The £1 coin has just celebrated its 30th birthday and
Money Supermarket is celebrating by trying to gather together 1,000 ways to save £1 (or more). To help them reach this goal, they are running a competition for bloggers. They are inviting anybody with a blog to write a post giving up to 30 ways to save £1 and then send them a link, and every blog will go into a draw to win £1,000. But if they get over 1,000
different ways to save £1, they will double the prize to £2,000! So it's in everyone's interest to come up with some unusual ideas.
They are also giving £1 a tip to the first 500 bloggers to enter, but I fear that I may be joining in too late to be in that first 500. There's no harm in trying though!
If you'd like to join in with your money saving tips, you can read the details
here. They will be drawing the winner on May 17th so make sure you enter before then. Here are my tips, and since this blog is mainly about comping, I've made sure that some of the tips are specially for compers.
1. clip money-off coupons from magazines and leaflets – and
remember to use them! You can save £1 or more in a single shopping trip.
2. if you have bonus point vouchers for a loyalty card, tuck
them into the same compartment of your wallet as the appropriate card, then you
will remember to use them when you swipe your card. It will probably take 3 or
4 shopping trips for the points to add up to £1, depending on the offers at the
time.
3. always check your fridge and cupboards when shopping or
planning meals, so that you use up things that are approaching their expiry
date and don’t accidentally buy more and end up throwing some away unused. Just
one large pot of yoghurt that doesn’t
get wasted will save you over £1.
4. if you save up small change, don’t use one of those coin
sorting machines at the supermarket to change them – they charge almost 9%.
Instead, use the self service checkout for
your shopping and tip your coins into the coin tray. it sorts it for you
and doesn’t charge. Around £11 worth of small change
will save you £1.
5. competition addicts, always look around for the cheapest
way to enter. Many of the competitions on popular TV shows cost over £1 to
enter by phone, but have a free online entry route. It will only take a few seconds to save more
than £1. And lots of people really DO win with free entries.
6. Another tip for compers – if you are entering by post,
don’t leave it to the last minute and have to use a first class stamp. Using a
second class stamp will save you £1 for every 5 entries you post.
7. always use a price
comparison site to check you are getting the best price, even for small items.
I recently bought a newly published book with a cover price of £20. Prices
online ranged from the full £20 down to just over £9, so a few minutes
searching saved me over £10.
8. check postage rates before placing any online orders.
Sometimes an apparently lower price is more than offset by sky-high postage
rates. Shopping around could save you around £5.
9. when you are planning your meals, have at least one meal
a week that you buy NOTHING for. Then go through your fridge, freezer and
cupboards to see what you can make. Something as simple as a tin of tomatoes
and a bag of pasts can be the basis of a
delicious meal. You’ll save money AND do some decluttering at the same time. Potential
saving – the entire cost of a meal.
10. always ask for a jug of tap water when eating out –
drinks prices are often inflated to help keep the food prices down. This will
save you between £2 and £5 depending on what they charge for a bottle of water.
11. Use an old-fashioned steamer, the kind that sits on top
of a saucepan, for cooking meals. You can put potatoes in the bottom, chicken
or fish in the middle tier and veg in the top. This can save 15-20p a meal in
fuel, so you could save £1 in a week.
12. save your vegetable peelings to make compost. Not only
is it effectively free, saving money at the garden centre, but it is
environmentally friendly too. It takes a while to rot down but once it’s ready you
will have saved £10-20 depending on how many scraps you’ve saved.
13. Pulses such as peas, beans and lentils are a cheap
source of protein, and tasty too. But if you buy them dried and cook them
yourself, they cost a lot less. By the time you’ve used a 400g bag, you will
have saved about £3.
14. Look at the label of your favourite ready meal and try
to make it yourself, copying the ingredients (well, apart from the E numbers
and chemical names!). You will probably be able to make the same dish for £1 a
head less.
15. Make your own greetings cards, especially extra-special
ones. The kind of card you would buy for a special occasion in the shops can
cost around £5 and making something similar yourself – only more personal
because of the love that’s gone into it – will cost around £1.
