Half price perfume

There are some things that I don't like to do without, even when I am on a budget and one of them is perfume.

I use a site where you can buy your favorite perfume at excellent prices. They sell the same brand designer fragrances that you will find in the retail department stores except not at the retail prices. A lot of their stock is unboxed or the box may be damaged items but it is only the outer packaging that is the difference between what you buy from them and what you buy from the shops and the savings can be huge.

I just got a 100ml bottle of Paul Smith for women for just £14.99 and this is a saving of about £27.00 as the RRP is £42.99. The reason for the reduction is that it is unboxed! Considering I would just throw the box away anyway, that makes no difference to me.

Even if it was a gift I would still get it unboxed and I would wrap it up myself with some nice ribbon or put it in a box with some coloured tissue paper.

Cheap perfume

Free Petrol....

Shell have a printable voucher on their website offering you £1.50 off their V-Power fuel.

All you need to do is print it and use it next time you fill up at your local Shell garage.

Click here for your voucher

As Tesco's say (or is it Asda?) - Every Little Helps.

Competition of the week

Winning this one will save you plenty of money - the prize is over £300 worth of free fuel. You need to guesss how far you think a Ford Galaxy will travel on a single litre of fuel.

http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/drive-smart/one-litre-challenge/competition.html

This one expires on 10 July and only takes about thirty seconds to enter so its worth a quick go.

Good Luck

Reduce your Shopping Bills.... Part 2

I know, I know another reduce your shopping bills post! Last one for a while, I promise.

I have just found this site where you can enter your shopping list and it will tell you which supermarket will be cheaper for you.

http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/

The site will also give you ideas on what items to swap or substitute so that you could save money. It will even help you to choose healthier options by advising you of the lower fat versions of the items you have chosen!

Follow me on Twitter

I have just registered with Twitter so if you want to follow me on there you look up my user name 'familybudgeting' or you can click on the link further down the page on the right hand side.

Competition of the week....

Following on from my previous free stuff posts, I have decided to add some competition posts on to the blog every now and then.... I will only add ones that can be entered on line and take little or no effort.

Todays competition post is to win a one day family of four pass to Alton Towers.

You can click here to enter it.

I have put Jenson Button as the answer and I am pretty sure that I am right.

Good Luck

Free Photos

At the moment Tescos have an offer on for 40 free prints if you register with them here:

http://www.tescophoto.com/wpp/tesco/welcome.jsp

I love freebies!

Reduce your Shopping Bills......

You need a notepad and pen for this one.... Go through all of your food cupboards, your fridge and your freezer and write a list of everything that you have in there.... even the old tins of things that you have at the back of the cupboard that you have no idea why you bought it!

Next sit down and write out a weeks worth of meals made from the things that you already have in. You will be surprised at the amount of things you can make without having to buy anything else.

Then write a shopping list for everything else that you need for the week. Make sure that you stick to your list when you go shopping and you should see a big reduction in your food bills. You may find it easier to shop online as will not make any impulse purchases this way and you will also be able to see any items on special offer and can adapt your meal plan to incorporate these offers. Supermarkets like Asda deliver to most areas in the UK and regularly offer their customers voucher codes for free delivery which will cut the cost even more.

I know that this is easier said than done but if you can find the time to cook from scratch you will save a fortune. Whenever you cook something, make double and freeze half. This means that you save on both electricity and time and you will be less tempted to pop to the take away if you can't be bothered to cook. Its also a lot healthier for you and you will know exactly whats in the food you are eating.

Be in the Audience of your favourite show.... For free

Have you ever heard of http://www.applausestore.com/, they are the company that all of the big TV shows use to fill their audience. At the moment they have free X factor tickets for the X factor auditions and loads of other popular TV shows. All the tickets are free so it is definately moneysaving as well as something fun to do.

I've just booked tickets for the live X factor auditions next month.

Snowball....

If you have any spare money left at the end of the month, it makes sense to pay a bit extra towards any debts. The best way to decide which of your cards to pay off first is to use the 'snowball' method.

Snowballing is all about paying off your debts in the most efficient and cost effective order: it makes good financial sense to pay off the debts with the highest interest rate first.

Check out the Snowball Calculator to determine the best way to prioritise your payments.

Save money on your water bills....

Do you have a water meter fitted at home? If not, this is something worth looking into as it has cut my bills from £32.00 a month to about £50.00 a quarter!

The general rule of thumb is that if you have more bedrooms in your house than people living there, a water meter will save you but that doesn't always apply as there are four of us and the savings have been massive. The link below helps you to work out in about 2 minutes if a water meter will save you.

Will I benefit from a water meter?


If you decide to get one fitted, there are ways that you can cut down on your water usage without any hassle, my water board give out free inflatable bags for your toilet cistern which mean less water is used every time you flush....

My daughters teacher at school taught her that 'If its Yellow, let it mellow.... If its brown, flush it down!!' Not sure about that but you get the point.

I have loads of other ways to save money on my website:

http://www.sortyourfinancesout.co.uk/

Cheap Days out....

With Summer approaching, the weather should be getting nicer (in theory) and the kids will need to be entertained while they are off school. If your kids are anything like mine, they will drive you mad by the end of the Summer holidays and you will end up counting the days until September rolls around again......

I always find it helps me to have a few days out planned. I try to space them out throughout the Summer I can bribe them both to be good. Does that make me a bad parent? To be fair, even if it does it also helps to keep me a sane parent so I guess I can live with that!

Seriously, I want my kids to grow up and be able to look back and remember all of the fun things that they did when they were younger. You should see me follow them around with a camera wherever we are. We didn't have a car when I was growing up but we did travel on the bus or train to visit loads of interesting places and now that my kids are 6 and 4, I love that we can just jump in the car and take them somewhere interesting.

I have found a great website that says it is the Number 1 place for discounted days out in the UK. After using the site when planning my day trip to London last week, I am happy to confirm that I agree with this..... You can actually search over 7,000 attractions, broken down by area within the UK and there are loads of printable vouchers for days out, attractions, theme parks, places to go and fun things to do across the UK.

We went to London by train last weekend and I wanted to fit in as much as possible without spending a fortune so I spent a while on this site and then armed with all of my vouchers, we had a fantastic money saving day.http://www.daysoutuk.com/

The money we saved meant that we could spend an hour in Hamleys Toy store and buy the kids plenty of treats.

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More Moneysaving Blogs....

I have been searching around the internet looking for blogs that are similar to mine as I don't think that you can ever read too much about making money :-)

I have come across one so far that has some excellent ideas and is definately worth checking out.
Have a look at http://workingathomenow.myblogsite.com/

I especially like the information about a website called Dooyoo. This is a website that asks people to write reviews on products or services and they pay you in Dooyoo miles. Strange name I know but it looks as though they accumulate and you can exchange them for vouchers or cash when you reach a certain threshold.

Each review has to be a minimum of 150 words and for that you recieve 500 Dooyoo miles! I think that the lowest threshold for redeeming you Dooyoo miles is 20,000 so its not easy money but you can review practically anything so I can see how you would quickly manage to build up your points balance. I registered the other day and reviewed some of the things that I have worte about on this blog such as, Quidco, Retail Eyes Mystery Shopping and Cineworld Kids Clubs. I have just checked and my Dooyoo miles balance is 1850 miles - not sure where the extra came from but I won't complain!


There are loads of ideas on http://workingathomenow.myblogsite.com/ and I will keep checking in as you can never have to many ways to make or save money can you?

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