I am saving around $100 a month on my grocery bills, thanks to a few simple changes to our family meals. I wanted to reduce our food bill and after some thought came up with the idea of making two nights per week a '$2 Dinner Night'. For example, one night we will have something like toasted baked bean sandwiches or stuffed baked potatoes; the other I use up all the leftover vegetables in the fridge to make a self-crusting quiche. This reduces the amount of food we waste and the kids love it. Even the simplest meals can be delicious and filling and the savings we are making from our twice-weekly $2 dinners are well worth it!

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!

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.

If your baby or toddler enjoys Heinz fruit gels, you can easily make your own at home. The benefit is that you know exactly what you are feeding them and it costs you a lot less! You will need:

2 cups of fruit juice (apple, blackcurrant or whatever you choose)
1/2 teaspoon Agar powder (you can buy this from health food shops; don't be put off by the cost as it will last a long time). You need to measure the ingredients exactly to get the right consistency, otherwise the gel will be either too firm or too runny.

Put the juice in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Then sprinkle the Agar over the top and let simmer for about 30 seconds. Pour into jars or containers and let set in the fridge. This should make around eight serves depending on the size of the containers. Unlike gelatin, Agar will stay firm if the gel is taken out of the fridge. You can also mix pureed fruit like apple, and it won't affect the recipe. For toddlers or older children you can mix two fruits and it is just like the jelly fruit cups you buy in the supermarket.

Through my job working at one of the major supermarkets, I have learned all kinds of tips and tricks to save money! Next time you visit a supermarket, bear the following in mind:

• You can save up to 50% on Sara Lee products by buying our house brand bakery items instead - they are made by exactly the same company.

• The meat is no longer as good quality and has gone up slightly in price. I would suggest going to a butcher instead and paying less for better quality.

• In-store baked items are marked down from 40-80% two days before their use-by date (this does not include bread or donuts)

• Buy bulk and buy less often. For example, if you drink coffee, wait until the BIG tins are on special and buy three or four. This will last you for ages and save you $40 and upwards on coffee alone in the long run!

• If an item seems a bit sparse towards the end of the week, chances are there is actually heaps out the back and it is going on special on the Monday, so wait to make your purchase then if possible.

• For those living alone, take another look at those frozen meals. They may look expensive at first glance at between $4 and $6 but then go and price the meat and all the vegetables. Remember also to take into account how much you have to throw out after a few days through not using them!

• If you want to see who makes what, look at the back of the pack to see which company owns it. Visit the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) website and find out which other 'mini-companies' it has under its belt. They often compete with their own brands!

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!

I have two daughters who live at home with me who are both university students. They both work part-time and pay me $50 a week each for everything. (And I mean absolutely everything!) I had begun to get sick and tired of their wasteful habits! I would find half eaten muesli bars lying around, week-old uneaten fruit, discarded shampoo bottles and toothpaste tubes with enough in the base for three or four more uses, soap in the bin which still had plenty of use left in it and the list goes on! Quite frankly, I'd had enough! I told them to keep their $50 a week and instead they could buy everything for themselves (snacks, lunches, toiletries and so on). I would provide their one evening meal and that was it. I even made them buy their own toilet paper. Well after two weeks they have decided to mend their ways! They just did not realise the costs involved in running a household and admitted they had taken things for granted. I only wish I had done it much sooner, for their benefit and also mine! One daughter can only afford to give me $50 still and her older sister has increased her amount to $70. However, I think things around here are going to be very different from now on as my Sad Sallys strive to become more like Happy Hanna!

As school has gone back, and exercise books need covering, I thought I'd share this money and time saving tip.

I bought a box of 100 plastic sleeves, just like the ones you clip into ring binders. These cost me just $1.50. I then cut off the spine and the bottom of each sleeve, leaving me with a piece of plastic that is the perfect size for covering exercise books. The spine of the book fits and holds neatly in the crease, and the overhang is the perfect width for folding over the edge and sticking down. So simple, and at $1.50 to cover 100 books, so economical too.

Instead of buying pureed fruit in jars or tins, which according to the latest stories contain a lot of water, buy a large tin of pie apples (no added sugar) and a large tin of any other fruit in natural juice, puree them together and put in single serve containers. Two large tins make about 15 single serves (a much bigger serve than the baby food tins) and cost about $4.50 less than the equivalent of baby food in tins. The pie apples don't contain liquid so this means that your home-made baby food is not too sloppy. You can vary the taste by changing the second fruit to apricots, pears, fruit salad, peaches, two fruits and so on.

Think twice before you buy an expensive bathroom cleaner to clean your acrylic bath, vanity basin and laundry tub. Try Sunlight soap - it works wonders!

After recently having a dint repaired in my three-year-old acrylic bath (the kids were too rough with their bath toys!), I asked a man who repairs acrylic baths, basins, and so on what the best cleaning product was to use on this surface. I was amazed to hear that good old Sunlight soap was the best. He said most of the marketed products available eventually wear the surface and take off the shine, then people have to pay him hundreds of dollars to get that shine back again!

I decided to try it for myself. I purchased a pack of Sunlight soap (four in a pack) for $2.09 at Coles (with even cheaper generic brands available). One cake of soap lasted me for six months - that's just over $0.50c for six months of cleaning the bath, vanity basin and laundry tub. Best of all, it really works! Also, it leaves a wonderful shine; I was really impressed. I use an old sports sock over my hand and foam up the soap, then I clean away - all that soap scum and grime easily vanishes.