16. Take a picnic on car journeys instead of queuing in a
noisy, crowded motorway cafĂ© for an overpriced sandwich. You’ll save at least
£1 a head and be able to make the lunch stop into a treat instead of a chore.
17. Do you buy books, read them once then give them away?
Why not borrow them from the local library instead? You’ll save several pounds
on every book you read.
18. Check the contract on your mobile phone is the right one
for you. The staff in a shop owned by your service provider should be able to
advise, by looking at your usage. You may be able to cut your payments by
£5-310 a month.
19. grow your own. Even a few cress seeds on a piece of damp
kitchen paper can produce a tasty sprouting salad and you’ll soon save that £1.
20. and talking of kitchen roll, save it for really messy
jobs. Use washable dishcloths for everyday spills and flannels for sticky
fingers. With kitchen rolls costing up to £1 each, you could save a lot of
money over the life of just one pack!
21. If you like to drink sparkling water at home, invest in
a soda machine. The gas required to carbonate 2l of water costs about 30p,
while a 2l bottle of ready carbonated costs between 70p and £1.40, so you’ll soon cover the cost of the machine
and from then on be saving up to £1.10 on every 2l of water you use.
22. For entering competitions, don’t buy postcards! A pack
of 50 costs around £2.95. Lots of cinemas have racks of free ones, as do some
restaurants and coffee shops, especially in student areas. Or make your own out
of old greetings cards and food packages.
23. I really ought to say “Hang your washing outside instead
of using the tumble drier” but if we get another summer like the last, that
won’t be possible a lot of the time. But you can save on fabric conditioner AND
cut the amount of electricity you use by
investing in one of those pairs of spikey balls to put in the drier. They
soften the fabric and remove static, so you won’t need to add liquid softener
to the wash or softener sheets to the drier. And they reduce the drying time
too, so they save electricity. A pair of spikey balls lasts me 5-6 years and
saves me about £50 a year, or £1 a week,
on softeners and electricity.
24. Town centre car parks can be very expensive. If you are
visiting one where the price leaps at the end of an hour, two hours or three hours, decide when you
need to leave and set the alarm on your mobile to ring long enough before that
for you to get back to the car. In the town I visit most often, making sure I don’t
miss the two-hour deadline saves me £1.50 on every trip.
25. If you pay for
your prescriptions and need more than one every 4 weeks, it is cheaper to buy a
pre-payment certificate for three months or a year. And if you do change from
paying to getting them free during the lifetime of your certificate, you get
the time remaining on it refunded in full.
26. But if you pay for them as you go, always ask the
pharmacist if it would be cheaper to buy your medication over the counter.
Where there is an identical over the counter drug avail able, it is often a lot
cheaper.
27. Don’t always
assume that “Bigger packs are better value”.
It’s no longer always true, and the price per unit (item, 100g, ounce or
whatever) may turn out to be lower in a smaller pack. You don’t have to be a
maths whizz to compare, although you may need your strongest glasses – most
supermarkets display unit pricing in tiny print on their shelf edge price tags.
28. Most supermarkets don’t include reduced price items in
their multibuy offers. So if something is on BOGOF, it is usually cheaper to
buy two nice fresh items with a decent use-by date than it is to buy just one
that is right on its expiry date and will need to be used right away.
29. Don’t buy it – win it! Although big prizes like exotic
holidays and huge TVs are exciting and glamorous, you’ll soon find as a comper
that you get a steady trickle of smaller prizes – that occasionally turns into
a flood. And it’s the small prizes that really save you money – that new computer
game the children have been pestering you for, a £10 shopping voucher to cut
the cost of that week’s shopping, a goody bag of cooking ingredients that you
would otherwise have had to buy, little gifts that can be set aside for
Christmas and birthday presents. They all help to cut the cost of living.
30. Which leads me on to….. subscribe to Grape Vine to save
a fortune on your comping! I buy
promotional packs and stickered books,
drive many miles, pay for town centre parking – so that in many cases, you don’t
have to! Where a purchase isn’t needed, you get all the necessary information
in Grape Vine, and where a purchase IS needed you are told exactly what to buy
so that you don’t come home from the shops with the wrong thing. I do all the leg work, so you can
devote your comping time to winning, and every issue will save you many times
its own cost in unnecessary purchases.