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18 simple Life Tips to save money and make life easier
One of my favourite Twitter feeds at the moment is @lifetipseasy. I love the practical and really simple tips and quite a few of them are about saving money or using alternative (cheaper) products to fix a problem, and some are even just simply genius.
Here are my favourite tips at the moment from the feed:
1. Measure one of your fingers and memorise the length – now you have an instant ruler.
2. Reduce nail polish clumping by running the polish bottle under hot water for 40-50 seconds.
3. Take a picture of your fridge on your phone, you’ll never struggle to remember what you need to buy at the grocery store!
4. Apples are more powerful than caffeine at helping you stay awake.
5. Want whiter teeth? Gently rub the inside of …
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3 great tips to save money on school holiday flights
Last night’s Watch Dog revealed three awesome tips to save money when buying flights for family holidays, and avoiding the price hike that comes with school breaks, so I thought I’d share:
1. Take advantage of Scotland or England’s different school holiday times
Scottish and English school holidays often differ. For example, in Scotland in the summer most schools break up at the end of June and pupils go back in the third week of August. This means that if you are Scottish, you could make your way down to English airports such as Manchester and Newcastle when English kids are still at school and save in flight costs. The same applies in reverse, English people can travel north for cheaper flights. According to Watch Dog, the savings offset any petrol and parking costs.
2.
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Freebies galore – my top 5 from Latestfreestuff
Collecting free products has been made a lot easier by freebie round up websites.
I wrote last week about L’Occitane being generous with freebies and thought that I get plenty of stuff for free. From makeup to booklets, I have already used freebie websites to gain products for nothing.
I use LatestFreeStuff as my freebie round up service of choice. So I thought I’d list their top 5 current freebies (IMHO). Get in quick as once they’re gone, they’re gone.
1) Free Bvlgari Indian Garnet Perfume
Bvlgari are giving away FREE samples of their new Omnia Indian Garnet perfume. Just head over to their website and fill in the form with your details. Note: there is no post code box, enter it into ‘Address’ box including your full address. They’ll send out the samples in …
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Kids saving account with 3% interest
We have accounts for our kids at Nationwide and I popped in today to deposit some money.
The friendly assistant told me about the building society’s new kids Smart Limited Access account. It was launched two weeks ago, so I was glad I went in.
The account pays 3% per year if you only withdraw once a year. If you withdraw more times, the interest reverts to 0.75%. As we have never withdrawn from the kids accounts, this is perfect for us.
We are pretty ad-hoc with their saving, so don’t want to commit to depositing a regular amount, so this account is even more interesting.
With a whopping £50,000 limit for deposits, that’s attractive if we win the lottery ;-).
Here are some key facts about the Smart Limited Access account for children:
A
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15 tips to help you save money while on holiday
You’ve booked the flight and hotel and are expecting to splash out, but with a few tips, you can spend the money on some nice gifts or day trips, and save on the essentials. Here are some of my handy holiday tips for you.
1. Get a Post Office credit card
We only use this card when abroad. It doesn’t charge foreign exchange charges, which most credit cards do.
2. Read Tripadvisor
Ideally you should so this before you book, but if you have already sorted your holiday, make sure that you know where the restaurants and bars near to your hotel are. Armed with this information, you can share the wisdom of people who have already stayed at your accommodation. Useful information could be where the 7/11 is to which direction to walk for …
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Sleep Park Fly – cheap hotel and airport parking
We try to fly from Midlands airports whenever we can. We can get cabs or trains to a couple of airports and that is a lot less stressful than flying from London airports or Manchester.
But sometimes, you get more choice from the other airports in terms of where to fly, that’s when we discovered Sleep Park Fly for a very early flight from Heathrow last year.
We arrived the night before, had our dinner and went to sleep in a comfy family room. We got up at 3 am to board shuttle bus that took us to the airport. We left our car in the Premier Inn’s secure car park.
Today, I booked my second Sleep, Park, Fly stay. We need to be at the airport at 5.30 am, so would have to leave …
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Discounts with new Two Together Railcard – great for couples
On 3 March, the Two Together Railcard was officially launched.
Now I am a fan as I was one of the people who trialled it when it was being tested a year or so ago in the Midlands.
Basically you and one other person (can be anyone) have to both have your photograph on the card to get the discount on most travel after 9.30 am and on weekends/weekends….even on advance fares.
The card’s benefits made travelling to London cheaper for me definitely. However, since the trial and the official launch, there was a lull of about a year, so I went on the hunt for an alternative.
As most of my travel to work is to London, the Network Rail Card has proved very useful. From Banbury onwards, I get a discount. I did …
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Cool money saving apps for freebies, price comparison, online selling, money transfer and going out
I have an iPhone and quite a few apps running on it, but I’m always looking out for more and thought I’d do a round up of some cool money saving and bargain hunting apps.
idealo
idealo is a a price comparison app, offering you on-the-go price information by comparing more than three million products – everything from pushchairs to smartphones to running shoes – and hundreds of online shops. It’s got some handy features:
- Barcode scanner – swipe the barcodes of items they seen out and about and immediately compare online prices.
- Pricewatcher feature which enables shoppers to enter their target price for a particular item, and receive an email notification when the product reaches the desired price.
- Favourites list to easily share popular items with friends and family.
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Best supermarket for online grocery shopping – a comparison
From prices, delivery costs to minimum order value and customer service, which online grocery store wins my comparison?
You may know that I shop at Aldi and supplement that shop with Co-operative or Morrisons, but sometimes I have a lot on and need to save time, so I go online.
I haven’t shopped online since September 2013 for groceries, so I thought I would check out what’s new and have put my research here in my attempt to see which is the best online grocery store on paper. I looked at Asda, Ocado, Sainsbury’s and Tesco. I thought about adding Waitrose but they do have a reputation for being expensive, and after five days their customer service hadn’t got back to me about my online grocery queries, so I left them out.
Here are my …
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Quit smoking and save loads
In my 20s I used to smoke, but Mr BH said it’s either me or the fags, so I gave up. As well as the health risks, smoking costs a small fortune. Check out this handy Smoking Calculator from the NHS to see how much money you could save by giving up. The image above is the saving for someone smoking 20 a day.
I figured that plenty of you will be looking to quit smoking around this time of year, so as I don’t smoke, I asked my friend, who has just given up, to give me the low down on how she is coping and saving money. I was offered some free electric cigarettes, and gave them to her, so she’s even given feedback on them.
“If, like me, your New Year resolution …
