More Bangs for my Bucks - MF by 50??

Thriftyknickers

Apologies for the delay in replying - I always knew time would be an issue.

Thanks luxor4t for the Greenmetropolis tip - I've put all 3 books on there but no bites so far. And thanks Floxxie for the paidtoshop reminder - I am a member but haven't had a browse for a while so did a quick catch up. It doesn't feel like there are so many clubcard point offers around at the moment. Still it all adds up!

Floxxie, here's a link to the Disneyland Resort Paris Shareholders site - http://corporate.disneylandparis.com/shareholders/index.xhtml I found it all really confusing but if there isn't any info on MSE, there's a couple of DLRP forums that are really good - the first one in particular regarding the shares, explaining everything in terms I could understand! http://www.disboards.com/forumdisplay.php?f=77 and http://www.dlp.info/Guide/index.htm I don't think DLRP shares would be considered a good investment - I think the company is just starting to make a profit - but the shareholder benefits are good. We bought ours last April and went for 20 shares (with brokers fee back then I think this cost around £127) If you buy 20, you don't need to pay a 2 year admin fee of 30 Euros but you can get the membership benefits (15% off restaurants, purchases (including Disney shops in the UK) etc) if you buy at least 5. NB. Although you get a discount on hotel accomodation and tickets etc, often there are better deals available anyway. On our first visit last April, 7 of us went and then 5 of us again in November. I think we've already recouped our investment and the shares are still sitting there which we can sell when we want to - although no point whilst we continue to take the kids there. I haven't looked to see if they have a similar scheme for the States - not really applicable to us until I can stomach taking the kids on a 10 hour flight, but should be easy enough to find out with a few searches on the internet.

Not much to tell you except we all went to Pizza Hut on Saturday and took advantage of the 50% off food offer. I'm a bit of a food snob and hadn't visited Pizza Hut pre-kids but their pizzas are really good! We had garlic bread with cheese, a large pizza (you can do half and half with toppings as me and my DH never agree!), a side salad for me, drinks and 2 kiddy visits to the icecream factory for £14.60 plus tip. This fed us all (in fact it was our main meal of the day) plus I had 1 and a half slices of pizza left over for my lunch the next day - they're happy to give you a take-away box for any over. (I'm getting so cheeky these days - whenever we eat out I either go prepared with a box or ask for a takeaway container for anything that's over. I hate wasting good food!)

On the making money side I've made a 21p (OK, OK, but hopefully it will boost my Ebay 100% 375 feedback rating) profit selling an MOC for Boots on Ebay plus earnt a £20 voucher on iPoints, a £10 voucher on IPSOS (but I don't officially count these until they actually arrive) and £1 on Lightspeed. I'm also collecting the free Daily Mail DVDs as I find they sometimes sell quite well on Ebay - I made £18.48 profit selling their 24 series of British Classics in November.

Thriftyknickers

Another little thing that helps me is my spreadsheets - it seems like a lot of MSE-ers are fans. I don't profess to be an Excel whizz, and I've built my own, but I've got a monthly one that keeps tabs on all of our spending plus breakdowns the spend into various headings and this then feeds into a monthly totals sheet. This allows me to see how we're doing per calendar year, 12 month totals and compare our spend with the same month in previous years. I find it really motivating - I'm so sad!

The other one I've been completing since mid September 2008 is a MOC/voucher code one. Its amazing how these benefits soon add up. From 18/9/2008-31/12/2008 we saved £218.14 made up as follows:-

• MOC in Tescos - £25.10
• Twins & Multiple Birth Association Discount (mainly 10% off Clarks shoes) -£9.40
• Pizza Hut offer - £7.74
• Boots Complaint - £12 (problems with online points being put on my card)
• Twins Club card (10% off at outlet village) £11.44
• Tesco Deals - £60 (used in the restaurants at CenterParcs)
• MOC at Sainsburys - £1.76
• 5p off litre petrol, Sainsburys voucher - £11
• Bicester Outlet Village VIP Card - £2.64
• Boots Advantage Card - £43.22 (I tend to bulk buy vitamins, moisturiser etc online when there's 3 for 2 plus advantage points etc and then use them to buy all our toiletries to reduce our grocery spend. I've been trying to keep the grocery spend under £300/month -a big saving on this time last year. Think I'll add this to my signature).
• Center Parcs - £26.45 (one quarter, my kids share, of the total discount - my parents pay for me and DH as our Christmas & birthday presents)
• HotUKDeals - £2.39 (my favourite discount code site)
• Marks & Spencers MOC - £5

Thriftyknickers

Long time - no hear from me as I've been on a course and then had computer problems!

We've had some redundancies announced where I work - its all very sobering. Fortunately my job is (currently!) all right. Our biggest challenge I think is to stay gainfully employed!

