How to get a free car FINAL update! Challenge Achieved!!

Sometimes life has a strange way of firing coincidence after coincidence. Above pictured is the car I got FOR FREE and it is the EXACT Sisley 4x4 Fiat Panda I was searching for! Below is how this happened:

I left my work early on a friday recently, and went home, strangely for me the first thing I did when I got home was log into the Fiat Forum where I am a member (big shout out, its a great forum) and the top post was someone offering a Fiat Panda Sisley to anyone who would take it! All they wanted in return was a £50 donation to a Dogs Charity, I figured someone had already private messaged the seller but I messaged her anyway stating my interest in the car and could I phone her tonight to ask some questions. She replied very quickly with her telephone number and we talked on the phone, I asked all the usual questions one would ask when buying a classic car, miles condition etc and it all sounded good. The car had been sitting for 5 years and would need work, but I enjoy working on cars so if anything this was a bonus. I received some photos of the car and agreed to buy it there and then.

I then had to arrange transport. I used Shiply.co.uk as the car was in London, undriveable and I am in Scotland. The price for transportation came in at £430 at first, but then companies started bidding AGAINST each other for my business! I eventually got the car transported for £142!!!! There was a bit of hassle as the company had multiple failed attempts due to their tranpsorter breaking down, but after a few weeks I got the call that they were picking it up and would be delivering it to me the next day, which they did.

Its an awesome car which needs a lot of work, but its the perfect car I was looking for, the seller was a lovely lady who just wants to see it back on the road, and the total cost including transportation and the charity donation (which I made before I got the car) came in at under the amount I had saved, I COULDNT BELIEVE MY LUCK.

So it just goes to show you, the method I have detailed DOES WORK as I had the money saved for this car, and the car itself was free as I got it off the forum.

Dream big folks, you too can have your dream car, here is mine arriving on my driveway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHsjVpWJipo

Free Car Savings update No 10

So I am back up to pre emptying the fund levels, it never seems to take me too long to get to this point, but progress slows after here. Anyways, the new total is:

£236.60

A respectable amount, and there is a sisley selling on ebay today with a starting bid of £225 and noone has bid on it. Why? Because it honestly must be the rustiest panda never mind sisley I have ever seen. Not that thats a bad thing necessarily, but I am not looking for a project.

But progress is progress! Any comments? Inspiration? Tips? Let me know!

free car savings update number 9

So as some of you could probably have predicted I emptied my savings fund entirely about 2 days after the last update. This was to fund another of my many projects, building my shed.

 But failure is a part of life, and how you react to failure defines you, so I am picking myself up, dusting myself down and getting straight back on the horse. I've also decided to stop counting funds until they are actually liquid, so the total is now as follows (I am hussling hard)

Total: £64.47

I am gutted as this week a PERFECT Sisley came up on everyone's favourite auction site, and it went to someone I know on fiat forum. Fair play to him I hold no grudges, it was my own fault for not having the funds to hand. But the next time a perfect example (for my tastes) comes up I won't be stopped.

So are any of you taking the challenge with me? How are you doing? Comments below folks!

Free car savings update no 8

Beginning to seriously lose motivation here, unexpected costs have made me think even more about using the 4 x 4 savings money to get on with other projects in the short term. Hmm, time for some motivational numbers methinks!

Nectar Points-£11.82
Quidco-£2.39
Adsense-£3.90
Paid Survey Sites-£57.95
Coin Jar-£82.09
Side Hustle Savings-£62.06

Total-£220.21
Liquid Total-£158.36

Liquid Total jump of £1 not great, and £4 in Total. Hmm, this isnt making me feel much better unfortunetly!

Free car savings update no 7

GOT TO STAY MOTIVATED!!!

