Money Making Ideas

Online surveys and market research

There are plenty of companies willing to pay you for your views and feedback about brands or for telling them about your shopping habits, or even your personal and social habits! MoneySavingExpert.com has a great round up of some of the best: Surveys.

Sell LEGO by weight

Sites such as musicMagpie buy old LEGO by weight, so no need to worry about complete sets. You can sell anything from 500g up to 10Kg. Just put your LEGO bricks into a plastic bag and seal/tie it. Then weigh and round up to the nearest 500g (0.5Kg) and select the weight from the dropdown. You’ll get an instant quote and you can send it for free. Then sit back and receive a same day payment.

Recycle old clothes

High Street favourite H&M has offered an in-store garment recycling service since 2013. They accept clothes by any brand, in any condition at all of their stores. All donations are used somehow and won’t end up in landfill. Simply fill up a standard carrier bag with your unwanted clothing and you’ll get a £5 voucher in return to spend at the store. Win, win.

M&S has an initiative in place with Oxfam. Donate any item of M&S-labelled clothing or soft-furnishings to the charity store and you’ll receive a £5 voucher for Marks & Spencer, which you can use at any participating store when you spend £35 or more. More details here.

Get a current account that pays interest

I really like the Santander 1-2-3 account. It’s a current account, but pays 2% on balances up to £20,000. It also gives you cash back on many household bills and up to 15% cash back when you use the Santander debit card at a range of major retailers. There’s a £4 monthly account fee, but this is more than offset by the cash back you get. In order to qualify, you have to pay at least £500 into your account a month and have two active Direct Debits.

Selling unwanted items 

Facebook is a great platform for selling things you no longer need. There are loads of local selling groups so you can connect easily with people in your area. You’ll also find many selling pages for specific items/categories such as Mini Boden & Joules Children’s Clothes UK  Additionally, there are sites such as Mazuma for selling old mobile phones or tablets and great general selling sites such as Preloved and Gumtree.

Offline, there are plenty of options too. Nearly New Sales or Mum2Mum Markets are great and there are also old school car boot sales.

Money Saving Ideas

Just as important as money making, is money saving! Here are a few ideas…

Refer a friend

You can get money off for yourself and a discount for whoever you’ve referred with lots of businesses/brands such as banks, clothing stores, utility providers and supermarkets. Use ‘Francesca De Franco’ for clothes brand hush to get you £20 off your first order.

The Penny Challenge

A really simple idea… Starting with just 1p, you save money every day for 365 days, going up in increments of a penny each day. So on day one of the challenge you put 1p away, and then on day two 2p, 3p on day three and so on. If you do this for a year you’ll have £667.95 – Skint Dad’s chart helps you keep track – https://skintdad.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Skint-Dad-1p-Saving-Challenge-2022.pdf

Teaching Your Children About the Value of Money

Rotate online supermarket shops 

Sadly, loyalty doesn’t pay. If you have a number of online supermarket accounts chop and change which one you use. Ocado in particular is very good at sending discount voucher codes to lure you back if you haven’t shopped with them in a while.

Saving money on petrol and diesel

Before you next fill up the car, take a quick look on PetrolPrices.com. The site tells you where you can get fuel cheapest in your local area. Prices fluctuate all the time so it’s worth looking regularly. You can make very big savings.

Discounted tickets for Merlin attractions – Alton Towers, Chessington World of Adventures, Legoland…

Kellogg’s cereal boxes regularly have vouchers giving one free adult entry with another full-paying adult or child for Merlin attractions. We recently redeemed two at Legoland so my husband and I got in for free. However, the three childrens’ tickets were still £180. I’ve since discovered there are better bargains to be had on eBay. Just do a search on the site and you’ll get an array of ticket sellers (many tickets are for specific days).

Kids Pass – a digital membership platform – offers discounts at cinemas, attractions and restaurants across the UK (and even on UK and European holidays). You can try it out for £1 here.

Online discount vouchers

Before you click ‘pay’ and make that online purchase, always look for online discount coupons for the site in question. Daily Mail, Voucher codes and Voucher Cloud are some of the best. However, it’s worthwhile Googling the name of the retailer followed by ‘voucher code’ or ‘discount code’ and seeing what comes up. You might get a few duff ones/expired ones, but it’s worth persevering. I’ve found codes for everything from chocolates to a garden shed! I’ve signed up to a number of voucher sites so get alerted when a new one becomes available for brands I’m interested in.

Prepay

I’m always remembering birthdays at the last minute so Funky Pigeon is a frequent port of call for me as it is so fast and efficient. What I particularly like is you can load up credit and get bonus credit added. If you prepay £5 you get £1.25 added to your account balance for free; £10 and you get £2.50 and with £20 you get £5.

Switching utility providers

If you’re not on a fixed-term contact, regularly check whether there are better deals out there. USwitch is brilliant for this. Obviously, this also applies when you’re coming towards the end of your fixed contract. Make sure that you’re not going to be automatically rolled over onto a less-attractive deal with your existing provider and shop around.

I’m with Octopus who will gift you £50 credit (and me) if you sign up using this link.

Cheaper meals out

Save money on a meal by booking a table through an e-commerce site such as Groupon or Bookatable. There are some great deals out there.

Car and home insurance

When my renewal quote is sent for car and home insurance I always hit GoCompare immediately as the renewal price is always higher than the previous year (without any claims).

I’ve discovered there’s no point in going to your existing provider first to get a better quote; you have to call them armed with a list of alternative providers that can offer the same cover cheaper. Almost always they’ll then price match or even undercut. If they don’t then just swap, it’s very straight forward.