Our fabulous Nationwide Tracker (1.97%) comes to an end at the end of March so I've been hunting around for another deal. I think we going to stick with the Nationwide BMR for the time being (which I think will be 3% by then unless rates change further?) as its a great deal, we've built up an overpayment reserve we can draw down on plus we'll be able to overpay more than the current £500/month if we feel particularly flush!

I've been comparing our various savings rates and have decided to close my Nationwide Isa and moved it into my Tesco Internet saver (which pays a 1.5% bonus). I'm also going to close my A&L premier accounts too as the interest is poor.

We had a pretty good January - in terms of 'extra' income I made the following:-

• Quidco £0.06(!)
• Amazon £6.22
• Ebay £23.87
• Shop&Scan £10
• Lightspeed £3
• Ipoints £20
• Ipsos £10

I've got to pop off to the vets now - more later!

setmefree2

well done on your progress :T

deefadog

Congratulations, your doing really well. To point the Matched betting income - Yes this is real and is very easy once you get your head around it. You can easily make your 6k target for this year just by Match Betting. I started out like you, saving where i could, surveys, daily clicks, ebay etc. But then soon discovered Match Betting and have not looked back. Over the last 3 years i have made around 32k from it (honestly). But it's best to start slow, read, read & read the threads and ask advice and get fellow Matched bettors to check your figures for you.

Thriftyknickers

An update for February - signature now updated. I only generated £35.62 in 'extra' income - Quidco, Rpoints, Shop&scan and Lightspeed but I have got a load of stuff ready to put on Ebay this month - and have already sold 3. So March should be more promising. I saved £25.36 using various MOCs and my Boots Advantage Card points. Plus I got big savings on Vitality Show tickets for a girlie day out for me and some friends later this month - another little treat!

We had a bit of a big bang in February to belatedly celebrate my birthday (without the kids!) - a one night stay at Babington House. It probably sounds wierd to some MSE-ers, blowing the equivalent of my monthly grocery shopping bill (just over £300) on 2 days and 1 night away but it sooooo fits with my philosophy. I do appreciate that we're in a position that we can push the boat out from time to time too. The thought of our little 5* 1 night breaks that me and the DH take for our birthdays and anniversary (conveniently spaced throughout the year!) keep me going when the going gets tough - a bad day at work, a toddler tantrum or like tonight, whilst trying to write this, having to take my DDs to the loo/get a tissue/find Teddy [strike]3[/strike] 4 times in the space of [strike]20[/strike] 30 mins! I love my girls to bits, but its nice to just have some quiet quality time with the DH sometimes too. And my top tip would be go on a Sunday - you can get some fabulous deals - our room was £150 instead of £300+. Plus always let them know if you're celebrating a birthday or anniversary as we usually seem to get an upgrade too. :T

I picked up a bargain Manuka 'hoodie' that I'm really pleased with in TK Maxx (I'm a bit of a TK Maxx convert) - £16.63 instead of £55. I've been having a bit of a fashion crisis, never being able to find anything that looks right and more often than not go shopping and don't buy anything (very MSE but frustrating when your clothes are sooooo old), so I'm always over the moon if I find something I really like and I feel its a good deal too.

And now the not so good news. We have oil central heating and sometimes I long for the simplicity of our old little semi, with our electric night storage heaters! Since we moved 5 years ago, we've totally run out of oil twice - but had always been lucky that the boiler would then restart after an oil delivery. To solve my oil amnesia I now just have a top-up every 4 months. So far, so good. However, at the last delivery, the oil man commented that we had one full tank (we have a double tank set-up) - and that the 2nd tank wasn't switched on - no idea why. I mentioned it to my DH and of course we both forgot to do anything about it. And so, we 'ran out of oil' again (ironically on the day of our scheduled oil delivery - oh cruel fate!) despite having one tank still full. By the time I realised what was going on and switched on the 2nd tank, we had an air lock. So I called out the boiler man who had installed it 18 months before. I'd already taken off the front of the boiler and all he did was unscrew a valve(??) to release the air - it seemed a bit like bleeding a radiator. He couldn't have been in the house more than 5 mins. 'And that will be £50 please!!'. I didn't have enough cash and rather than take a cheque he said he'd just send an invoice with the date of my next boiler service. And when the invoice came in it was now £65!!!:mad: An expensive lesson learnt!

And so to bed! I'm taking part in a 6 week (just starting week 2) weight loss challenge to raise money for The Smile Train. My target is 6lb but in my first week, after thinking I'd been so good, I've only lost 0.5lb. This weight loss thing is hard!! So off to the gym first thing tomorrow morning! Wish me luck!

PS. Sorry for the ramble - should really try and do little and often!

setmefree2

well done on the mortgage reduction

Thriftyknickers

I really must get into the habit of posting little and often! Anyway - an update. Here goes! Quite a bit of good news all round.

