'I collected almost £7,000 in Nectar points in four years' - MSE News 3 December 2018 at 10:37AM in Food Shopping & Groceries 21 replies 4.3K views

Former_MSE_Callum

A dad of four has amassed almost £7,000-worth of Nectar points in the past four years - and is now hoping to use them to buy a family holiday to Florida...

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''I collected almost £7,000 in Nectar points in four years''

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VT82

Seeing as there's no PIN or ID required to spend Nectar points, isn't that a bit like carrying seven grand around in your pocket? Banks will have excellent procedures in place to help you out if someone robs your credit card and racks up £7k of debt, but do you really think Nectar would be that helpful?


Also, there's no guarantee that Nectar redemption offers, or even the scheme itself, will even be here tomorrow. Would MSE really recommend keeping £7k held as an undrawn Quidco cashback for example, or in a non-FSCS protected savings account?!


All seems very naïve to me.

mjm3346

Surprised MSE is not making it clear how silly it is to have that number of points, if they were worth £100s that would be bad enough but in the £1,000s is completely stupid and not following previous MSE advice whatever he claims about using the site.

If he had taken advantage of the numerous offers Nectar have had over the time he has been collecting and put the money saved into a bank account, not only could he have saved at least twice the basic value of the points, the funds would be protected, earning interest and with complete freedom on where to spend the cash he could negotiate a far better deal for a holiday than by using the points.

michaels

Note it is possible to have a nectar card set as 'collect only' - anyone with a large balance should do this and only enable spending of points when ready.

Nectar systems are very old fashioned and points balances are often only updated overnight. With a stolen card it is often used to collect a single point at both a Sains and an Argos which enables the card for redemption at these stores and then the whole balance is spent at both stores leaving the card with a negative balance equal to the previous positive balance once the system updates the next day - so you can't just lose your points balance but in fact twice the balance!

The website also requires just a single password so if your password has been compromised on another site then potentially a fraudster can log in, change your address and order a new card....

somethingcorporate

I guess it helps cycling £200-300k worth of petrol from his job through it. I wonder what his employer would say...?

KxMx

The most I saved up was £90 on there towards a new mobile.

Given that the vast majority were earned for free via a Survey site, I was willing to risk letting them build up that much.

Candyapple

somethingcorporate wrote: »

I guess it helps cycling £200-300k worth of petrol from his job through it. I wonder what his employer would say...?

Exactly. Another pointless and annoying click-bait article by MSE.

Title should have read: 'How to collect loads of points with Clubcard or Nectar if you are a lorry driver'.

kerri_gt

somethingcorporate wrote: »

I guess it helps cycling £200-300k worth of petrol from his job through it. I wonder what his employer would say...?

I don't think employers tend to mind people picking up points as part of business spending, so long as they are not doing it to the detriment of the business (so purposefully filling up at BP if a petrol station the other side of the road was 10p a ltr cheaper, or driving additional miles out of his way to a BP station).

Fletchasketch

Using nectar for holidays is one of the worst redemption s going. He's unlikely to be able to negotiate as you normally would on a holiday and as another poster pointed out, could get much better value from nectar double-up and similar deals.

20aday

I once had nearly £400 worth of Nectar points and even I was worried, at times, that they could've been lost for whatever reason!

Side note: is he using a Nectar for Business card? Just wondering as I'm pretty sure it's against their Terms and Conditions to use a personal card for business use?

somethingcorporate

kerri_gt wrote: »

I don't think employers tend to mind people picking up points as part of business spending, so long as they are not doing it to the detriment of the business (so purposefully filling up at BP if a petrol station the other side of the road was 10p a ltr cheaper, or driving additional miles out of his way to a BP station).

That's exactly where I was going with it. Are they choosing the more expensive pertrol station to the detriment of their employer.