Free champagne for our survey winner

Here's a cheap way to spend your lunchtime - and you could walk away with a case of bubbly. 

If surveys are your thing, we're looking for people to help shape the future of This is Money. It won't take long.

Take the survey

Related

How to improve our message boards

Holiday Inn: 2 nights for price of 1

That singer Neil Diamond (pictured) has a story that he's been on the road for 40 years and still hasn't found a comfortable pillow. Well, maybe he could try a Holiday Inn because they have a pillow menu.

Something else they have at the moment is a 2 nights for the price of 1 offer for weekends in July and August. We've checked and there are some brilliant deals but they are being snapped up fast.

http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/h/d/6c/1/en/c/1/content/dec/teaser/6c/1/en/lp/emea/twofor.html?rateCode=IDEX1

Or phone:

0870 850 9084 quoting '2 for 1'

Related

Big expansion of Premier Inns in London

Archive: Cheapest and dearest cities for hotels

Dirt cheap but quality travel insurance

Argos: free theatre and a half-price treadmill

One of the great pleasures in life of a Saturday afternoon is to pop down to the local Argos and watch as the free Theatre of Chaos unfolds before your eyes.

The first Act starts well with everybody more or less receiving what they paid for in the order they paid for it. But by the interval, tempers are fraying and customers are getting angry. By the end of Act 2 and the grand finale, the Saturday boys and girls employed to manage the flow of goods trundling down the conveyor belt demonstrate that clearly they aren't up to the task and the mess that inevitably follows can be a joy to watch.

But now there's even more of a reason to go because it's sale time and there are some bargains to be had. Check it out: Argos sale now on.

One interesting 'bargain' is the half-price treadmill. At £500 it's not exactly being given away but if you're the kind of person fooled into joining a gym then not using your membership this could be a viable alternative.

Related

Can I get my money back for shoddy gym

Gym saga is weighing me down

Nightmare on the High Street to worsen

Archive: Weak dollar means price cuts at Argos

How call centres really behave

'Isa rate? I don't know what you mean by Isa rate.' Lloyds TSB call centre, 2008.

Everyone has a call centre story. Personally, I like the idea of speaking to someone in another part of the world and for a few moments being a part of another culture. It's romantic. Exciting. Until it goes wrong. As I said, we all have a call centre story.

My personal gripe is with Kwikfit insurance, staffed by the most enthusiastic, friendly, decent people you could ever wish to deal with but managed by cash-grabbing monkey people who have forgotten that customers can tell the difference between customer service and feeding time. Of course, that's just my impression. What they are really like is a mystery. All I've got to go on are a few voices, a few unsolicited spam phone calls and the hilariously inappropriate hard-sell because I once had one of their policies. Never again.

That's my story. So what's yours?

If you can make time this lunchtime, I urge you to listen to the clips and post your stories on this report from my colleague Alan O'Sullivan, who has been doing a few cold calls of his own to various banks' call centres around the world. It's brilliant. Make sure you add your comments. You must have a story of your own.

Listen in on our call centre ring around

Be your own financial adviser: #1 credit cards

If this credit crunch has taught us anything about the people working in the financial services industry it is that they don't seem to have a clue about what they are doing... but who cares as long as there's a bonus or commission. Their reaction to the mess is just as reprehensible: freeze credit for everyone.

The whole thing raises the question of whether we should ever trust anyone with our money again. This story about bad financial advice is typical of the kind of thing that can happen when you entrust your money to someone with one eye on a fat cheque. It's not a one-off. Thankfully, This is Money has all the information and independence you need to make your own decisions and today for the people with the inclination but not the time we're launching the first of a sporadic series of helpful introductions to various aspects of your money.

1. Credit cards

Credit cards, in the right hands, are a fantastic way to get quick short-term interest-free money to buy stuff - but they're only fantastic if you pay off the balance at the end of the month. If you can't clear the balance then you don't have the right kind of hands and you should not have one. It's very simple. And don't fall for the intense pressure from the industry marketeers and commentators to take 0% cards to try to beat the system. If you don't have the right hands, you cannot win at cards.

