, dryer, lawn mower and so on. The next month we contribute and pay for another family and cycle goes on until all families own one item each. Whilst waiting for our turn to come around, the first family that has the item allows us to share it until we have our own and so forth.

The next big project will be assisting each family to obtain a second hand vehicle for starters, then when we have settled in and are mobile enough, we can trade-in the second hand vehicles for brand new ones to suit the timing of each family.

By putting in the effort as a group, we are able to achieve our dreams within a reasonable time and without going into debt. Our culture embodies this practise of sharing and helping each other, and it has worked just as well in Australia as it did for us in Papua New Guinea. A positive outcome which may invoke similar thoughts among close friends and neighbours in other communities.

Why buy lunch? With recipes as good as this, there's no need! I make this egg slice every few days to take to work, and I thought you might like to try it too.

Ingredients:

2 cups vegetables – just about anything will do. Leftover roast vegetables, steamed vegies, wilted salad... even raw stuff like grated carrot or chopped up tomato.

1/2 cup leftover meat, for example, bacon, fish or chicken

4 eggs, beaten

Grated cheese

Method:

Spread the vegetables and meat over the bottom of a greased square baking dish. Pour over the beaten egg, top with grated cheese and bake at 170C for about 30 minutes.

I take a quarter of this slice and some salad to work every day – it's yummy hot or cold. Thanks to the wide variety of vegetables you can use, no two slices are the same. It costs less than a dollar to make and the vegetables and protein keep me going for hours.

Swapping roles with my husband forced him to start budgeting and to learn to take control of our finances!

My husband and I are happily married and are about to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary, but there was a stage in our lives when we were raising three children and our finances were incredibly stretched, yet he refused to accept it.

One day there was no bacon for his breakfast (he likes bacon every day) and he lost his temper. Rather than get angry back, I wrote him a letter resigning as housekeeper, mother and wife and gave it to his secretary.

He finally agreed to talk and I got him to agree that for one month he would take responsibility for running the house on the budget I had been working on. It wasn't long before he asked 'How on earth do you manage? We need to reassess our finances'.

Since then we have always cooperated when it comes to getting through a tough period.

I have saved a fortune on laminating costs over the years, by doing my own at home. I don't have a laminating machine though - I don't need one! I just buy the laminating pouches I need and get exactly the same effect using my household iron on a low setting. You just need to ensure you are working on a fairly rigid surface - if your ironing board is too 'spongy', strengthen the surface by adding a piece of cardboard, covered with cloth before laminating. When applying the iron, put a cloth or other fabric between the plastic and the iron. The results are just the same as using a machine and the heat will gently fuse the pouch together. I have done this for so long, that I don't know how much laminating costs any more, because I never pay to have it done!

Sometimes I feel as though I've lived on a budget all my life! I live alone in a second floor rented apartment - no yard or garden, just a concrete car park. To combat that 'locked in' feeling, I have endeavoured to bring the outside in for little cost.

I have several indoor plants; beautiful, green and healthy. My small cold water fish tank has two goldfish in it, they are healthy and lively and provide colour and movement darting around. Very cheap pets too, a can of fish food lasts for ages and you can get all kinds of tanks to suit any budget.

I conserve water by using the 'old' water from the fish tank when I change it to water my plants, giving them lots of nutrients! I also use the water left from steaming vegetables to water the plants too.

I have no car, so must walk to get my groceries and other needs. I tell myself this is all POSITIVE. Everytime I walk to the shops and back it is exercise and energy sustainable. I'm not creating any air pollution either!

Almost all my clothing comes from the local opportunity shops - guess you could call me Second Hand Rose! I have three good op shops in my area, which are also great for cheap books, kids' toys - just about anything you can think of!

Frugality is not about being 'mean'; it's often very necessary for those on a fixed and limited income - and it can be a lot of fun!

I am 22 years old and on a low income, but am well on the way to saving for my first house! I developed a simple system that keeps my savings goal at the forefront of my mind and encourages the support of those around me.

I've always found it hard to save, but one day I got a big piece of cardboard and wrote 'My House Deposit' at the top. On the right hand side I cut out images of a house, a kitchen and a loungeroom that I would love to own one day. On the left hand side I drew a giant thermometer and on the side wrote the figures $0 to $40 000 ascending, just like on a real thermometer. Whether or not I need $40 000 is irrelevant; I look at this table every day and whenever I save another $500, I colour in with a red crayon up to the amount on the tally. I use hints from Simple Savings, such as making my own lunch every day and not buying clothes if I don't need them and now whenever I make a purchase I think of my house deposit and how much I want it far more than a coffee or new shoes!

