I feel a bit like a broken record with this one, but we are about a month away from jetting off for a year of travel.  With the kids!   Now we haven’t even set off yet, but I’ve learnt a lot about how I think about my money and even more about how I spend it.   The process of review your savings, income and packing up your home makes you acutely aware of what money you have and how you have been spending in the past.   Luckily, I have always lived a frugal lifestyle and, of course, been savvy about money and budgeting.  Therefore, I enjoyed the challenge of deciding how much money would we need for our trip.   What I wasn’t prepared for was a change in how I spend and how I view the things I already own.   Having A Declutter A few…

I am so excited to be able to bring you another UK Money Bloggers Giveaway!  This time it is our Summer Giveaway and it is bigger and better than the last.   After the huge success of our Easter Giveaway, we decided that it would be great to offer something similar in the summer.  And what better time to do it!  The summer holidays can be expensive so you could bag yourself one of SIX awesome prizes.   With the competition closing at the end of August, if you win, you could find yourself in receipt of one of five prizes, just as the kids go back to school.  What a treat eh?  All that luxury to yourself!  Just make sure you hide the evidence from the kids.   All the details on how to enter are below.  Take a look at the people involved and the prizes you could…

If you’ve been maximising the frugal lifestyle and slaying the debt or saving for your dreams holiday, then go you!  You rock!   But at some point, we must confront the next stage of truly managing our finances, and that is getting a pension and looking after it.   I speak from experience when I say that pensions are confusing.  It feels like they designed that way so that you don’t ask too many questions and accept the decisions that these finance-y people make.   Personally, I like to be a bit more involved.  I like to know what my pension is doing and how it is going to support me when I am no longer willing or able to work to support myself.   Why do you need to need to nurture your retirement funds? There might come a time in your life when you no longer want to…

There is no doubt that you’ve heard that Amazon’s Prime Day starts today.  And this year it is not just one but two days.   Every year there are big savings to be had and it is bound to be the same over the next two days, so it is natural to get a bit excited.   However, with many of us trying to stick to a budget and manage our less than obedient willpower, these two days could have the potential for disaster too.   With this in mind, I thought I’d write a list of steps you can take to get the most out of the next two days and stay in budget.   Make sure you are a Prime member In order to access the deals, you’ve got to have Prime.  Now, there are a couple of ways of going about this.   First up, if someone…

First up, IFISA stands for Innovative Finance ISA (Individual Savings Account).  They are a newer, alternative type of ISA that was introduced in April 2016.  They offer another choice to more traditional Cash ISAs and Stocks and Shares ISAs and provide access to a slightly different market.   How do IFISAs work? The way IFISAs work is by lending your money to borrowers in exchange for an interest rate.  Sometimes called peer to peer lending, you will be providing loans to businesses or individuals in a similar way to banks.   When you invest, you will be matched with individual borrowers and they will make payments back to you with that additional interest payment.   Who is providing these services? In the UK, RateSetter is leading the way in peer to peer lending.  Created in 2010, by two guys who wanted to fill the gap between low-risk, but low return…