If you are a confident player and hand on heart you know what you are doing, check out the best deals here: Best credit cards

But if this story rings more true with you - I can't get out of my credit card debt - then first check how long it will take to pay off your balance, with the credit card reality check calculator and consider a low-cost loan as an alternative. Do the sums: a credit card debt (APR 17%) of £5,000 over three years will cost you £1,417 in interest. A loan at 8% will cost £604. A saving of around £800.

Find the right loan here

Related reads

Beware rogue debt advice
Millions face debt disaster

How to get out of debt

Read our debt guides
Read/ask the debt experts
Check your credit rating
Reduce your debt repayments

How to get Wii Fit for half price

Oh dear. It seems rip-off Britain is alive and well. At least it is when it comes to the must-have game of the year, the computerised home gym system for the Nintendo Wii console, Wii Fit.

The trouble is, there isn't nearly enough supply to meet the demand, a situation that brings out the worst of the scammers and the touts. Buy it now on Amazon.co.uk and you'll pay around £150 for a new one, that's more than double you might expect to pay from a reputable High Street store.

So what can you do? Well, wait. Go for a walk, go for a run, get fit the old fashioned free way.

If you can't do that because having stuff is more important that commonsense, why not buy it from Amazon France? The average French person is too busy eating to worry about jumping up and down in front of the telly and as a result Wii Fit has been in stock long after it sold out here. You'll pay 88 euros, which is about £70 with delivery another £5ish. Stock was due this week on 25 June, although now it is advertising a slightly more vague, delivery within one or two weeks.  Find it here.

I've bought plenty of stuff from the french Amazon site and never had a problem. The Wii games work here just the same and if you're worried about the language read this guide:

How to order from Amazon France

Related

This is Money's guide to shopping online

Ask an expert: Can I get my money back for shoddy gym?

Never forget a password again

I need to remember around 30 passwords to do my job. Add to that more than a decade of internet surfing and the number of passwords is just silly. It's impossible to remember that many yet we're told you cannot write them down. You don't have to.

This is Money's technical genius Matt recommends a little piece of software called Password Agent that securely stores all your passwords and, even better, automatically fills in the login details of all the sites you save. Check it out here:

http://www.moonsoftware.com/pwagent.asp

Related

£1 buys all your online banking secrets

Half price Legoland tickets - today!

One thing that Lastminute.com does well is periodically dishing out half-price Legoland tickets, which is great because in my opinion the theme park based on the famous little plastic bricks is a great day out but it isn't worth the full ticket price.

The latest offer is available for one day only and expires at midday Friday 20 June.

Book your half-price tickets now

Related tip

How to get discounts on days out

Get your FREE tickets for the Olympic concert in The Mall

QUICK! If you want tickets for the free concert of the summer, to celebrate the Olympic Games coming to London in 2012, you should sign up now. There are 40,000 places for the event that will take place in The Mall, London, on Sunday, 24 August.

Although the line-up hasn't been announced - all that is promised so far is the chance 'to join Olympians and special guests' - London is probably better than the rest of the world at organising gigs, so it should be a good one. It's not first come first served, but a ballot.

GET YOUR TICKETS HERE

In case you missed

High School Musical: £10 off top price tickets

Play YouTube tennis with This is Money readers

High School Musical: £10 off top tickets

If you have young children and haven't been pestered into shelling out for the theatre show, the films, the DVDs, CDs, duvet sets, sleepover kits and almost any kind of merchandise you can imagine for the phenomenon that is Disney's High School Musical, then this maybe the last chance to salvage your credibility in your children's eyes. Well, at least until the third movie in the series comes out later in the year...

You can get £10 off top tickets (£35 instead of £45) for the show, which has a six-week run over the summer at London Hammersmith Apollo theatre.

Book tickets here

ENTER PROMO CODE: FAMILY

Valid for Tuesday - Thursday performances from Tuesday 1 July to Thursday 28 Aug. Subject to availability and transaction charge. Warning: Seats at the back of the circle are miles away from the stage, see the seating plan and read the seating opinions on Theatre Monkey.