1. First of all my online electricity bill arrived. Don't you just love it when they say 'And there's no need to amend your DD?' Oh yes there is - I've reduced mine by 10% and got over £154 refunded. :j All because I've been more conscious of our usage - switching the microwave, radio and stereo off at the socket when not in use, changing to low energy lightbulbs etc. I must get round to looking at switching my supplier too sometime as I'm sure that could save some more.

2. I sorted out our buildings and contents insurance. (Unfortunately that plus 2 sets of car insurance are all due within the same month :eek: - but separate credit card bill months, fortunately.) The original quote from my current supplier - The Post Office, was £438. Anyway, I've followed the MSE guidelines again (don't forget some of the companies that trawl for you pay cashback via Quidco and Rpoints etc. The actual insurance companies paying cashback seemed to have very high quotes). The Post Office are currently doing a £50 cashback so I phoned them to see if I was eligible - sadly its only available to new customers - but they redid my quote - now down to £311. However, I was determined to shop around. After a lot of searching, I decided they were my best bet so I phoned back to take up the quote. Sadly, the previous lady hadn't saved the quote, so the next operator redid it and its now down to £296 - only £4 more than last year so I'm pretty pleased. Always get the company to re-do your quote if you are going to stick with the same supplier. They should let you stick with the original one if its cheaper, or switch to the new one if that's better. One tip the operator gave me which you might also benefit from. Last year, a lot of insurers bumped up their contents cover free of charge - to £55K in our case. This year the premiums are reflecting this. I took our cover back down to £30K, which I think is reasonable for us - all our electric gismos are still functioning but way over the hill and we don't have lots of 'things'. Plenty of junk though!!!

3. We got a mighty £277 back in cashback from our Amex card!! :beer:

4. I've got 2 £5 gift cards from the House of Fraser courtesy of the Daily Mail this week.

5. We were investigating bikes for our 3 year olds but instead of buying new ones, I've bought one through Ebay fairly locally (so no P&P). And very pleased with it we are too.

6. And talking of bikes - I've been getting on mine! I've cycled to work a couple of times (5 miles each way but with massive hills - but I can only do it when my DH has the kids or can do the nursery run, so once a week max) plus once to the supermarket. This is the first time in 4.5 years I've been able to use my bike - my RA drugs are making such a difference to my joints and I'm sooooo pleased. I really love cycling (with my 10 year old £99 bike - the panniers I bought a few years ago must be worth way more than the bike!) But I love it and the weather has been so good! :T 'Couse this is also helping my charity weight-loss challenge - 3 weeks in so half way through - 3lbs off my 6lb target! I never realised losing weight was so hard!

7. We're going to take the kids to Legoland at the end of the month so have been investigating the best 'reward' scheme to use to buy annual passes. Top tip from me is to use Nectar points - they will just take them off your card at Legoland. Tesco Deals will only do 'adult' ones - which you can still use for children and seniors but obviously you end up 'overpaying'. Nectar sell children and senior citizen annual passes at the discounted rate. (Incidently my Mum has chosen a Legoland annual pass as her Mother's Day present!!)

8. And finally, we've booked another 3 night holiday at Eurodisney. Through Quidco of course. We've really pushed the boat out and are staying at The Disneyland Hotel (aka The Pink Palace) as we managed to take advantage of the 40% off plus kids free deal. This is one of my dreams, so am really looking forward to it. Obviously the strength of the Euro v Sterling is going to make our expenditure there pricey but we're hoping to be a bit canny. As shareholders we can use Mickey's Salon for free drinks and snacks until noon, we get a discount in the shops and restaurants and our plan is to go to the parks early, making use of the Extra Magic Hours and then have a late breakfast - say 10ish to see us through to our evening meal (which won't be that late with over-excited 3 year olds!!)

Anyway, that's all for now. Hope all is well with you!

uzubairu

Well done on your progress. :beer:

Floxxie

Thriftyknickers wrote: »

And finally, we've booked another 3 night holiday at Eurodisney. Through Quidco of course. We've really pushed the boat out and are staying at The Disneyland Hotel (aka The Pink Palace) as we managed to take advantage of the 40% off plus kids free deal. This is one of my dreams, so am really looking forward to it. Obviously the strength of the Euro v Sterling is going to make our expenditure there pricey but we're hoping to be a bit canny. As shareholders we can use Mickey's Salon for free drinks and snacks until noon, we get a discount in the shops and restaurants and our plan is to go to the parks early, making use of the Extra Magic Hours and then have a late breakfast - say 10ish to see us through to our evening meal (which won't be that late with over-excited 3 year olds!!)

I am soooo jealous! This is where we stayed the first time we went. In December we had to stay at the New Yorker as there was no space at the DH. It does not compare and I was very disappointed. Would not go back unless I could stay at the 'Pink Palace'.

Love reading your diary. Add some more soon!

Floxxie