An unexpected bonus of having this chart is that I've found my family and boyfriend have become aware of my goals and I get lots of support along the way. This visualisation technique really does wonders, and most importantly you are making a concrete agreement with yourself and you stop losing sight of your goals. I'm already a quarter of the way to reaching mine!

I took on the $21 Challenge, and won! However, my husband was a rather grumpy participant; he loved the savings but not the lifestyle during Challenge week. As he goes away regularly, I decided that every night he's not home for dinner would become a $21 Challenge night for the kids and I - all meals must be made from ingredients I already have at home, and I can only use ingredients that have not been allocated for other meals. This saves money and gives me a night off cooking, as my Challenge meals are usually simple affairs, sometimes as easy as pancakes or toasted sandwiches.

The true value of the $21 Challenge became apparent when a friend was recently diagnosed with a severe form of leukaemia. She is a married mother of four boys and is embarking on a long therapeutic journey that will hopefully lead to a full recovery. As a way of helping her family, the parents at our school have banded together to make all their meals for the next three to six months. As they are a large family, with an above average food requirement, I was unsure how I could afford to help feed them each week. Thankfully, my husband was away the week my friend was diagnosed, so the kids and I lived off the $21 Challenge that week and all leftover money was put into making meals to freeze for my friend's family.

We now do the same thing whenever my husband is away – it's a great gift over the Christmas break to know that I can afford to cook and freeze meals for my friend's family, and look after my family at the same time. Thank you.

As a new singleton, I have learned not to let my pride stand in the way of making a new home for myself on a budget. I recently separated from my husband of 14 years and moved out of the family home. We share our four children week-about but I wanted to leave the family home as complete as I could for some sort of stability for the kids. With so little to now call my own I had no choice but to swallow my pride and 'put it out to the universe' that I needed quite a bit to furnish my new home.

At the op shop I purchased three Jason recliners, a telephone table, two tallboys, a desk, four bedside drawers, a single mattress and linen for the beds for $63, including delivery!

By word of mouth through friends I was given: a washing machine, microwave, crockery, glasses, towels, THREE TVs and a TV/stereo unit, a digital set top box, two stereos, a BBQ, a brand new gas bottle for the BBQ, a gorgeous white cast iron bed for my daughter, a queen size bed and three single beds, a computer, a bookshelf, a two seater couch, a bike and doonas for us all, as well as pillows. I gave away a few of the TVs and one of the stereos to people who needed it.

I also found that if you ask your friends if they have excess tea towels, coffee cups and so on, you'll find that they can often spare a few of these items.

Most importantly of all, I have learned that I don't need matching crockery or linen to make a home, just the basics and a lot of love!

Changing circumstances and a growing familly all added up to us paying a whole lot less off our mortgage than we would have liked. Pretty soon we would have started to go backwards. It was crunch time!

Using the Simple Savings calendar I identified our most expensive habits, and was astounded to see the amount of money that could have been saved. Our grocery bill was always around $200 or more per week. This amount did not include meat or bread that we get from the butchers and bakery.The trouble was, my husband loved all the expensive name brands for items such as chocolate biscuits, lollies and savoury snacks and was convinced that the cheaper or no name products would be tastless and boring. Week after week I would just automatically reach for these items, without even glancing at the alternatives. I knew as soon as my husband saw the packaging, the goods would remain in the pantry unopened, and he would then go and buy the brand name items anyway.

One week I kept mentioning to him that I was going to do a big clean up of the pantry and I was finally going to utilise all those assorted Tuppaware containers that I had never used. That week I substituted his expensive brand of snack foods with cheaper versions, emptied them into the assorted airtight containers and threw the plain packaging out before he could see them!

I also applied this technique to several other items; I would fill cheaper dishwashing liquid into Morning Fresh bottles, no-name hand wash into saved Palmolive dispensers, you get the picture. Our grocery bill went down from $200 to $140 per week - a saving of $240 a month!

When I finally fessed up to what I had been doing, my husband admitted that most of the snacks were just as good as the name brands, you just have to try a few out. All it took was some creative (OK, and somewhat deceitful) way to present the changes, but we have never looked back. Why would we, with a saving of $3120 a year? Plus of course, one very neat pantry!

I love making scones, and my Mum passed on this wee hint which makes my scones even better.

When the scone recipe calls for milk, use half milk and half water. For some reason, the water makes the scones extra light with the added bonus that it drastically cuts down on your milk usage.