If you live nowhere near London the show is on tour across the whole country.

Related

Why we are fighting the ticket rip-off

Cut your shopping bill by a million pounds

OK, ignoring the ludicrous hyperbole that 'we Brits could save over £375m a year on their grocery bills? That's a whopping £1m a day!!', this is nonetheless an interesting wake-up call to all supermarket snobs out there.

If you dedicate your life's shopping spend to one of the biggies such as Waitrose, Tesco or Sainsbury's because, basically, you've bought into the marketing, now could be the time to rethink your attitude.

There's incredible quality at the low-cost end of the supermarket chain, at Lidl and Aldi for instance. And to prove the point Aldi has come up with a calculator to show how much you could save if you switched your loyalty. Remember: if you can save 20% a week off a £100 shopping bill that's more than £1,000 a year. Kerching.

The calculator

http://www.saveamillionwithaldi.co.uk/

Related

10 tips for cutting food bills

Tesco worried by Aldi and Lidl challenge

Shoppers happier to use cut-price stores

Are you a supermarket snob?

Dump your your car, clear your debts

A while ago on This is Money we conducted a poll, asking readers how much the price of petrol would have to rise to before you would consider giving up your car. At the time, the idea of petrol hitting £1.50 a litre was preposterous. Besides, a quarter of voters said they'd continue driving whatever it cost.

How things have changed. As unleaded edges ever closer to £1.50 (around £6.75 a gallon) we are nearing the threshold at which 19% (at the time of writing) of voters said they would abandon their car. According to some reports it has already started to happen. But would you really do it? With the help of some basic maths, here's an example of why your car may be as unnecessary as your overdraft.

Let's say you have a car on the drive for occassional use - school runs, the supermarket, that kind of thing.

Assumptions
You live three miles from the supermarket
You visit the supermarket six times a month
You do a daily school run, same distance from home as the supermarket
You get 30 miles a gallon on an urban run
Petrol is £6 a gallon (£1.30-ish a litre)

What that means
You are spending £86 a year just to go shopping. That's nothing, right?
You are spending £216 a year to take the kids to school. Let's round that up to £350 to include extra little journeys on the school and shopping run. £350 a year. That's nothing. Right?
Now add the insurance (£350); road tax (£200); service/MOT (£300).

Total bill for shopping and dropping the kids off:

£1,200 a year. That's nothing right?

Now multiply that by say five years and factor in further increases in petrol prices.

£6,000 + the depreciation of the car's value +£6,000

= £12,000

Now, even if some of these estimates are plucked out of the air, I hope if you are feeling the pinch that this will make you think about how much that second car is costing just to drop the kids at school and go shopping. There are alternatives.

Related
Should I still buy a diesel car?  Ask an expert  02/06/2008
Warning: hidden car hire costs abroad  Travel insurance  11/06/2008
Revealed: The most expensive car park  Bargains & rip-offs  09/06/2008
Car tax U-turn on the cards  News  29/05/2008

Sign up to appear on the next series of the Apprentice

OK, it's the only thing anyone's going to be talking about today and so bandwaggon-jump we must. The Apprentice - one of the last remaining 'event TV shows' that brings much of the nation together to talk about it the following morning.

If you saw it and are talking about it, great, and I hope you'll agree the real star of the show is, and always has been, Margaret Mountford, the silent adviser (pictured) who can slay a moron with the twitch of an eye.

If you didn't see it but you fancy a new job that pays £100,000 a year and a few weeks away from it all caged up with bickering sales people and would-be managers who aren't very good at selling or managing then this could be for you...

SIGN UP TO APPEAR ON THE NEXT SERIES HERE

Related

Who should be the Apprentice?

The Liar is hired

Calculate how long it would take to make £100,000

Read top business books in minutes

At This is Not Work Towers the postbag is forever bulging with the latest promotional copies of self-help-style business and money advice books for review. Sometimes among the pap is a useful gem of a book that handles complex boring stuff with ease, but on the whole the view is, 'Great book in theory, but... Come On! It should have been a pamphlet.'

