19 Money Saving Hacks – CouponMamaUK

The sad fact is there are currently 3.5 million families living in poverty in the UK. These families can have as little as £12 a day to buy everything they need such as food, heating, toys, clothes, electricity and transport. Not to mention all the high costs of school trips and Christmas/Birthday gifts!

Most of us including me and my family have struggled with money at some point in our lives and having children who rely on you can make it 100 times more stressful. There was one time last year when my partner lost his job so we had to beg and borrow money we couldn’t afford to pay back.

Naturally people on a low-income are very careful how they spend what little money they have, and try to make it stretch as far as they can. Being one of the 3.5 million myself last year made me so depressed, I felt like I was failing my children and not giving them the life they deserved. This is when I started hunting around for ways we could cut our costs while hubby was job hunting. Here are 19 money-saving hacks you must read, these have helped us save so much!

Free Starbucks Refills 

When you purchase a Filter Coffee to stay in one of the participating stores in the UK or Ireland, after you finish you can enjoy a Tall Filter Coffee for free!! They also offer customers 25p off of the price of their beverage if they bring their own mug!

Share The Costs

Get friendly with your neighbors, split the cost of internet bills and share the wi-fi! Also when it comes to companies like Sky Go, Netflix ect.. You can have more than one account so worth having a few of you chipping in to avoid huge bills.

Get A Better Deal

Once your contract is finished with your phone and/or internet/t.v provider give them a ring and threaten to leave, chances are they will offer you a discount or an exclusive deal to keep you as a customer. If they offer a better deal for new customers then cancel and get your partner or roommate to rejoin in their name. Sky have amazing deals for new customers all the time.

Avoid Huge Paying Phone Bills

These days there really is no need to run up huge phone bills as there are so many other free options to connect with the people you love. A few of my favorites are:

1.Skype

2.Whatsapp

3.Kik

4.Facetime

You can also convert high cost 0845 numbers to free numbers.

Don’t Pay Someone For Something You Can Teach Yourself.

The Internet is an amazing tool and there is nothing you can’t find, so before you call someone out for your leaky sink or broken washing machine see if you can do it yourself with free tutorials.

Including how to cut your own hair, plumb your washing machine into your new house. These handy videos have even helped my partner with tips on passing his driving test! Obviously don’t try to play about with electrics or boilers ect if you have no idea what you’re doing.

One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Treasure.

Everything you own can be used for more than just its original purpose, you will also be surprised what some people throw away!  Think outside the box and get creative with your trash. If we pass a skip in the street we always have a rummage and see what we can salvage. There have been a few times we even restored things and sold them on!

Take Advantage Of Free Trials

A huge amount of companies offer free trials, it’s their way of promoting their product. Always take full advantage of offers like this as they sometimes also offer free gifts for signing up. Be sure to cancel before the trial ends to avoid being charged. You can sign up to all kinds of trials from computer software to online newspapers, The Sun+ currently has an offer where you can get 3 months free plus a £20 Argos gift card! 

Wombling

I know what you are thinking “What an earth is wombling?” It’s really very simple, you pick up receipts off the floor and make money! Asda for example have a price guarantee website where you type in the numbers on the bottom of your receipt and they tell you if your shop would have been cheaper elsewhere.

If they are beaten on price they refund you the difference in the form of a voucher. Tesco and Sainsbury’s offer the same kind of thing and Morrison’s have just released a new match and more card.

Shop Out Of Season

This is one of my biggest tips. You can save so much money from simply buying things at different times of the year. For example we buy Halloween stuff in November or Christmas stuff in January or buy BBQ’s in the winter and Winter coats in the summer!

Free Decorating

This year I managed to paint my bathroom for free using the Dulux free tester pots, it’s one per household but luckily my friends and family applied for these freebies for me so I had enough. We also applied for free wallpaper samples and stuck them to canvases, it’s a really effective and cheap way to brighten up a room and lots of them are themed such as Hello Kitty or Spiderman!

Coupons & Cashback

This has got to be my favorite way to save money I have built up quite a stockpile from all my hauls using coupons and cashback apps . Using these also helped me get Christmas for free !!! You can make so much money on cashback apps I earnt over £100 in just a few months just from using TopCashback.

Grow Your Own Food

This type of money-saving can be very rewarding when you sit down to a cottage pie knowing you grew the potatoes and veg! We live in a flat so unfortunately we can’t grow our own food but there are ways around this. Our kids love going to nanny and granddad to pick fruit and veg and we also pick tons of blackberries when we walk the dogs to.

The Art Of Bartering  

Bartering goes back to centuries ago, it’s a system of exchange by which goods or services are directly exchanged for other goods or services without using money. For example a friend of mine has chickens and often gives us eggs in exchange for cupcakes I make, or one of our friends will fix our car in exchange for my hubby painting his kitchen.

Bartering happened a lot in small communities years ago but these days people rarely even speak to their neighbours! However there are plenty of websites where you can exchange goods or services and if more people did this we would all save so much money!!

Look Out For The Best Deals 

Some of the best deals you can find are online I spend hours everyday searching for amazing savings to post on my Facebook page recently we had Black Friday and Cyber Monday where people camped outside stores or woke up at 4am then trampled all over each other in shops across the U.K just to save a few quid.

Meanwhile myself and a few friends set up our laptops in the comfort of my living room with a nice coffee and managed to get some amazing bargains! You can also use discount codes online and sometimes even stack them up to really maximize your savings!! 

Freebies

I’ve actually read some interesting stories of people who have lived their lives totally for free! Although this is quite extreme, there are ways you can dramatically reduce your cost of living such as:

free samples

free product testing

free online courses

free photo prints

free business cards

The list goes on…. Follow my Facebook page for up to date freebies!

Cook With Friends 

My friend and I first started doing this when our kids were weaning onto solid foods.Jars of baby food are so expensive and personally I prefer my kids to have fresh food. So we came up with a plan to split the cost of weaning our kids and buy all the ingredients together then cook meals to blend up and share into tubs to freeze.

By doing this we actually managed to feed our kids for less than £10 each a week! If you could get a group of your friends together and split the cost of all the ingredients you could make huge savings on your weekly shops and have a giggle at the same time!

Free Printables

Quite a few things you buy in the shops you can actually print for free such as:

party invites

coloring pages

craft stuff

reward charts

activities for the kids

I’m sure there are tons of other things you can print for free just type what you are looking for into Google.

Shop At The End Of The Day 

Always check out your local shops early in the morning or late at night. Not just supermarkets reduce their prices at these times but also bakeries, butchers, fish mongers ect..  It’s always worth going in and asking what they have going cheap as most of the time it just goes in the bin if it’s not sold!

You can also use coupons and cashback on clearance items to maximize your savings! We managed to get these pork joints for just 58p and Most things you buy in the clearance section you can freeze for a later date.

Enjoy The Money You Have Saved, Life Is For Living!

The number one rule of money-saving is to enjoy the money you have saved, what’s the point in going to all that effort scrimping and saving if you’re not going to have a little fun? My Granddad always taught me when I was younger to spend half and save half and I have lived by this rule all my life.

Whenever we have some spare money we put half away in our savings account and use the other half for a family days out on the weekends. It’s always reassuring to know you have a rainy day fund for when the car breaks down or the kids have an expensive school trip. Plus having that money in a high interest account can actually make you money!!

 Share your tips and tricks with others so we can all benefit from saving money:)