Cue the rocky theme music, today for the first time since I started I hit a mental road block "Hey, why bother? This is too hard!" WRONG I can do this, so I promptly went onto the fiat forum to read more about Sisleys, there is a brilliant example of one selling right now, I want it so badly but the timing isnt right. GOT.TO.STAY.MOTIVATED my views on youtube have finally started to climb again, so thinking up some more ideas more videos. In the meantime here is this weeks tale of the tape:

Nectar Points-£10.83
Quidco-£2.39
Adsense-£3.90
Paid Survey sites-£54.95
Coin Jar-£82.07
Side Hustle Savings-£62.06

Total-£216.20
Liquid Total-£157.35

So a jump in liquid total (which I find myself being more and more interested in) of about a fiver. No great shakes there then, but its good progress, so I am gonna keep making it.

Keep Hustlin.

Free car savings update no 6

Lets get straight to it, whats the tale of the tape today??

Nectar Points-£10.23 <<<rocking the taking the free boxes and getting bonus points for using own bags!
Quidco-£1.45
Adsense-£3.90 <<<Finally moved up a little!!
Paid Survey Sites-£49.50
Coin Jar-£79.02
Side Hustle Savings-£62.06

Total-£206.16
Liquid Total-£152.76

So a decent little jump, starting to pick up some momentum now, and reached another £100 milestone :) Thats cause for celebration I reckon :)

See ya next time, but till then look at the underside of the panda and celebrate with me as I have my second MOT in a row with no advisories! :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFolYphlyak

Free Car Savings update No 5

Just look at this bad boy! 1 whole litre of 4 x 4 power. As I have talked about before on this financial blog (which is fast becoming the FREE CAR savings blog!!!) you have to stay motivated when trying to reach a goal. One technique for me is to look at photos and imagine the goal (whatever it may be, not just for free vehicles) so I am currently using the above picture for inspiration. Anyways I digress, lets get some numbers jumping!!

Nectar points-£9.65
Quidco-£1.45
Adsense-£2.59 <<<<Will this ever move????
Paid Survey sites-£40.65
Coin Jar-£78.28 <<<Most of this will be moving to the side hustles column, Its just "resting" there right now!
Side Hustle Savings-£62.02

Total-£194.64
Liquid Total-£151.40

DAMN SON! A cold hard update of £83.07!!! Once again though its not all sunshine, the liquidity of some of these categories is slightly annoying me. Quidco has reached the payout threshold (anything over £1) but Adsense threshold is £60, so a long way to go with that (my youtube views have dropped dramatically and none of my attempts to kick start them again have worked so far) and my Paid survey sites will pay out roughly about £120 as these are actually 3 combined sites which have payout thresholds of £40 each, and they all seem to be moving along at roughly the same rate. So actually liquid total is not as good, only £151.40, which is still pretty good (my side hustles are moving along tidily) at the end of the day. The timescale I am doing this in is probably a minimum of a year, so plenty of time for those categories to become liquid. And a year is not long to wait for a free car really!

So a mixed bag of results, but most definatly on the up and up :) Stay tuned!

Free Car Savings Update no 4

Not a lot of change this time, but here goes:

Nectar Points- £8.47
Quidco- £1.04
Adsense- £2.59
Onepoll-£34.45
Coin Jar- £7.60
Side Hustle Savings- £57.42

Total- £111.57

Getting there, nearly a month since I started this, hopefully I can get my youtube earnings up as they really aren't where they should be considering I got £545 in December :/

Cheers budgetlifers

Free Car savings update no 3

Nectar points: £8.09 (+£0.69)
Quidco:£1.04(No change)
Adsense:£2.59(No change)
Onepoll:£27.70(+£8.40)
Coin Jar:£7.14(+£4.21)
Side Hustle Savings:£57.42(+£57.42)
Total=£103.98(+£70.72)

Analysis
I couldn't be happier with how this is going, I am updating this on a roughly weekly basis and it looks like my side hustling is starting to pay off! Though I really want to emphasise that my onepoll account is not liquid yet. But the rest is, so not too shabby!

So I am £103.98 closer to buying that FREE CAR! I should stress that I have only changed a few lifestyle habits to do this, I am not doing anything special. Just buying things from ebay that I would normally buy in a shop anyway, and as my regular readers will know I do not spend needlessly. I am happy with this update so far, lets see what the next few weeks bring! Next target should really be £200 :)

Yourbudgetoryourlife folks ;)

Free Car savings update number 2

So here is my second update!

