Budget Food: Chewy Cookies

The first budget food recipe I have researched is those big fat chewy cookies which you can buy in supermarkets and from stalls. These can cost up to £1 each in some places, so I was wondering how much it costs to make them. The prices are from Aldi and are correct on the 10th of February 2012.

This is the recipe:
250g    self raising flour                     9p
125g    butter                                 59.5p
200g    sugar                                  47.5p
1         egg                                     13p

plus anything else you like such as chocolate chips, raisins, dried fruit, etc.

Preparation:
Preheat the oven to Gas mark 3/170 degrees C. Grease a baking sheet lightly.
Melt the butter and add the sugar. Stir until it is well mixed and begins to be a little lighter in colour. Wait until it is cool then add the egg and mix again until it is creamy and light. It does not look like cake mixture, just a little lighter. Then mix in all the flour until it is a smooth consistency.

Drop largeish amounts of the mixture onto the baking sheet with a tablespoon taking care to keep them around 5-6cm apart because they will spread out in the oven.

Bake for 15 minutes. The chewy, soft consistency comes from underbaking them slightly. They will be large, flat slightly sticky cookies when they come out, but when cool, they are fine.

Using this recipe, I made 17 medium sized cookies for £1.29.

That is 7.6p per cookie.
(Include energy costs if you can work them out for the length of time that the oven is switched on).

 

How To Get More Traffic for Your Blog Through Linkreferral

Linkreferral is a great website for generating traffic to your blog, e-commerce website, or any other website that you may have.

 It is basically a links directory where you can add the link for your own website into one of the many categories that they have after registering for their service.

After that they require you to do your share of visiting people’s websites which in turn makes people visit yours.

If you go to 30 websites from their directory, from any category, and review 5 sites, choosing one of them to be your favourite, and make one comment on the forum, then you have done your maximum daily amount.

Bad Points

• It takes ages to visit 30 websites. It is not possible to just click through quickly, linkreferral only registers your visit once the whole website home page has loaded.

• It also takes ages to leave 5 reviews on other people’s sites which are helpful and meaningful.

• Because the forum comments are perfunctory, the forum is full of thousands of comments, but does not have the feeling of a proper community. A bit like a dance for shop dummies. They are dancing, but they don’t know why they are there or whether they are having fun or not.

• From time to time, someone visits your site who just ‘doesn’t get’ what you do and what you are all about. This person just leaves a low score or a poor review and this can knock your ego a bit.

• Another bad point is that sometimes you come across a website which is so interesting that you find yourself so absorbed with reading it and forget to visit the other 29 and one link leads to another and…

Good Points

Linkreferral leads you to discover hundreds of other websites. These are often other blogs, or money-making websites, or anything you can imagine. You can leave comments on their sites and so build up your backlinks and they in turn visit yours.

• You do not have to do every part of the requirements, just surfing a few of the sites lets you work your way up the list of sites in your category. The secret is little and often. Since people have to visit 30 sites, if you are on the first page, then the chance are higher that you will get a visit.

• You start getting visitors almost immediately you join. 

• People come to your site and leave a review. This means that they can spot something obvious that you may have missed, and it also gets tested out by lots of different browsers and computers who can comment on how fast your images load etc.

Link Building
A directory website like this is very useful for making contacts and link building because you are able to send direct emails to the website owners.

Referral Programme
Unfortunately, the actual referral programme is not that great. They ask $50 to join and pay $0.15 cents per referral, so you need to refer at least 334 people before you even get your $50 back.

But on the whole, it is a great way to generate a steady stream of traffic to your site, who are interested to see what your site is like and can review it for you.

 

10 Ways That I Saved Money Today

Times are tough right now, and money is tight for a lot of families. Incomes are not only reducing in real terms because many people are being asked to take pay cuts or to reduce their hours, but also because everything is becoming so expensive. In the UK, unemployment is at a 17 year high, with 8.4% of the eligible population out of work.

There has never been a better time to take a good look at your income and spending and save as much as possible. Here are 10 ways to immediately start saving money:

1. Cut down on takeaways. If your average spend on a takeaway meal is £25 a week, then getting one every other week immediately saves you £50. Cut down altogether and you are £100 a month better off.

2. Lower your mobile phone tariff. Just how much do you pay for your mobile phone texts and calls? Some of the tariffs are so confusing that the people selling them don’t even understand which ones are better value for money (this means you Carphone Warehouse!). Work out how much you spend a month and see if there is a better deal out there.

3. See if you can switch to a better rate for your gas and electricity. Many websites let you search online for better value. Save up to £100 a month in some cases. If you have not already discovered these websites, then moneysavingexpert.com and uswitch.com are good places to start. I will put a list of some more at the end of the post.

4. Shop around for cheaper car insurance. If you have been using the same company since you started driving, then the chances are that there will be other companies which provide far better deals to you. Do you have all the benefits? You pay less if you park in a garage, have an alarm fitted etc etc, discuss it with your prospective insurance company and see what they will offer you.

5. Pay off as much expensive credit card debt as you can. This will significantly reduce the amount of interest you pay for the rest of the debt. Letting it stay just builds up the debt for you. Save money by paying it off more quickly.

6. Use your car less, drive to a park and ride instead, or just simply walk for shorter distances. Drive more economically and plan your journeys so that you can get several things done during just one trip.

7. Cut down those subscription services. You know if you cancel your Sky subscription, they only phone you a month later and offer you a much better deal. Haggle with them! Of all the services that you buy they are probably the ones that you can bargain with the most. Save at least £30 a month.

8. If you have a landline phone, see if your phone company offers a cheaper tariff. A lot of companies have unlimited calls during evenings and weekends. Or if you regularly phone overseas, see if they have an Anytime service which lets you call anywhere for a certain number of minutes a month. Halve your phone bills.

9. Shop at a cheaper supermarket. Switching from Sainsburys to Aldi can reduce your bill from £100 a week to £40 a week.

10. Go through your bank account with a fine-toothed comb And pick out the niggling little unnecessary payments. Are you paying for things you no longer use? Are you paying subscriptions for the kids that they don’t even read? Cut out all the useless payments. Do you have more than 3 insurance policies? Make sure that you are not paying to cover the same things in different policies!

Don’t throw away your hard earned cash. Sit down and make those savings today!

 

Short Survival Tips #4 Lose Weight, Save Money, Clean Up!

Instead of vacuuming your whole room, buy a stiff brush with a long handle and brush all the dust into a big pile in the middle.

Then vacuum around the edges and the big pile.

• Burn off some serious calories while you are brushing.

• Save money by not vacuuming for so long.

• Save energy by not using so much electricity

 

Short Survival Tips #3 Reduced Support

Save yourself money.

• Instead of buying expensive tops which give added support, and can cost a fortune, buy cheaper vest tops which are a couple of sizes small. They will hold all the curvy bits in without reducing the size of your bank account!

• Do not wash and condition your hair twice as it says on some shampoo bottles. You will only wash all the natural oils out of it and make it limp and lifeless! Save money and get twice the use out of your shampoo.

• If you come home with a cracked egg in your shopping, and don’t like the thought of using it in your cooking, rustle up a quick egg conditioner for your hair. Either quickly whisk it up and use as it is, or add a tiny amount of oil or honey to make your hair even shinier. Use it in the bath or shower, massage it on to your hair and leave for as long as you like. Wash out with your normal shampoo for lustrous, shiny locks.