If you've bought some of these types of book, and it's usually the American ones that are overwritten to the point of destruction, and you understand what I mean, there is a service that may be of interest.

getAbstract is a Swiss-based company that has a team of researchers who read all the latest business advice books and condenses them to pamphlet-size proportions. Prices start from $89 a year for 30 'books', to $299 for full access to 4,500.

http://www.getabstract.com/

Related

And one worth reading in its entirety for our own economics correspondent

>> The Gods That Failed

How the Dragons made their millions

If you want to start a business or are merely interested in how those famous millionaires amassed their fortunes, you cannot afford to miss our interviews with BBC TV's Den of Dragons.

Watch the videos, read the interviews and the transcripts and learn from...

Peter Jones

Simon Woodroffe

Doug Richard

Theo Paphitis

Rachel Elnaugh

Related

>> Read all our millionaire interviews

>> Find a business for sale

10 rules of GSI - getting someone (a builder) in

It's happening. The economic boom based on easy money and rising house prices is coming to an end. Estate agents are having to prepare themselves for the worst and the professions allied to the housing market can expect  tough times ahead.

But it's the tradesmen and women who may be in for the nastiest of shocks. If this report is a true representation, they have been putting their prices up by 20% over the last two years - typical behaviour of people who know the good times are coming to an end. One of the comments on the story from a reader sums it up:  'Just hang on. In 12 months builders will be ringing you begging for work.'

The days of having little choice of which builder to choose for a job are over. Here then is a timely reminder of the 10 rules of Getting Someone In (GSI).

• Appearances do matter in the building profession. Anyone who looks really scruffy probably does scruffy work.
• Recommendations matter. Never employ anyone without a referee. Belonging to a trade association means they fill out paperwork and care somewhat about the legalities, but it's not everything.
• Some tradesmen make up prices as they go along. Always get a second opinion. Ask them how they got to that figure.
• If they have no tools or equipment and say they have to come back, worry. Most professionals carry everything in their van.
• A trick of the profession is to point out the shoddy work that someone else did previously and suggest (!) that they can do it better. This is an old trick; don't fall for it.
• Don't get blinded by science. Ask what this or that means and how they intend to go about fixing it. You can explain things to your friends and so can they.
• Anyone without a business card or business address is to be questioned. A mobile is not enough.
• Companies with hierarchies and MDs are the better option because the MD knows that word of mouth is everything. It's very useful to have someone to complain to if the job goes wrong.
• Building is a very imprecise art, so don't expect perfection. Any good builder will persevere until the problem is resolved.
• If someone does a good job, tell them (better yet, tell their boss). The next time you have a leak or disaster they will drop everything and come over.

List compiled by Helen Kirwan-Taylor, author of Home UK, a guide to the best architects, builders, gardeners, interior designers and general handymen in the UK, available via Amazon for a couple of quid.

The best of YouTube - by This is Money readers

One of the frustrations of writing about the best of the internet is that some of the really clever things are either downright illegal, which is fine - we don't want to write about that - or worse, in this legal grey area where our lawyers advise caution.

It's all to do with copyright and the basic principal that if someone creates something it's theirs, not yours and you can't just take it. The problem is that where Google and YouTube test copyright laws to the limit by basically publishing other people's material, they're deemed acceptable and lauded for it but sites that take content from YouTube and create all sorts of other clever musical services on the back of it can be deemed to be taking things too far. So they tend not to get written about.

However, I needn't worry because a service (of sorts) that brings the best of YouTube to the masses in a legal and entertaining format is emerging under our very noses on This is Money.

On our message boards, contributor MARY_LOU has created a kind of YouTube tennis game, where you post links to your favourite music clips. There are nearly 200 entries and I've yet to see one that's not worthy of inclusion. It's brilliant.

Take part, or just have a look, now

• Post your favourite video or song

Best place to rent DVDs?

News that Apple is to launch an online movie rental service merely confirms that the end of the High Street video store is inevitable. As is the end of DVD rental services. Probably eventually even DVDs.

