the richest man in atherstone

I've been actively taking an interest in my finances for over two years now and it looks as though some of this "money awareness" has rubbed off on the missus.

My wonderful wife informed me at the weekend that she'd applied for something called a Sure Start Maternity Grant and her application had been accepted netting us £500 of free money from the government.

The SureStart Grant claims to be for low-income families that have had a baby to help with the initial cost of looking after the child. Now, I don't believe that we're a low-income family (we have a combined salary of a little over £30'000 a year) so we think that we were probably given the cash because it is our third kid - working family and child tax credits seem to have gone up by a lot more for our third child than it did for our second!

My wife was initially informed of the Sure Start Grant by one of the other 'mums' at the school before checking it out on the Directgov website. Eligibility was quite difficult to understand so she just printed off the form, filled it in and sent it off thinking the worst that can happen is they'll say 'no'.

Lo and behold, a week or so later we got a letter telling us that the application had been approved and yesterday she got £500 paid into her bank account.

Personally, I'd never heard of the Sure Start Grant before my wife mentioned it, so I suspect there's a lot of other people out there in Internet Land that haven't either. If you've just had a baby (or if you're expecting one) it might be worth checking out the Sure Start Grant to see if your eligible for the free money.

Needless to say, I'm very proud of the wife