Our fixer upper house has been a labour of love for six years now.  Upon moving in we naively thought we’d be done in a matter of weeks, but had no idea how much things cost and how long it would really take to decorate the house to our taste.  Throw in having our second baby after moving in and getting married and things took even longer than we could have ever imagined.

Updating your living room on a budget has never been easier with a huge selection of both in-store and online home décor stores.  There are even some ways to update your living room that don’t cost a penny!

If you’ve read my matched betting blog then you’ll know I’m a big advocate for matched betting.  Matched betting is a way of extracting a profit from the free bet offers that bookies regularly offer.  In short, you use a mathematical equation to cover all outcomes in order to extract a profit from the free bet.  But it’s not complicated as companies like Profit Accumulator have step-by-step instructions and software that does all the calculations for you.

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There seems to be a huge focus on consumers making the right choices at the moment when it comes to being eco-friendly, but I really think the responsibility needs to lie more with businesses, manufacturers and the governments.  After all, they have the power to create more eco-friendly products and enforce it. 

Just like fast food is bad for our personal health, fast fashion is bad for the health of our environment.  And in turn this will also affect our own health as we continue to use up valuable finite resources and pollute our water, sea and food through mass production of clothing we don’t need, transport of this clothing and discarding of fast fashion items we’ve barely worn.

Raising a family is a marathon effort. We all want to give our children the best possible start in life, and to help them as best we possibly can. But while few of us will be able to buy our children a house, it is still possible to put some money aside to help with a deposit.  In this blog post I will explore how to practice some good money management skills when it comes to saving for your children's future.

Full price cinema tickets are really expensive.  I recently read an article in a newspaper showing just how expensive a cinema trip can be.  A family of four were sent to the cinema as a test, got a ticket each for a film, a drink and food item each and the total cost was around £90!  A crazy price just to watch a film for a couple of hours with a drink and snack!

With a lot of cold weather still to come, there’s always one boring thing that we have to cough up for – heating our homes. We all need our home to be cosy during the long and cold winter days - but how can you keep your home stay warmer for longer?

Everybody spills things. I don’t think there’s a single human being alive who hasn’t spilt something at some stage. If you have kids and/or pets then it’s inevitable something will spill on the floor, no matter how much you try to stop it.  If you’ve hard floors then great - simply mop up the mess and job done.  But what if you have carpet in your home?  Carpeting an entire room is expensive and you can’t re-carpet every time there’s a spill or stain, so it’s wise to learn how to remove some of the most common stains so your carpet is cost-effective for years to come.  Removing stains from carpets can be a little trickier than mopping a spill on hard flooring.  In this blog post I’ll explore how to DIY to remove some common stains from your carpet.

If you’re wondering how to find your lost bank account in the UK then read on.  I share my experience of easily locating a bank account I haven’t used for almost 15 years in My Lost Account review.

We may only be a few weeks into January, and while there seems to be surprising news popping up every day, there is a big surprise for those of us running small and independent businesses that shouldn’t be overlooked: the self-assessment tax return deadline. 

It’s a general fact of life that your perfect pristine carpets won’t stay that way. Cream carpets are a popular colour choice nowadays to make a room feel new and look bright and airy, but they’re not the best colour when it comes to having kids and pets or in high traffic areas.  Even carpets that are a more forgiving colour than white or cream will soon look less than their best. Carpets are for living on, after all, so it’s not surprising that they get dirty quickly.  But how can you prevent replacing your carpets every few years and spending a small fortune in the process?  Carpets are expensive business with prices in the hundreds per room.  With a few carpet cleaning hacks you will be able to keep your carpets looking as good as new instead of replacing.

For many people, especially busy working mums, going to the hair salon is more reminiscent of a spa day than a menial task.  It’s a chance to interact with someone else, even if small talk is not your forte, a moment to shut eye whilst having a soothing head massage and letting someone else take care of us for a short while.  Going to the hairdressers becomes an experience, rather than a beauty maintenance task that must be complete.

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GIVEAWAY HAS ENDED. Winner notified.

Ad for The Midcounties Co-operative 1Change campaign – all words and opinions are my own.

My phone is filled with receipt snapping apps, supermarket coupon apps and UK cashback apps.  I absolutely love them!  They help me to save money on our weekly food shopping bills and some of them even put cash back into my pocket.  One of my favourite grocery cashback / coupon apps is called GreenJinn.  In this blog post I will share my review of the free money-saving GreenJinn app.

Although it is lovely to hire outside help to tackle your home improvements and decorating, there will no doubt be quite a high cost. Some of the work can be quite specialised and you may need to hire professionals for certain jobs, especially electrics and plumbing.  But if you are quite handy then a lot of the other stuff you can learn to do yourself.