💥 Contest 💥 The Money Saving Thread

[Shambles]

Times iz tuff right now, so how to save money?

This thread is for any and all - big or small - tips for saving money.

Inspiration came from our broadband contract (which happened to be with Virgin and was previously very reasonably priced) was up and the first month of the implied new contract jumped to fukkin sixty fukkin quid a fukkin month

After a little research we’ve decided to switch to Sky for around 24 pound a month. If we’d just caught it before the contract ended we’d’ve saved over thirty quid

Over to you, folks: save us all some pennies

 

[Bleaney]

There's a shit load of videos on Youchube covering this subject, You've probably seen many of them.

Unfortunately a lot of them all say exactly the same super obvious things; like cancel unused subscriptions and memberships for example, that one always gets mentioned first.

Now, whenever I hear that as point 1, I stop watching, as from experience it means that the entirety of the rest of the video, will also just be covering the same old points, that everyone else covers.

There's many other points besides the subscriptions and memberships that always gets mentioned too.

If I can find a couple of the more original videos I've seen, that stood out for covering the subject in an original, different, or better way, I'll post them.

The problem is that my liked videos and watch history is absolutely rammed, so it may be very difficult to find the relevant ones, as they'll be like needles in a haystack.

A personal opinion, and method of mine, is that you can save a lot of money by totally cancelling cable or satellite TV subscriptions to providers such as Sky or Virgin Media.. All main 5 terrestrial channels do "catch up" services that you can stream online for free. Apart from the BBC's Iplayer, that you have to legally pay the licence fee to watch, obviously. I genuinely don't watch anything on Iplayer, nor any BBC live streaming, so I also save £180 a year, because I don't legally need a TV licence, as I don't watch anything from the BBC, nor any "live television broadcasts" from anything that could be considered a TV channel. Many of the bigger (in addition to the traditional top 5 terrestrial channels) cable TV channels probably also do catch up streaming services, but I cannot be sure about that, as it's not something I've looked into in any depth, nor at any recent time, but IIRC I have watched catch up streaming for free from at least one Cable TV channels 'catch up TV', streaming website, at some point in the past. I think by this stage that more of these tend to be pay for services, as opposed to the free ones you get from channel 4, channel 5, and ITV, for example.

I find more than enough to watch on youtube, (although sadly the overall quality of the content is getting much worse of late, with the mass proliferation of AI slop, and the use of AI narration, which is also intensly annoying and offputting,) streaming the catch up services provided by the non-BBC channels, and any films or TV box-sets I want to watch are generally super easy to download completely free using P2P torrent services.

It's been in my extremely long 'to do book' (I have so many things I'd like to do, but don't get round to actually doing a fraction of them, that I use notebooks to keep track of them, not just paper lists) to get a Bluray DVD player and to start frequenting the charity shops to start building a collection of any of the more obscure movies or boxsets that you cant get on the torrent sites, or sometimes only in pretty low quality. I'd also like to do more of this for music CDs. There seems to be a resurgence of people doing this for TV series, movies, and music, as people are getting fed up of digital subscriptions and purchases that can remove any title from your collection at any time. Once you own a physical DVD or CD, you own it for life, obviously. And no one can take it away from you. Charity shops used to sell CDs, DVDs, and Blurays extremely cheaply, but the word is that they are starting to jack up their prices a great deal. So it's no longer so easy to get great bargains in many charity shops, but some still do, and long may those last, hopefully!

 

[Perkins : Reborn]

There's a shit load of videos on Youchube covering this subject, You've probably seen many of them.

Unfortunately a lot of them all say exactly the same super obvious things; like cancel unused subscriptions and memberships for example, that one always gets mentioned first.

Now, whenever I hear that as point 1, I stop watching, as from experience it means that the entirety of the rest of the video, will also just be covering the same old points, that everyone else covers.

There's many other points besides the subscriptions and memberships that always gets mentioned too.

If I can find a couple of the more original videos I've seen, that stood out for covering the subject in an original, different, or better way, I'll post them.

The problem is that my liked videos and watch history is absolutely rammed, so it may be very difficult to find the relevant ones, as they'll be like needles in a haystack.

A personal opinion, and method of mine, is that you can save a lot of money by totally cancelling terrestrial TV subscriptions to providers such as Sky or Virgin Media.. All main 5 terrestrial channels do "catch up" services that you can stream online for free. Apart from the BBC's Iplayer, that you have to legally pay the licence fee to watch, obviously. I genuinely don't watch anything on Iplayer, nor any BBC live streaming, so I also save £180 a year, because I don't legally need a TV licence, as I don't watch anything from the BBC, nor any "live television broadcasts" from anything that could be considered a TV channel. Many of the bigger (in addition to the traditional top 5 terrestrial channels) cable TV channels probably also do catch up streaming services, but I cannot be sure about that, as it's not something I've looked into in any depth, nor at any recent time, but IIRC I have watched catch up streaming for free from at least one Cable TV channels 'catch up TV', streaming website, at some point in the past. I think by this stage that more of these tend to be pay for services, as opposed to the free ones you get from channel 4, channel 5, and ITV, for example.

I find more than enough to watch on youtube, (although sadly the overall quality of the content is getting much worse of late, with the mass proliferation of AI slop, and the use of AI narration, which is also intensly annoying and offputting,) streaming the catch up services provided by the non-BBC channels, and any films or TV box-sets I want to watch are generally super easy to download completely free using P2P torrent services.

AI narration is sometimes unintentionally good.

 

[Larch]

Shop at Lidl, make the pounds work for you (ie when the coffee beans are on offer, stock up, when the toothpaste is on offer, stock up), patch the takeaways, shop around for everything at the end of a contract, learn to turn wrenches a bit for keeping maintenance costs down on your vehicle, dare I say it... ditch the booze?

As an aside, I do marvel at the inflation-proof nature of the UK cannabis market. In fact, it's cheaper than ever and generally of a quality too (although proper old world hash seems scarcer, and the "cali packs" trend is scamming the youth).