I have to share this text with you as I can see how easy it is to accidently get scammed by people pretending to be from your bank! I would have been close to being fooled if this text was actually from one of my banks!
I bank with both Santander and Natwest and I’ve had a few texts like this to confirm online transactions that are real texts from my bank. They’ve just started recently so I wonder if it’s a new thing, or perhaps just because of my more recent spending habits. I don’t know, but I was surprised the first time I received a real text from my bank. I’m always dubious when I get anything from the bank. Even when they called me and left me an answerphone message once, I thought it was a scam so didn’t call back!
It’s usually been when I’ve purchased something from Zeek that I get the real texts from my bank. The texts will show my last three or so transactions and I simply reply Y or N to confirm if I made them.
Note - The real texts never have a phone number to call.
I do not bank with Lloyds so I knew instantly this was a scam. After a little research on the internet I discovered this phone number is a super high rate number that will charge you a fortune for calling it. Those who did call it say they were just put on hold and that was it, so some were on hold for ages believing it was their bank!
Never ever trust anything like this, even if you think it is real. Always check the back of your card for your bank’s telephone number and enter it yourself into the keypad.
Have you ever received dodgy looking texts from a bank? Let me know in the comments.
As you’ve probably guessed, I love making money from home. As a busy mum to two young children, working from home for myself provides me with the flexibility I need to care for my children and avoid high full time childcare costs. It also means I get to do what I love. I’m an advocate of earning money online and from apps, and I’m always looking for new ways to make more income from home. I’ve decided to invite other bloggers and money making mums to share even more ways us busy mums can make money from home. If you’d like to feature in this guest series please do get in touch.
Introducing Katy from Katykicker
Today’s guest post from Katy is all about selling on eBay. Katy runs the blog Katykicker all about making money online, saving money, cooking and family life.
11 tips for eBay selling
Be aware of fees
There are a number of fees to pay when you are making sales on eBay. You may have to pay a listing fee and then there will be eBay final value fees, PayPal fees and the cost to post your item. Ensure that you take these in to consideration when deciding if it is worth listing an item.
Check what similar items sold for
Use the advanced search tool on eBay to search for sold items. Do not be tempted to price your item based on the buy it now price of other listings. People often use scripts or robots to price their items and this can mean that other items are seriously inflated in price and have no chance of selling.
Take high quality photographs
If you are going to be selling regularly then consider investing in a decent camera. I use the Canon Powershot G7X Mark ii which is a camera a lot of other bloggers use. Use good lighting, show off any flaws or damage and use more than one picture.
Be thorough in your item description
It is better to over explain damage or problems with your item. Make sure that you use the condition box to accurately describe the condition of the item, to reduce the chance of a claim being made against you by your buyer. Also, use the item description box to give lots of details about the item. You can look on Amazon and other websites to help you, if you are selling an item that you know has a lot of detail to it.
Reduce the price of items with lots of watchers
If you have an item that has a lot of watchers, but no real interest, and you have listed it on buy it now consider dropping your price slightly. Often 50p - £1 is enough to make a sale. I recently had an item for sale for £40, with watchers, for a month. I dropped the price to £39 and within 1 day I had completed the sale for the full £39 - despite the item being on buy it now or best offer.
Use buy it now or best offer
People love to feel that they are getting a deal. If there is enough room between your price, and the next cheapest, consider allowing buyers to make you an offer. You can even set your minimum amount for an auto-accept in the listing of the item. This will save you time and ensure you don’t see offers below your minimum at all - cutting down on time wasters who want to offer £1 for items!
Switch items from buy it now to auction
If you have a lot of items, and you are trying to de-clutter, consider listing your items for 30 - 60 days on buy it now and then switching them to auction. It is really easy to change the listing and you can even use the bulk tool to do a load at one time.
Be prepared to wait to make a sale
If you aren’t in a hurry to clear out items, or don’t need the money fast, then be prepared to wait to make a sale. This is particularly smart if you have a rare item or an item that doesn’t sell often. Set your price and then be prepared to wait.
Don’t put all similar items as a job lot
It can be tempting to list items as job lots, however, this isn’t always the best way to maximise profit. I split up a load of dresses and baby outfits recently, instead of selling as a job lot, and I put all of the items on buy it now. I was able to make the sales, slowly but surely, and made almost £60 profit, whereas my last job lot sold for just £5 + postage.