Saving money on your will

If you’ve not made a will, try and schedule it in the month of November with a solicitor that’s taking part in Will Aid. It will save you A LOT of money. Here’s what you need to know. 

Discounts for multiples

If you have twins, triplets or more then a membership to Twins Trust offers a whole host of benefits including great discounts at a wide range of high street retailers. Lots of independents offer special discounts too; usually because they have a multiples connection! Independent Usborne book seller Fiona also offers a twins and multiples discount. 

National Trust membership  

Entry fees for a family of five at a local attraction can easily cost in excess of £50 and something such as Legoland is a whopping £60 per person! On the other hand, National Trust membership for one adult and up to 10 children costs £78 a year and for two adults and up to 10 children is £126 a year (under 5s are free). This can be paid in monthly instalments and gives access to over 500 NT venues and includes free parking. Also check out National Trust Holidays.

Would love to hear about your money making and money saving ideas. Please comment below.

The post Money Making and Money Saving Tips appeared first on The Parent Social.

The to-do list

• • Get photos printed – actually print out the photos that are on memory cards and then put them into frames and actually put them up around the house. I also want to update the girls’ albums – something I haven’t done for about two years!
  • Do the small niggly home improvements – Not renovating rooms or anything, but stuff that’s easy to do and would actually make a difference: replace all the lightbulbs that aren’t working around the house (there are many), change old sockets and finally get round to filling in the holes in the walls left behind when we replaced curtains with shutters
  • Get bedding that actually fits the bed – I mistakenly bought a super kingsize mattress for our queensize bed. It was an old bed so we got a new one to accommodate the huge mattress, but didn’t replace the bedding. For months my head’s been falling down the gulf between the pillows and the bedsheets have continually pinged off making it really uncomfortable. For someone that has very broken sleep anyway, it’s bordering on the masochistic. My first to-do list tick. The only thing I’ve hit the sales for. Massive bargains to be had in the world of bedding 
  • Draft a will – Matt and I keep saying we have to both do one. We never quite get round to it. It’s really important when children are involved, so 2016 is going to be the year

• Car maintenance – Get the re-occurring car window problem fixed whilst the parts and labour are still under warranty – second week of January got this to-do ticked off
• Sell more stuff at Mum2Mum Markets and online – I need to declutter and sell anything that isn’t suitable for charity shops. Always nice to make some extra cash in the process; I’ve been quite successful in the past. I wrote about it here
• Expand my recipe repertoire – I’d like to set aside an evening or two with the cookery books to get some family meal inspiration. The meal planner needs updating!
  

  

• Get an additional book shelf – The girls have always had loads of books, but following birthdays and Christmas they have a lot more and they’re stating to clutter. Sofia has a big book case and Maria and Gabriella already have two of the lovely Star Book Ledges from the Great Little Trading Company (GLTC) and they’re great.They are also rather pricey. I need to get at least another one and I am currently stalking the GLTC website in the hope that they are put into the sale
• Make a dental appointment – my dental practice doesn’t ever send reminders. The upshot is, rather embarrassingly, it’s been rather a while since my last visit

The post The 2016 To-do List appeared first on The Parent Social.

A Mum2Mum Market is essentially a nearly new sale where you can sell and buy children’s clothes, baby equipment, toys and books etc. Of course dads can buy and sell too!

My Mum2Mum Market in Surrey

The markets are held all over the country and you can find ones local to you by visiting the website. Prices for your ‘pitch’ vary according to location. I paid what looks to be the highest amount at £25 (that’s Surrey for you!). This gets you a decent-sized table with plenty of room around it to display items. After paying that, you keep 100% of your takings. I wasn’t sure how much I’d actually make as I had lots of clothes to sell – so not high value items like high chairs, buggies or cots. I’d already successfully sold these sorts of items via Preloved UK. As I was a bit chicken, I decided to do it with a friend so that we could share the initial cost.

The ladies behind Mum2Mum Markets do a great job of marketing the events and will ask you if you have any specific items that you want to promote, which they’ll then push via their social media channels. They provide sellers with notes about all of the logistics. They also include some helpful tips about what they’ve found works selling-wise based on their experiences.

Here are my tips:

• Don’t get too hung up over what you initially paid for something. People are looking for a bargain. Think about whether you really want to lug something back home to sit back in the loft
• That said, you can always start with prices a little higher and see how you go in the first half hour (that’s when we were busiest) and reduce a bit after this time. You’ll quickly judge if you’ve priced too high
• Get a hanging rail to display any really good quality clothes you’re selling (if you can’t borrow one, they have them to hire for £5)
• I was trying to shift clothes in large volume so I made boxes of items for 50p and age ordered them. Mum2Mum Market say that secondhand baby and children’s clothes are the least profitable items to sell. Therefore you have to be realistic. This method worked well for me. It also worked particularly well alongside the rail as people could differentiate quickly between the more select items and the more every day stuff
• Don’t take every single item you’ve got stored at home as it risks looking like a jumble sale, which is off-putting. Keep it seasonal for a start
• It’s good to have a variety of things on your stall (and not all piled high). This is where sharing the stall with a friend helped. My friend had more major items, I had mainly clothes. This meant that the stall captured more people
• Make sure you have a good float with you

I did reduce quite a few of my things in price as the morning went on (sales last for two hours), but there were a couple of designer items that I really felt I couldn’t part with for a hugely discounted rate. People kept looking at them but didn’t buy. I don’t think this was the right place for them. I sold these on Preloved UK.

I’ll definitely do one again.

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