Nectar points: £7.40 (+£1.61)
Quidco:£1.04(No change)
Adsense:£2.59(No change)
Onepoll:£19.30(+£14.55)
Coin Jar:£2.93(New Category)
Side Hustle Savings:£0.00(New Category)

Total=£33.26(+£19.09)

Analysis
So this month I've switched up my strategy a bit, and added my coin jar and my side hustle savings, and as you can see I recently "cashed out" on these too, so it feels good that I started from nothing with this.

The second thing I want to say is that some of these funds are not "Liquid" yet, which basically means I can't withdraw some of these at the moment, mostly because these things have payout thresholds. I have added my three Onepoll accounts together for the purposes of simplicity, the payout on these is £40, but they are roughly all at the same level and so should payout at roughly the same time, which will be £120!! My adsense payout threshold is £60, and I have quite a way to go with that, but you know me, I will keep hustling! The part I am most excited about is the change in the total, its an add of £19.09, which is more than a 100% rise!! I am excited to see how far this goes, see you for the next update!

Free Car saving plan update 1

I plan to update this every month with where I am with my savings:

Nectar points: £5.79
Quidco: £1.04
Adsense: £2.59
Onepoll: £4.75

Total=£14.17

Not bad considering I "cashed out" all of these recently, but this is as good a place to start as any!

I will also be talking soon about my nectar points more, so stay tuned!

My mad plan to buy a car using ONLY side hustles and NECTAR POINTS! FREE CAR BOOM!

So this week I came up with a brand new plan. As you may or may not know I do paid surveys online,use cashback sites and monetize my videos on youtube, and collect nectar points.

If you don't know already, Ebay allows you to use your nectar card on it, for collecting points on anything you buy there, and you can use points to buy things from ebay, with the only stipulation being that at least £10 of the purchase is paid out of your own money. So I am saving my nectar points, and using nectaradpoints to save nectar points, and saving the money from my cashback, paid surveys and youtube earnings to pay for my next car, which I have decided will be a classic Fiat Panda 4 x 4, (cos one panda is never enough!) these go on ebay for anything between £500 and £4000, but I don't mind having to restore it to working condition. in fact, I'm sure that would add to the enjoyment!

I am a bit surprised that I havent seen any other financial bloggers blogging about this yet! Just remember folks, you saw it here first ;)

Constantly improving your budget

My budget is constantly improving, is yours?
 
A budget is like a human being in many ways, constantly growing, learning, improving, making mistakes, refining and changing. Today after discussion with a workmate I have decided that instead of using my leftover money after savings and bills to do "whatever I want with" I am creating 5 new online saver accounts! This is separating out my life goals, and making things easier if something does go wrong. The new account names are: 1-Second car savings fund 2-New York City trip fund 3-Car repairs buffer 4-House repairs buffer 5-Germany/Italy trip savings fund. The added bonus is that because they are online savers, there is a small amount of interest paid!
 
Furthermore, I have decided to give myself a "Personal allowance" of £10 per week to spend on whatever I want. For me, this is the perfect solution to the guilt I feel when spending needlessly, and the sadness I feel when I am too strict with my money, as I have talked about before, you have to budget in fun! Its just that I was previously budgeting in more fun than I was financially comfortable with. And at the end of the month if there is anything left the money will be split equally between all 5 of those savings accounts.
 
I do a lot of "side hustling" and any of the money I get will be split equally between "extra treats" to make the extra work worth it, and the other half will be distributed between the 5 accounts to make it do something worthwhile for me!
 
The last of my new guidelines is that I am going to use my nectar points to pay towards my second car when the time comes! Just dont tell my wife though ;) now that nectar points can be earned on ebay, AND used on it too, there is theoretically nothing stopping me buying a car with points earned on my grocery shopping!
 
I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders, I am much happier about my situation!
 
Can you take a long hard look at your budget and try to improve? Let us all know any tips!