Always get proof of postage
Sometimes items get lost. Other times buyers lie that they never received the item. By receiving proof of postage, and ensuring adequate insurance coverage, you can refund your buyer via eBay and claim back for your losses.
Write a return address on parcels
I have had items that have gone missing in the past, refunded and claimed from the Post Office and then a few weeks later the item turns back up at my home. Often this is because people did not receive the red card, misplaced it or did not collect their item in time.
I hope that you’ve enjoyed these 11 tips for eBay selling. Selling on eBay can feel time consuming, and not worthwhile, but often it is. Even if you sell items for just a few pounds, by calculating the postage correctly you’ll soon have a nice little sum in the bank.
eBay selling is something that I love to do to de-clutter, make money and to build up a nice fund for our family holidays. It is great to get some money back on baby clothes, books, shoes and more. It can take some time to make a sale but I’m happy to bag the items up once listed, put them in my hall cupboard and wait for the sales to trickle in!
Do you have any tips for selling on eBay? Let me know in the comments!
How to raise the cash for an unexpected bill and my own debt story
I was never any good with money. Perhaps you’ve already read my story of how I ended up in £17500 of debt by age 19. Luckily, for me, that was a huge eye opener and a lesson well learnt. I’d never had any experience of cash and growing up in a single parent family, cash was always tight. In fact I just remember money worries being rife, always being skint and budgeting everything to the very last penny. So when I turned 18 and could suddenly get a store card and overdraft, I did. I really did. The taste of being able to buy whatever I liked was just too tempting.
I’d never experienced anything like it before and I was hooked.
Before I knew it I had store cards for all my favourite shops, two loans, several credit cards and a maxed out overdraft. I went out socialising every evening, always bought rounds of drinks for everyone, always had a new outfit every day, went to the pub for lunch every day I worked, ate out in the evening at restaurants, rented a flat, had a car and a £100+ mobile phone bill every month. At the time I only earnt £150 per week in my full time shop assistant role. I was living WAY above my means.
I hit debt crisis pretty quickly. It spiralled out of control and the minimum payments were more than I could afford after my rent and bills. I was stuck in a circle of paying debt off with debt and never actually paying anything off. Luckily I sought help from the Citizen’s Advice Bureau and went on a debt management plan for over 5 years and paid every last penny back.
It was a tough lesson learned. The debt management plan basically left me with £30 per week for food and personal care, and that was it. No more expenditure money whatsoever.
Fast forward 12 years
Fast forward 12 years and I like to think I’m much better with money. OK, so I have a huge mortgage, but I see it as an investment and surely it’s better than paying off someone else’s mortgage by renting, right? In three years we’ve already made £40,000 on the value of our property, plus we’ve just increased our mortgage repayments, by only £100 pound per month, but it’s knocked £23000 off our overall interest. We went for the longest mortgage of 35 years whilst the children are little and my work was unpredictable, but we plan to overpay and reduce the term as the children grow and our earnings increase.
We also have two loans. We bought a property that needed renovating from top to bottom and we’re still going three years in. We were quite naïve as it was the first time we did this and only saved £7500 to do the work. Well that was swallowed up in around 4 weeks and we had no idea of the enormity of replacing everything and the costs involved. We took out a home improvement loan so we could get a bulk of work done in one go and not have to spend the next ten years relying on bits of money each month from our wages. We’re at that stage now of course, but the bulk of work has been done so we’re fine with that.
I also have a credit card again. But guess what? It has a whopping £5400 limit, even though I’m self-employed which I think is crazy, but my balance? £0. Well that’s a lie, it’s actually -£2 as I’m in credit on my credit card!
It’s purely there for emergencies or to make big purchases as it’s a Tesco credit card so sometimes it’s worth buying large items to get all the clubcard points and then paying it back right away.
The best thing nowadays is I feel in control. The credit is there but I no longer have the temptation or addiction to go and spend it all. I learned my lesson and I budget our income every month. Yes, we have two loans, but we only took them out after a lot of serious consideration and knowing that we can absolutely afford them and still have plenty of disposable cash at the end of each month. It meant we could get on with renovating our home and not have to wait years on end. It certainly wasn’t a decision we made lightly, or on a whim, and we also shopped around for the best deals and lowest interest rates.
