Week 10 If You Are Going To Spend Anyway, At Least Make The Wisest Choice

 If you simply have to replace something, top up on the essentials, book a holiday or spend some time and money in the garden at least choose the wisest option first before parting with your money. 

Women are often referred to as “great shoppers”, perplexing as it is for our men folk when they get dragged along, we really do want to go into every shop in the Shopping Centre or especially the Outlet Malls just to see what bargains we can find.

 

Then after we have looked in pretty much every shop, we have completed our bargain research thoroughly and even though it seems like we always go back to the first shop we went in, we only carry out this crazy ritual because by then we NOW know where the best bargain is!

 

So the same thing must surely apply to everything we buy ? It would appear not. How many of us book our holiday through places like Quidco for cashback. A £2000 holiday can get you several hundred pounds back, just by using the system. In fact Quidco has cashback available on most things.

 

How many people have reward cards, points, club cards, nectar cards and other reward schemes and never use them? Or simply save them up to spend, or to buy an extra treat every now & again?

 

At Christmas, birthdays and other events with gifts, why not ask for garden centre vouchers, DIY vouchers or other Gift Vouchers from your favourite stores to use later in the year to save you some money.

 

The idea this week is to obviously acknowledge that you simply have to spend money along the way, that’s life, but when you are serious about Paying Off Your Mortgage you have to accumulate every additional few hundred pounds you can by making wiser choices when you have a purchase to make.

 

It seems to be a bit of a “British” thing to ignore savings to be made by using discount coupons. If you have ever been in a queue at the Supermarket and someone of older and wiser years is just checking out & reaches for their purse to produce a handful of coupons, do you roll your eyes and think ” Oh for goodness sake, coupons!” or do you think “I wonder how much they save every week by doing that.” For the most part Supermarkets tend to make it easier these days with their own schemes, but if you can add a pound or two to your next freedom payment — do it!

 

My husband came in the other evening and declared that he would have been home hours ago if “the elderly lady in the shop hadn’t wanted her free packet of sweets.” He went on to say that it held up the whole queue while the assistant went off to get the free sweets, the lady turned to my husband and apologised for the delay, and went on to explain she had promised the sweets to her grand children and didn’t want to leave empty handed.

 

It just goes to show that the right way to save money has been around for generations, and I’m sure they could tell me a thing or two about today’s society, in fact I suspect most of them could pinpoint the solution in less than 5 minutes.

 

So the Pay Off Challenge this week is all about saving money as you spend it, a slight contradiction in some ways but can be profitable if you know how.

 

If you receive vouchers of various kinds to the value of say £ 200 per year, and you receive cashback on one holiday of £2000 plus a couple of home items of around £ 400 each that would be a total cash equivalent of around £ 480.00 per year. This is money back on things you were going to do anyway, it’s what they call a “no brainer”.

 

Any savings that you make should be added to your Freedom Payment each month and used to Pay Off Your Mortgage in 3 Years or Less. Anything else & it simply will not work.