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Petrol for 78.8p/litre

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Comments

  • Cornucopia wrote: »
    You seem to have a double-posting problem.

    Is the transfer to bank account thing new? If you can do that without penalty, then there's no need to find places to spend your card - you can just get all your credit refunded back.

    edit: It seems to cost £3.50 to redeem a Visa number account to a bank account - so that's not going to work.

    edit2: You cannot pay for Council Tax with the 3V Visa numbers.

    ah, thanks for the update Cornucopia, oh well back to the search for the "free lunch" of which it would seem ever more evident that there's no such thing as a free lunch or tin this case no way round of working it to a mega-huge advantage
  • Cornucopia
    Cornucopia Posts: 16,545 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper Photogenic
    No such thing as a free lunch. But such a thing as a discounted lunch.

    I will be trying the B&Q and Boots gift cards and a couple of 3Vs to get to maybe 20p per litre off - that'll be enough to see how tricky it all is.

    I'm always buying bits & pieces in both those shops, as well as a variety of stuff on-line. If I get left with pennies on an individual 3V card, I'll sacrifice 1.5% of that and get it added to my utilities account. In the summer, I'll be checking whether on-line hotel bookings can be made with 3V, too.

    The other thing I want to investigate is whether a Cineworld gift card can be used to add credit to an Unlimited card sub (which I already have). Looks as though it can. That's another £200.
  • londonTiger
    londonTiger Posts: 4,903 Forumite
    pound poor penny wise. If you put this much effort into a business you could just make more money which will be more rewarding than trying to claw pennies off your fuel.
  • Cornucopia
    Cornucopia Posts: 16,545 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper Photogenic
    edited 22 April 2014 at 12:32PM
    Having tamed most of my other spending, I'm left with fuel as one of my biggest costs each month (typically spending about £100 per month to cover around 800-900 miles). Whatever I can do to reduce that (with a modest amount of effort) is going to be well worthwhile.

    I suspect that in the end, the 3V cards will not be the answer. They *are* too much effort to use, given the range of artificial restrictions that they have.
  • londonTiger
    londonTiger Posts: 4,903 Forumite
    Cornucopia wrote: »
    (typically spending about £100 per month to cover around 800-900 miles). Whatever I can do to reduce that (with a modest amount of effort) is going to be well worthwhile.

    on a 1.6 hatchback with 27mpg I get 300 miles for £60.

    your numbers are just out of this world.
  • Cornucopia
    Cornucopia Posts: 16,545 Forumite
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    edited 22 April 2014 at 2:51PM
    I drive a 1.6 HDi Citroen C4. I get 600-700 miles out of every tank of diesel, which is 60 litres, about £80.

    Road tax is £30 as a low emission vehicle.

    Assuming I continue to do over 10000 miles a year, I wouldn't go back to a car with significantly lower mileage than this. I previously had a DS3 1.6HDi, which being smaller/lighter was slightly better, although it had a smaller tank.
  • Cornucopia
    Cornucopia Posts: 16,545 Forumite
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    Okay, I took the plunge on this offer yesterday.

    I bought a basket of gift cards that I know I will use over the coming months. (B&Q, M&S, Halfords). I also got some 3V cards, too, though I can see the restrictions making them tedious to use.

    In all £225 in cards/vouchers giving 22p/litre discount - note that Morrisons round down to the nearest £10.

    I bought 58 litres of diesel at £1.109/l - £65 instead of £77. I also picked up a Morrisons Miles card to collect the vouchers against the fuel I paid for.

    Worth doing, but I cannot see it being possible to get more than 5p-10p per litre per month on average unless you are already a bit of a profligate spender.
  • Cornucopia
    Cornucopia Posts: 16,545 Forumite
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    edited 29 April 2014 at 1:23PM
    Another little twist in this saga...

    Morrisons issue money off next shop vouchers from their tills. Whilst the cashiers won't take them on purchases solely of giftcards, they will on purchases of giftcards and groceries.

    So today, I was queuing in Morrisons with £40 of giftcards and a £2.50 lunch, and the chap in front of me gave me his £3 off £40 spend... and I got my giftcards and lunch for £39.50.

    Assuming that you get £3 off £40 of 3V cards, it would then compensate for all those bill payments where they make a 3% surcharge.

    As long as you can keep the money off vouchers coming (not sure how you do that?) this is looking like a lucrative deal. I regularly shop in many of the shops they have giftcards for, and I still get the 1% cashback on my credit card, too.

    Next stops: Cineworld and Halfords (to see if you can pay for your MOT/Servicing with giftcards).
  • Cornucopia
    Cornucopia Posts: 16,545 Forumite
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    The man from Cineworld said no.

    I think you probably *can* use the gift vouchers if you sign up for a new Unlimited card from scratch, with an annual pre-payment.

    But I am past the 12 month mark, and get additional discounts from my black Unlimited card.
  • josie
    josie Posts: 3,107 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    Cornucopia wrote: »
    No such thing as a free lunch. But such a thing as a discounted lunch.

    I will be trying the B&Q and Boots gift cards and a couple of 3Vs to get to maybe 20p per litre off - that'll be enough to see how tricky it all is.

    I'm always buying bits & pieces in both those shops, as well as a variety of stuff on-line. If I get left with pennies on an individual 3V card, I'll sacrifice 1.5% of that and get it added to my utilities account. In the summer, I'll be checking whether on-line hotel bookings can be made with 3V, too.

    The other thing I want to investigate is whether a Cineworld gift card can be used to add credit to an Unlimited card sub (which I already have). Looks as though it can. That's another £200.

    I was looking at the 3V cards, initially to get them in Tesco to get the bonus clubcard points on offer at the moment and then came across this thread.

    As far as I can tell, you won't be able to use them for hotel bookings because the purchase amount has to be less than or equal to the value of the purchase and if you're paying the fee to merge cards it's going to wipe out your saving.

    I'm assuming like Tesco that Morrison's sell them as £25 gift cards?
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