What to do if you need cash unexpectedly
My advice to my younger self would be to save save save. Like Monica’s parents in Friends – put away at LEAST 10% of your wages every single month, as soon as you start working. This is what I’m going to teach my children and I hope they listen. That way, you’ll never have to borrow cash or pay any interest. You don’t even want to know the interest I had to pay back on all my personal debt all those years ago.
But, sometimes you still need cash in an emergency for an unexpected bill. It happens.
Even as a now responsible adult, we come across things that we need huge lumps of cash for. Even more so since we bought our first property and I expect many people are in the same boat. When you buy your first home it often swallows ALL your savings and then some. It might be a few years to get back on track and start saving again. For us it took around 2.5 years before we started up our savings account again. There’s so much to buy when you buy your first home and if you buy an old home, like we did, lots of unexpected things might go wrong.
For us, the first thing we weren’t expecting was the horrific water pressure! It wasn’t something we had thought of testing when we viewed the property, but as soon as we moved in and turned a tap on we were shocked! It was a dribble! To run a shallow bath for Bella took the best part of one hour. To wash my hair was impossible. We couldn’t go on like this and straight away, within a few weeks of moving in, we had to fork out almost £2000 to have a new high pressure water tank installed.
Next, just a few days before Christmas as these things like to happen, we had water pouring through our living room ceiling! An old pipe had rusted away and water was just coming out. Luckily we managed to find a plumber after a lot of calling around and it cost nearly £500 to repair.
More recently Ben has taken his car for a service and come home with a £800 bill. They needed to do some repairs as there was something quite vital on the verge of breaking. Needless to say I wasn’t impressed with this bill.
So in all walks of life something unexpected might happen. I remember Ben’s brother running up a HUGE phone bill, into the thousands, because he had no idea it cost to stream YouTube videos when abroad and there was no block on the phone. An innocent mistake I bet a lot of people make nowadays.
If you don’t have the cash saved to cover these emergencies, here are your options:
Bank of Mum and Dad
If you’re lucky enough to have a mum and dad with some savings, and you feel comfortable asking them to borrow money, then perhaps this should be your first port of call. I’m sure most parents would love to help out their children in times of an unexpected emergency. Just take it as a lesson learned to start saving money asap.
Borrow money
If you have a good credit rating and depending on how quickly you need the funds, you may be able to apply for a credit card. Many have zero interest options for so many months, so you could even borrow without paying any interest. Just be sure to pay it back as soon as you can so you don’t have to pay any interest. If your credit rating is not so great there are still options, but you’ll have to pay interest on what you borrow. There are also quick loans you can apply for, but be sure to read all the terms and understand the interest you need to repay. These should be short term and last resort solutions only.
Sell something
Got something you can sell to raise the cash? This is a great option. Maybe take a look through your attic and list a bunch of stuff on eBay or in local Facebook selling groups. This is also a great way to make some extra cash to pop into an emergency savings fund every month. Plus it keeps your home decluttered.
Call the company
If it’s a utility bill, call the company. If you just need to wait until payday or need to set up a repayment plan, they are often more than happy to help so long as you stick to the repayments. I’m sure they’d rather you called and tried to sort it out, than left it until the red letters started coming. Many have dedicated helplines for this sort of thing.
Earn some extra cash
If you only need a small amount of cash you could try earning it yourself. There are several money making apps available nowadays and if there are enough tasks in your area you can make a nice sum. I made £50 in three hours one morning by completing several mystery shopping tasks in a row.
Ask your employer
Years ago, a company I worked for offered ‘subs’. Not a six foot sandwich, but you could request some of your wages before payday and then they’d deduct what you’d had out of the official pay check. If you’re enrolled in a pension scheme, you may even be able to reduce or halt your payments for a few months. We were able to do this for three months at my husband’s work when I was on maternity leave and money was really tight. I think my husband went to payroll and jokingly said ‘I need more money, what can you do?’ and this was the best short term solution.
To avoid all of this, the best option is to save your own money. We now put away so much per month so we have a lump sum that should hopefully cover any emergency. Plus a backup 0% credit card if we still don’t have enough.
What do you do if you need cash in an emergency? Let me know in the comments.
