Moneysaving Idiot

2011 is set to be a hard year financially, as if 2010 wasn't. With more cuts in the public sector, and the VAT increase, most of us don't have much money to waste.

With that in mind, I have compiled a list of the best money-saving techniques, ways to make money with little effort and some interesting freebies. Some of these are common knowledge, and maybe a bit patronising, but here they are anyway! These are the ones I use anyway.

1. Cashback websites


These are easy to use, require very little effort and mean you basically get money for nothing. The concept is simple - you set up your account, say with Quidco. Then say you are buying a DVD from Play.com - you simply link to Play.com from Quidco, and complete the purchase as normal. The cashback site will claim from Play a percentage, in this case 5% of the purchase price and pay it back to you. Admittedly, if you are buying DVDs, video games and that kind of thing, you probably won't make more than a quid on any purchase. If you are buying ink cartridges, you may make some more. You really make money on insurance policies, new mobile phone contracts (I made about £60) and broadband services (I made £40 on a £5 Orange Mobile contract, Virgin Media are very generous as well).

Quidco does take an annual £5 fee from your earnings, which is how the site is funded, and different retailers take varying amounts of time to pay up. Topcashback is a very similar site with similar rates.

You may have read all of this before, but I would say this really works well. The only thing is that no cashback sites link to Amazon, but if you can get over that, you'll be fine!

2. Consumerpulse

This is a online spending diary. Everytime you purchase something like clothes, video games, DVDs, MP3s, perfumes, or go the cinema, you log it with Consumerpulse. For each item logged, you get 500 points. Each week you get 500 points. On your birthday you get extra points. Each month you completed a Telecom questionnaire and you get extra points for that. If you complete 13 in a row you get even more points. So what good are points?

Well, once you have at least 10,000 points you can convert them to vouchers from a number of retailers like Next, Argos, Pizza Hut, Monsoon and more. Or you can donate your earnings to charity. Now, there is a cap on how many points you can earn in a month, I think around 6,000 for purchases. And you will need to validate most purchases with things like barcodes, so you can't really make stuff up.

I saved my vouchers up for Christmas, and had about £120 to spend. As for getting signed up, I received an invite through the post. At one point I received 10 invites to give out. But aside from that, I have no idea how to get chosen to take part! Good luck though.

3. HotUKDeals.com

This is one website I check daily. Keen moneysavers post offers/deals/freebies they have seen, and then you can vote on whether the deal is hot or cold. There are some great deals out there. The site also has a Twitter feed, an RSS feed, an Ipod/Iphone app, as well as an app for Android amongst others.

Basically good deals on everything from supermarket essentials, to DVDs, computer games, hardware and everything in between.

4. Matched Betting

This is a bit more risky, but if you follow the rules to the letter and key a log of your incomings and outgoings, you will be fine. The basic premise is that you take advantage of an online betting site's free bet offer in conjunction with a betting exchange, like Betfair. In many cases you put a bet on a team to win on the gambling site and the same team to lose (lay bet) on the betting exchange. This means you can't really lose. Then if you qualify for a free bet, you do the same again, and usually make a profit, a good one being about £30.

You can only do this once with each company, so this is a case of getting in, getting your money and getting out. You can also use this in conjunction with Quidco, which means you get extra cashback - so for example, you can get £10 cashback for signing up Betfair, £25 for signing up with Jaxx etc.

The site I used is http://www.freebets4all.com/matcher.aspx - however, as a word of warning, read of all of the information, and be careful not to try it on websites where you have to wager your free bet winnings numerous times before you can withdraw it, because you'll never get it all back.

The only other thing with this is that you will need some cash to put down in the first place - you have to speculate to accumulate!

5. Like Eating Out? Get a Taste Card


There are some similar cards to this out there, but this is one we have. It gives you a discount off your food in restaurants nationwide, usually 50%. The main ones in Stevenage are Prezzo and Pizza Express. We went to Prezzo quite a lot, and by drinking mineral water, we were about to get a meal for a family for four, with starters, down to about £20.

The card costs £69.95 - http://www.tastecard.co.uk/ - although there are always deals out there, sometimes they give them out for free for a limited period, or they heavily discount them. But definitely worth looking out for.

6. Get Your Shopping Delivered


I swear by this. OK, so you have to a few quid to get a delivery, but the amount you save in not making impulse purchases more than makes up for it. If you plan your meals as much as you can, and only order what you need you can potentially save £100s each year. If you live near Baldock you can collect your shopping rather than have it delivered.

The best part of this is that you don't have to battle your way through the supermarket each week which is good for the stress levels.

7. Get Free Cinema Tickets From Sky


This is a new one to me, thanks to HotUKDeals. If you are Sky Customer, they put on regular free preview screenings. We went to watch Tangled 3D well before it was released generally, and didn't pay a penny for the tickets (although the popcorn was expensive). So worth it if you are Sky Customer: http://movies.sky.com/my-sky-extras-cinema-previews

Well, that's all I have for now! Hope this is useful to someone out there! Would love to hear about any others.....