Filed under: discounts, internet, lifestyle, money | Tags: discounts, lifestyle, money, on the cheap
Here’s a list of links where just being a student will entitle you to some delicious discounts to keep your bank balance happy.
Student Discount (.co.uk) Here’s a place that can get you discounts at McDonalds, Subway, The Boyshop and a variety of other places. All you need to do is register.
ensuring your time at University is about having fun and not worrying about money!
Damn straight.
Sta Travel- a delightful website dedicated to supplying us with cheap air fare prices, and further discounts for us students. Crossing the border has never been cheaper.
Probably.
SKINT- delightful. A pile of online discounts for clothing, booze, food…whatever.
Discounts at the online Apple store- because Mac’s might be sexy, but they’re expensive.
Student Free Stuff- another one of those “I don’t really have to explain it” sites. Free stuff. For students. Hurrah.
And the ever reliable NUS online. Student cards that you can flash at a shop assistant and they’ll knock some nuggets off your bill.
Now go forth and save money, because you know how 
Filed under: Clothes, Tips and Tricks, discounts, lifestyle | Tags: Clothes, lifestyle, money
If your finding yourself increasingly short of money, and with no new fun things to wear, have a go fannying around with stuff you already own. Cut the sleeves off old tshirts and sew lace around the armholes for example. It’s a lot cheaper than going out and buying something new.
You can also make your own printed tshirts by recycling a plain old one, designing your own motif, printing it off onto transfer paper then ironing it on to your shirt. Bish bash bosh.
One thing I’ve started to experiment with recently is making accessories. There are heaps of places on the internet that sell beads, buttons and trinkets at really low prices. All you have to do is stick them together in an original kind of way and you’re sorted. You could even make some money on the side by selling them at boot sales or from an ebay store. Genius all around.
Some of my most highly recommended crafty stuff retailers:
Tongue tied- apparently lacking in stock at the moment but the basics are there.
The Bead Shop- does exactly what it says on the tin.
E-Beads- SO much stuff.
And it’s always worth going to a textile shop to have a look at the material remnants on offer to see if they’d be useful in creating anything fun.
It’s free, it’s fun and it has a zip line.
With the weather hotting up, we all want to be out in the summer sunshine, frolicking like idiots. An outing to the park is a perfect excuse to laze around soaking up UV rays, and of course, it’s FREE.
We discovered the park on a drunken night out last week. We call our new tradition “drunken Thursday”; it’s basically an opportunity to blow off some steam without having anything to do during the day. On this particular day, we chummed up with another house who had been to the park by the castle before. None of our housemates had; and so tanked up with gin, we ambled down there in the darkness and commenced blundering around.
I was horribly injured in the whole “see how many people we can get on the zip line” scenario; we managed to get four of us on, and I was dragging along the floor the whole way. So halfway through the zip (going about 60, 70 thousand miles per hour,) I thought, shit it. I’ll let go.
Mud and grazes all up my back, multiple kicks to the face, and a nasty bang to the head with a side order of whiplash. It was amazing.
We’ve ventured back there since under less dangerous pretences just to lie around and talk about the meaning of life, soaking up a bit of summer sun and trying to avoid being trampled by hyperactive toddlers.
Ideal.
The BBC film stuff. Some of that stuff needs an audience. For the bargain price of NOTHING (except a return train ticket I guess,) you, yes YOU can be in that audience.
‘Citing.
And this website RIGHT HERE is the reason that me and my fellow house-livers are going to see QI on Monday. I love Steven Fry, he’s so wickedgood.
And it isn’t just tickets for Quite Interesting, no no no no no. You can also see:
Just to name a few.
Just to let you know that good entertainment need not be costly.
Huzzah!
Filed under: discounts, internet, lifestyle, money | Tags: discounts, internet, lifestyle, money, offers
I am risking filling my inbox with spam in an attempt to test websites dedicated to students.
More explicitly, getting free stuff, discounts and opportunities for students.
Today I have joined studentbeans, a website boasting
exclusive student offers, deals and discounts for free.
Fine….fair enough….
The sections are broken up into sub-catagories like “eating out,” “Gifts and electronics“, “bars, clubs and pubs“, yada yada blah….
I have so far entered competitions for a free macbok pro- ‘cos you know, winning one eliminates any chance of having to pay for one- and had to go through 4 or 5 pages of subscriptions, ticking yes or no as to whether I would like to hear from around 40 other companies about their upcoming offers; a lengthy, boring process which took around 15 minutes as there are about 70 separate companies all wanting you to subscribe.
Offers relating to food include free Millie’s cookies and 25% off Dominoes pizza, as well as a free beer at Nando’s when you spend £6 or over, 15% discount at the Slug and Lettuce, 20% off your bill at Bella Italia and 25% off your total bill at Yo!Sushi (a wonderful asian eatery that serves the most wonderful chocolate brownies).
All in all, quite a few good offers. And I am not one to turn down free crap.
There are also loads of offers relating to entertainment thingies:
2 for 1 cinema tickets at Odeon, 2 for 1 tickets at Cadbury World, Free DVD rentals from Lovefilm.com, and the opportunity to save 50% on West End shows amongst other things. It’s getting better…
There is also a section dubbed “market”:
We’ve scoured the web to find you a unique selection of online retailers that will help complement student life. We have reviewed loads of sites to make sure you’ll get the best deals, discounts and offers.
