Tired and Skint

Tag: freebies

  • Are you missing out on FREE money?

    When I lost my job in April 2024, we came a bit stuck financially. We didn’t have any money to fall back on, we were living pay cheque to pay cheque, always one step away from financial disaster and this was the disaster.

    I had everyone’s worst nightmare, not being able to pay the bills. I had every man’s worst nightmare, not being able to provide for his family. So I swallowed my pride and asked for help, help in the form of benefits for the government. I arrived at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) office, terrified. Feeling judged and unsure of what to expect I walked in, sat down and patiently waited my turn, I was then met with a lady who tried to be helpful however, I left with more questions than answers. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I received £745 in housing benefit which saw us through to the following much, by which point I was back in employment. I will go into my experience in more detail but that isn’t the purpose of this post today.

    Last night, I was lying in bed next to my wife, talking about money and we got onto the topic of benefits. We both know people who are claiming benefits who are quite content on continuing on claiming them for as long as possible without actively looking to change their circumstances for the better. It piqued my interest and I was curious to see how people are able to live solely off benefits.

    I just want to be very clear here before I continue, I am not criticising anyone who is claiming benefits, in fact I’m actively encouraging you to check if you are entitled to any additional help.

    I started to look into the UK benefits system to see if we were entitled to any additional support and it’s a minefield. It appears simple in principle but it becomes overly complicated and difficult to calculate accurately as soon as you factor in partners and children. You could married and have children, if you don’t choose a primary caregiver (even though you split it 50/50), you lose out on some money in your benefits award. Madness.

    Then I came across an absolute gem of a website, Turn2Us. Turn2Us is a charity, they have a benefits calculator, simply input your information (don’t worry it’s anonymous) and it does all the calculations for you. So, I filled in all of our information and we’re not entitled to anything other than Child Benefit which we already claim but I was curious and so I played around a little bit and these were the results.

    • If we had another baby – £245 a month extra.
    • If we both quit our jobs and did nothing £1700 a month.
    • If we earned £400 a month each, £1600 awarded plus we would have £800 earned income.

    Now I’m not for one second suggesting you quit your job and live off the state but the two major points that stuck out for me.

    1. There are things you can potentially claim for that you wouldn’t think you could. Take an extra child for example, I was gobsmacked to see that we would be entitled to £245 a month. If I didn’t play about with the calculator, I would never have known and we would never claim.
    2. No matter what you current circumstance please check your eligibility to claim and check every time your circumstances change. You never know.

    Here is the link again Turn2Us

    Good Luck!

  • FREE £10 weekly giveaway

    My goal is to add value to people’s lives. I’ve spent a long time scouring the World Wide Web looking for ways to make money online and it would appear to me that generally speaking there is always a catch.

    There is a lot of paid online material, courses, and offers promising to help you make you money online and the truth is, it’s true they will help you but conveniently they leave out the hard bits and even more conveniently they ask you to hand over your money before you find this out.

    I’ll give you a few examples:

    Affiliate Marketing:

    For those of you who do not know what affiliate marketing is, in a nutshell it’s the idea of promoting a product through an affiliate link and when a customer buys the product the seller gives you a commission. If the seller is offering a 10% commission and the product is £100, every time a customer buys that product using your affiliate link the seller will give you £10. Now this model does work but what happens is the person who is introducing you to the world of affiliate marketing is generally selling you a piece of software which they turn are getting an affiliate commission from getting you to buy it in the first place. At the same time they often offer you a discounted course or a free e-book on how to become a “6-figure affiliate” whilst leaving out the hardest part, generating traffic to your affiliate link and fundamentally there are two ways to generate traffic.

    • Paid traffic: essentially paying for adverts to display your website and affiliate links meaning your spending money you probably don’t have on something that’s unlikely to generate any sales or enough sales to keep you motivated.
    • Free traffic: it takes a long time to generate any meaningful traffic to your link, it’s unlikely you’ll get a sale within 6 months meanwhile the marketing guru that has introduced to affiliate marketing has benefited from 6 months of commission whilst you try and get your affiliate marketing business off the ground.

    Avon/Utility Warehouse:

    Both have been around for quite some time and both involve selling products to the general public. This way of generating extra money for you and your household is marginally better the affiliate marketing however it is a mix of affiliate marketing, direct sales and referral marketing. It’s split into two main channels, sales commission and affiliate commission.

    Sales commission, you get a percentage of every product sold, let’s use the 10% commission example on £100 again, for every £100 of product you sell with Avon, Avon are giving you £10 commission.

    The affiliate side of it all is that you refer people into your “down line” and then you earn a commission on every they sell, it could be 2% or 20% it all depends on the company you are working with.

    You think great, I’ll sell it a bit, recruit some people into my down line and earn off their sales too. Soon I’ll have 100 people in my down line and I’ll live off that but what happens when you run out of customer or people to recruit? Have you ever noticed both start with hosting a party or recruiting yourself. Ask friends and family, post on Facebook. What generally tends happen is even if you can sell to your friends and family, once that’s done you’ve run of customers, you post of Facebook you get 2 people interested and you are ignored by the rest so you keep posting and then suddenly your Facebook friends count starts to go down and people are snoozing your post because they’re sick of seeing it.

    The truth is every product and every service has a catch and a motivation but people tend to hide their motives, hide what they’re really after. So what’s my catch?

    This is a new website and all websites need traffic to succeed, to maintain operational. As I said in my opening line, I want to add value to people’s lives but also to my own life, to my family’s life. I want to do this full time, I don’t want to work for people, I want to work for myself. I don’t want to be scouring the internet trying to find ways to make money and grow increasingly frustrated by the false advertising and half truths. I want to provide the genuine ways to make and save money. An honest and transparent service that anyone can use.

    Enough waffle,

    THE CATCH:

    The reward: every Friday I will giveaway £10 to one person picked at random, via PayPal.

    Concerned about subscribing for any reason? Think you be receiving daily emails or not quite ready to hand out your email to such a new site? Create a brand new email address, use gmail or outlook whoever you like. PayPal payments require an email address to send money to and your email also acts as your entry to the free weekly £10 giveaway. For as long as you are subscribed you are in the draw.