Interestingly - and here's a bit of modern social history - a company called Enron was testing video streaming with video rental company Blockbuster in 2000 but a combination of dotcom hubris, oh, and large-scale fraud put paid to that. Fastforward eight years and everyone is talking about streamed movies. Indeed, Amazon is launching something similar.

It is only a matter of time before all films we watch are streamed to our computers/TVs but until the technology catches up with the masses and vice versa, the best way to watch films is use one of the DVD rental services. 

'Using online DVD rental firms makes a lot of sense. It's cheaper – for frequent film watchers vastly so - than going to the local video library, postage is free, there are no late fees and most firms offer a free trial. The flaw in the system is that you are not guaranteed to get a particular film on a particular day.'

Learn more...

How to win the online DVD rental battle

Five reasons to use the free Father's Day card service

From where I'm sitting, the attempts by the PR industry to turn Father's Day into a festival akin to a mid-term Christmas are becoming quite tiresome. With just 11 days to Father's Day, now is the time to do your last-minute Father's Day shopping before the High Street literally clears its shelves of amusing golf kits and driving gloves until November.

And how many 'Get out of debt this Father's Day with our Father's Day debt pack for the dad who can't afford school dinners any more - including 10% off your next Porsche' press releases do we have to endure?

FUNNY MUG: £12 / FREE GREETINGS CARD (inc P&P)

Thankfully among the maelstrom of 'straight-to-trash' emails there are a couple worthy of mention.

First, hats off to the people behind the 'I'm A Geordie Me' and other Geordie mugs aimed at the Geordie dad who, erm, hasn't got a mug with 'I'm a Geordie Me' written on it, and second, a genuine free offer and an interesting take on online greetings cards from  www.greetz.co.uk.

Normally, for about three quid and three minutes of your time you design a greetings card online - uploading your own images as you wish - you write the message, fill in the envelope and then the clever bit, they make the card up for you in the real world and post it to the intended. Only for now it's free.

This is particularly useful service because:
1. No one but no one understands the postal system any more and with this you don't have to even try to;
2. it's moronically easy - even a dad could do it;
3. you don't have to register, which is always a plus, but...
4. and here's the tenuous Father's Day bit: if you do register before Thursday, 12 June, your first card is FREE (inc p&p).
5. It's 'a great way to show dad you care on 15 June', it says here.

Try it now - it is all of the above

Related

Win a Father's Day VIP journey on the rails

Campaign: Save our Post Offices

Make the most of Google and save precious time

Whether you like it or not, circa 2008 Google is in charge of the Web. If you don't like it, it could be over accusations that it illegally takes and stores other people's content, that it invades privacy or that's it's just too darn big.

If you do like it, it's probably because it is gloriously simple, it does what you expect it to and it has an array of incredible applications and clever gizmos.

So are you getting the most out of the Google phenomenon? Probably not. Read this, and the comments, for tips.

>> Master the Google - search like a God and save time

Related

Google news and analysis from This is Money 

Breaking news and advice you cannot afford to miss

Shares in the former building society Bradford & Bingley lost a quarter of their value in early trading this morning. As it was happening our City writers were covering the story and sending out a free newsflash alerting subscribers to the news and the implications.

The newsflash service is about keeping our readers up to date with the big stories that directly affect the money in your wallet. If that sounds like something you might be interested in, check it out here:

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/newsflash

Sample____________________________________

Newsflash: B&B shares plunge amid cash crisis
Shares in the UK's biggest buy-to-let lender Bradford & Bingley plunged this morning as the bank revealed a crushing profits blow and confirmed it will be propped up by a US private equity giant.
>> B&B in cash crisis
>> Latest B&B share price

Then____________________________________

As the day progresses, we update the story and add all the analysis and background that anyone with the shares or an interest in, or connection to them will need know. And the one link you need to access it all is still in your inbox to use at your convenience.

Don't miss out again

Sign up for NEWSFLASHES now
Newcomers need to first register then follow the Newsletters link
Existing members should use the Update my details facility