October 26th 2015 - job charts

Following on from my post the other day about getting my son a gohenry card we have today sat and had a long talk about money and how he cant get it for nothing.  And we have agreed that I will only add money to his card IF he does jobs to earn it.

There is an option to add extra money to the gohenry card for things like jobs etc but i'm not in a financial position to just give him money for nothing or on top of the money going on the card.  So it seems fair.

My son agreed on the jobs he would do and he has to do each job at least 3times a week to get the money for his card.  He wanted a minecraft job chart so we made one:

(this isn't all of it but a part pic).

However, the other 2 then decided that if their brother is getting money for jobs they also want the same - but only the middle has a gohenry card as the youngest is too young.  We have said we will open him an account at the bank.

But we have had to make them job charts as well.  Middle son wanted skylanders:

and the youngest wanted Thomas the Tank:

They all have some jobs the same but others are different, especially lil man who cant do things like hoovering the stairs or clearing the table that the older 2 can do, he has things like helping to load washing machine and tumble dryer.

Hopefully its going to work and they wont get bored like last  time we had job sheets.

October 19th 2015 - purse

I have a small purse that is pocket size and great.  But I wanted another couple and was struggling to find them online at a sensible price.

So I took out the material box and some old clothes that were going to charity shops with zips in and set about making a new purse.

I have never stitched in zips to  things before, so the first of the purses I cheated and used the material that was already around the zip in the trousers and cut and stitched to the size I was after.  I over stitched the end of the zip and then coated it in superglue so that it should hold. (green in pic).

For the 2nd purse I half cheated as had a pocket that had been cut from an old pair of jeans, it still had the outer part of the jeans as well as the denim lining so all I had to do was attach the zip.  It took 2 attempts to get it in right but it worked.

Now you may be wondering why I would want multiple purses if I already have a good/nice one. Well as i'm off to London in a couple of weeks I don't want to keep all my money in 1 purse together incase it gets stolen.  At least if I have a couple of purses I can split my money and where they are on my person = less likely to loose all of it.

October 18th 2015 - Go henry

My son is off to Buckingham Palace in a couple of weeks and needs to take 2 pieces of id with him or he wont be allowed in.  Well this was looking to be a big problem for us as, 1 piece of id will be his St John Ambulance id badge but as for number 2 we had no idea.  His birth cert is not in his changed name by deed poll, i'm not sure if deed poll would be accepted, he has no passport and isn't old enough for a driving licence, he doesnt work and therefore has no payslips or national insurance card, his phone is on my contract so not in his name and he doesn't have a bank acocunt.  As you can see we were fast running out of options.

Anyway me and my friend were talking and she said that she had just got her 13yr old son a pre-pay credit card type thing from a company called Osper.  I took a look at it and didn't like that you were tied in for 1year.  Seems a long time that I have to pay money onto a card for my son to spend on most probably sweets!  I started looking around and found another company that does similar called go henry.  This company does not tie you in for a year and you can cancel at anytime and they will send card within 7days.  We have paid the extra to get him a personalised card that says "go Jarred" not go henry, my theory was it will be more easy to locate if it gets stolen at school etc. (he is the only Jarred).

We did look at a bank account but they are going to take longer than the 2weeks we have until London so I needed a quick fix.  Plus if my son gets silly with the above card I cancel it.

If anyone is interested in a go henry card and a free £5 when you activate it please click on the link below, it is classed as a friend referral.  https://www.gohenry.co.uk/secure/?utm_campaign=refer_a_friend&utm_source=inviteLinkWA#ref_lnk_1445176129203962735_Ya

October 14th 2015 - money matters

Today is wednesday, this means that as per earlier in the year I am back at school.  This term the short course we are doing is called money matters.  We will be looking at ways to save money, banks and building societies, budgeting, making gifts vs buying them, loans and credit unions, sales and offers and anything else that may be money related.

Hopefully it will be helpful and enjoyable like the previous courses have all been.  The difference this time round is that the children will only be in for 1 session and not a short time every session, but that is for the reason the course is aimed at the parents and not how to help the children.

February 2nd 2015 - Paid to search

February 2nd 2015 - Paid to search

Towards the end of August of 2014 whilst on a paid survey website, I saw a link to a site called Qmee, offering money for searches.  I had never heard of it so started a google search to see what I could on it.  Everything seemed legit so I went back to the Qmee page and started reading what they had to say on their own site.

It's very simple you sign up for an account, which is free.  You then install the simple add-on facility with 1 click and its added to your toolbar and you don't need to re-start your browser either.  And away you go.  I found a helpful article about it on Pinterest that links to a lady's blog page.

As you search for things on gooogle, amazon, ebay, yahoo or bing etc, you sometimes get a narrow box appear on the left hand side of your screen, it looks like this:

These are adverts from companies linked in with Qmee, they all have a price next to them, if you click on them they will take you to that page where you can browse and then go back to your original page.  The Qmee add-on will track that you visited that page and tracks you the amount it said.  If you then visit your Qmee account it will show the amount that you have earned. Sometimes these links stay for a couple of searches and you can get multiple amounts, other times they appear once and vanish.

The prices on the Qmee adds vary from £0.03p upto £1, i'm yet to find anything higher than £0.15p.  There doesn't seem to be a fixed thing that makes it pop up and if sit and "try" to find things it doesn't work either, its as though it knows what your doing.  But when you are doing random searches like at Halloween I was searching for spiders to make my house it a spiders lair it came up a few times.

Unlike other paid to search and paid to click companies Qmee pay out in cash via paypal and there is no minimum amount (YAY!)  they also don't pay out in points like others do.

I wasn't sure last year that it would actually pay out as it seemed to good to be true, and you know what they say if it seems too good to be true it probably is.  But I thought it's money for nothing, so I will give it a try.  From August until 31st Dec 2014 I managed to collect £4.02, which I cashed out on new years eve, and received in my paypal account a couple of days later.  The reason I cashed out was so I could see 1. if it does work and 2. how much I can get in a year.  So far in 2015 I have £1.16 from the month of January.  This isn't a get rich quick scheme by any means, but if you are going to be searching the net for things anyway you may as well get paid a few extra pence for doing so.

I told my hubby and a good friend about it and they both installed the add-on and neither of them have had as many links show up as I have.  So again it shows how random it is.  There are blogs with posts about Qmee all over the internet, with the odd few claiming they have made £40-50 a year through using it, now if they would like to share exactly HOW they managed to get that much it would be nice, but the majority are just a few pounds.

You can also donate your earnings to charity through the site.  Overall I would say if you don't mind the company tracking your data by searches and don't mind adding a few seconds to your time when searching by following other links, give it a try.