How Do You Know If You Are Frugal?

I have found Frugal In Norfolk's blog and as I am so nosey I have started at the beginning and will hopefully catch up one day - at the moment I am on October 2011 posts and the one I read was about being frugal.

FIN said that one of the defintions of frugal is 'practising economy; living without waste; being thrifty' and this got me thinking that I see all of those as just normal but am I actually frugal?

I read other frugal blogs but I never seem to do what they do - one blogger only had a quick wash most days and then a short shower once or twice a week. Now I find that extreme frugalness.

Everyone in my household has a bath every day - we don't have a shower but when we lived in a house with a shower we still all had baths. I think it stems from my childhood, even though we were classed as poor we all had a bath every night, my best friend had a bath once a week and my DH also only bathed once a week.

Our little nod to being frugal is that we all share the same bath water, DD always goes first (she has an early bedtime) and the rest of us follow in order of cleanliness so the last person is the dirtiest.

I cannot bear to scrimp on water - if we need water we will use it. Our water usage is about £30pm as we are metered, I suppose we could cut back but do we really need to?

I cook a chicken and then keep the carcass to boil up to get the meat off the bones and then the stock is either used in gravy or as a base to a sauce to go with the chicken. I thought it was normal not to waste food but then DS' girlfriend came round and said she had never heard of anyone boiling a carcass to get the rest of the meat off it.

One thing I do that I know not everyone does is to make my own washing powder - DD has always been allergic to most washing powders so we always purchased non-bio but then over on MSE someone mentioned making their own so I have been doing that for nearly a year now.

I use Borax substitute and soda crystals from a local hardware store and buy unperfumed soap from either Tesco or Lidl.

Here is my box of goodies ready to start

I buy 6 boxes of Borax substitute (500g each) and 3 packs of soda crystals (1kg each) and 4 bars of soap. Total cost £15.04.

I then layer it up starting with 1 box of Borax, followed by half a bag of soda crystals followed by 1 box of Borax and the rest of the bag of soda crystals and then I grate 1 bar of soap. Then I give it a good stir and continue the process adding the extra bar somewhere along the line

This is what it looks like in the tub - I always think the grated soap looks like the topping on London Cakes!!

I brought the tub from the hardware place ages ago and also purchased a seperate grater just for soap!!

I use 2 scoops of powder in each full wash, obviously half washes get 1 scoop.

Here is my nice large tub of soap

This tub should last about 8 - 10 weeks and as I do about 6 loads a week it works out very cheap per load. I also find it gets whites whiter than normal supermarket soap powder.

So what do you think is frugal and what is normal?