'I found ways to save £300 a year, but you won't like them'

A mum has shared the “extreme” things she has done to cut costs – and says they have helped her save hundreds of pounds a year. Charlotte Jessop shares financial educational tips on TikTok, where she boasts 66,000 followers. But the 37-year-old’s latest post may prove divisive, with her detailing how she stopped using staples such as shampoo and toilet roll, as well as a ban on buying clothes.

The mum says the savings add up. “They are small changes that accumulate over time – over the year saving £100-£300,” said Charlotte, a maths teacher from Norwich. Sharing the video on TikTok, where she goes by @‌lookingafteryourpennies, Charlotte reminisced on some of the most extreme ways she has cut costs over the years.

To start, she said: “I stopped using shampoo. “This isn’t like I didn’t wash my hair, I actually switched to the ‘no poo’ method, which is meant to be really good for your hair. To be fair, my hair did feel good, but it was only any good because I was mostly at home with my kids and nobody saw me on the days when my hair looked grim.”

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Her second tip is a little less unorthodox. Charlotte said: “I stopped buying new clothes. This isn’t a particularly hard one – like if you’ve got a decent amount of clothes already, you can just wear those clothes. It was hard when some staples wore out, and I had to kind of work around that. I did that for about six months to a year.

Next, rather than buying disposable nappies for her children, Charlotte opted to save her pounds by using cloth alternatives. She said: “I used cloth nappies with my kids. I wouldn’t say this is an extremely frugal one [tip], because actually those cloth nappies can cost a lot of money to buy in the first place, but washing and using those nappies definitely saved me a lot of money.”

Her fourth tip – and perhaps the most eyebrow-raising one – is ditching toilet paper. Charlotte explained: “This is the controversial one – reusable toilet roll.

Hear me out on this – this isn’t toilet roll that you just use over and over again, it’s basically little flannels that you wipe yourself downstairs with. The thinking with this was [that] I was using these little cloth wipes for my kids when they were in cloth nappies, so we just carried on using them for the kids whilst they were learning to use the toilet.”

Charlotte says she “dips in and out” of using the tips when she needs to save cash