Which, sounds kind of like the aim of this blog, only in a more specialised kind of way. There’s a link to the “fun stuff” section (more competitions,) a “tv” section (articles for students, by students, including this rather weird video about Krispy Kreme doughnut promotions,)
and a link to facebook…which I guess everyone uses these days.
So the general consensus is that this site is quite good. Aside from the multitude of irritating advertisements and the multiple (compulsory) opportunities for subscribing to sites you have never heard of before and would rather never hear from again; Student beans offers quite a myriad of discounts and offers, all for us
YAY for Student Beans!
I hope I win that Macbook…
A lot of my favourite clothes come from second hand shops. There’s something I like about knowing that what I’m wearing has been worn by someone else before me. Also, generally speaking, second hand stuff is pretty friendly on the pennies.
Unless they dress it up as vintage and charge you double what it’s really worth. There are a lot of places in London that do this- as much as I hate it I fall for it time and again when I see something particularly pretty. HOWEVER there is a way around this. Charity shops for a start are run by people trying to make some money for a good cause, rather than making a fat profit. In Farnham there are two particularly good charity shops; The British Heart Foundation, and Oxfam.
With charity shops, finding a good bargain is never a certainty. You really have to look; and even then you might not find anything. Also any money you spend there is automatically donated to a good cause, which is nice.
A couple of my favourite second hand shops are in Notting Hill Gate in London. Retro Woman is one if my favourites with some really really old pieces and some incredible finds. This is one of those places where you are guaranteed something awesome. They stock all kinds of things, from Gucci loafers, to Jimmy Choos to designer handbags, to really beautiful dresses from decades ago.
And just next door is Retro man; the men’s version. This is definitely worth a look. You can buy a 3-piece-suit here for about £25 if you’re lucky.
In FACT, I took the liberty on doing a search of second hand and charity shops in London; so here is a link to 1,000 different second hand and charity shops all over London. No excuses!
Shopping second hand will save you money, and could provide a completely original, beautiful addition to your wardrobe.
So as a fun day out type thing yesterday, we went out for a meal (£8 for two on offer at the Marlborough…thank you very much,) and then, in a thrifty fit of cleverness we went and bought some sainsburys basics toys. Such as this:
At the barry-argin cost of £1.50,
2 different frisbees at around £1.50 each, an inflatable football at £2, and a kite.
All from sainsburys, all awesome outdoor fun-time. So we did after dinner games using everything, until it got dark and cold 
I’m beginning to like this budgeting malarchy. That’s the most running I’ve done in years.
- Book train tickets weeks in advance. And spring for a railcard- the £20 you spend on a railcard soon makes itself up in reduced ticket prices.
- If you are going on a night out, drink at home rather than at a pub. Invite some friends round, Hit Sainsburys for some cheap moonshine and twat some good music on. Surprisingly, often just as fun as going to a pub.
- Rather than going to a hair salon for a cut, have one of your friends do it. Obviously make sure they’re fully lucid, have two hands, and are not a blithering idiot. Otherwise you could end up with a bowl-mullet. This will save you a lot of money, and also the walk of shame (from salon to house) should Toni and Guy (for example) dye your hair orange.
devastated. Keira does it better.
For some reason, we all need books. To feed our minds and the like. I have recently discovered the wonders of Amazon. It saves you money, and it has an incredibly substantial catalogue of reading material.
I have managed to buy really good condition books from here both for my course and for any ‘leisure’ reading I do. In the past few weeks I have managed to get 10 books at the combined cost of £20, including titles such as:
- Brighton Rock by Graham Greene,
- The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder,
- Snakes and earrings by Hitomi Kanehara
- Lady Cottington’s pressed fairy book,
- My Idea Of Fun by Will Self
Filed under: Clothes, internet, lifestyle, money | Tags: internet, lifestyle, money, shopping
What is this? An easy to navigate online market-place swimming with other people’s crap? Hook. Me. Up.
I’ve been an e-bay addict as long as I can remember. (One of my) favourite pair of shoes was 99p on ebay from a very nice person named Furry_Strawberry. Happy days.
Ebay is ideal if you’re running low on funds, if you’re looking for something you can’t find on the high street, or if you just can’t be arsed to get up out of your chair, and physically LOOK for something. Ebay is the reason my bank balance suffers less, the reason why I can often find exactly what I’m looking for, and the reason that there is a progressively pronounced arse indent forming in the flimsy seat of my desk chair.
By now you have probably gathered that I have a ‘thing’ about online shopping. This is because:
- It is SO much easier to type in an item description on a website than it is to go out and look for something you want.
- In Farnham, there are very few places to shop.
- Additionally, travelling to places where you could POTENTIALLY find what you are looking for requires hard cash. I can’t spare the sterling.
- Internet shopping means you can shop anytime, anywhere. I ended up buying an amber bead necklace from Tokyo about two years ago. The postage was around £6, but it’s cheaper than getting a flight out there.
- It’s a lot easier to find bargains online. Melikey.
