the richest man in atherstone

This article is now deprecated as the offers contained herein are no longer available. However, the same method can be used with other offers, so it is still worth a read. HINT: Take a look at the Post Office Credit Card.

Today, I'm going to share with you a quick and easy method of Doubling £15 to over £30 in just 30 minutes. This method, however, has the potential to earn you a lot more (hundreds of pounds) in the same amount of time.

All you need is a credit card, an email address and a little time to spare - oh, and because my journal has an international appeal, I must point out that you also need to be a resident of the UK.

The method involves simply signing up to a cashback website and playing a bit of bingo. It's remarkably easy to do but I'll walk you through the whole process and I know that it works because I've done it myself!

What are Cashback Websites?
Companies are always looking for new customers, so sometimes they will offer third parties a set sum of money to point new punters to them. If the consumer makes a purchase, the third party is paid. Cashback websites play the part of the third party, but instead of keeping all the money for themselves, they share some of it with the consumer.

Join The Cashback Website
First things first, click on this link to sign up with the cashback website. In the fields on the right-hand side of the homepage, fill in your email, first name, surname, username and password. Read the terms and conditions, tick the corresponding checkbox then click the 'Join Now' button.

Congratulations! You've just earned £2.50 simply for joining up. Unfortunately, you need at least £25 to get your cash out of the account, so you need to take advantages of some of their offers to pump up your balance.

Bingo Cafe
The first offer to take up is the one from Bingo Cafe. In the 'Search for' box at the top of the cashback website, type in 'Bingo Cafe' and click the 'Go' button. You will see from the Bingo Cafe company information that they are offering £20 when you deposit and play through £10 or more in their online bingo rooms.

Click on the 'Visit Bingo Cafe' link and you will be taken to the Bingo Cafe website. Here, click the big 'Download Games' button. The Bingo Cafe software will then be downloaded to your computer. Once downloaded, you'll need to install it on your computer and double-click on the 'Bingo Cafe' icon to run it. Next, fill in your details and login to Bingo Cafe. Click on the 'Bank' button followed by the 'Purchase' button and deposit £10 in your account.

Then enter one of the bingo rooms and play bingo until you have spent the £10 you deposited. At this point you have fulfilled the requirements needed to get £20 from the cashback website. If you're lucky, you might even win at Bingo, in which case click on the 'Bank' button again followed by the 'Withdraw' button to get collect your winnings.

At the time of writing Bingo Cafe are also offering a 100% matched bonus, which means that when you deposit your £10, they will give you a further £10 to play Bingo with.

If you need help using the Bingo Cafe software, take a look at their useful 'How to Play' guide and FAQ.

Back to the Cashback Website
Having finished your first stint of bingo, close the Bingo Cafe software and go back to the cashback website. You'll now have £22.50 in your account (note it takes a day or two to update so don't worry if it's not showing up yet) but you need a minimum of £25 before they will post the cheque so it's time for another game of Bingo to fulfil this requirement.

However, before doing this you will need to give the cashback website some more details so they know where to post the cheque! Click on the 'My Account' link (on the left-hand side under 'My Info') followed by the 'Update Account Profile' link. Then fill in your personal details and click the 'Submit' button.

Now, type 'gala' into the 'Search for' box and click the 'Go' button. Gala Bingo should be shown in the results and by looking at the text, you'll see that they are offering £10 cashback when you deposit and play through £5. Not as lucrative as Bingo Cafe but a nice little earner and enough to get your cashback balance over £25. Click on the 'Visit Gala Bingo' link and you will be taken to the Gala Bingo website.

Gala Bingo
You don't need to download any software to play Gala Bingo. Simply join up and deposit £5 into your account. Then click the 'Play Bingo Now' button and play through your £5 to earn your cashback. At the present time Gala are also giving an extra £5 to new customers, which is added to your account after you've spent your first £5, giving you extra chances to win. If you do win at Gala, Congratulations! The prizes are all pretty good there, so cash in your winnings. If you don't win at Bingo, don't worry because you've still made a profit.

What Now?
You'll now have £32.50 in your cashback account - £20 from BingoCafe, £10 from Gala and £2.50 for joining up. As I said before, don't worry if it hasn't shown up yet because it can take a day or two to update.

You've spent £15 (£10 on Bingo Cafe and £5 on Gala) so you've made a profit of £17.50, more than doubling your money in half an hour. In a month or two, the cashback website will post out your cheque and you can do whatever you want with the free money.

If you were lucky enough to win at Bingo, then you've probably made even bigger profits.

It is worth taking a look through the other offers on the cashback website to bump up your profits even more. There are plenty more Bingo offers to try as well as cashback offers from a wide range retailers.

The important thing is to not deposit any more cash on the gambling websites after you've played through the initial requirement to get the cashback. The odds are stacked against you so once you've got your cashback, move on to the next deal and retain your profit.

This is a neat little way to earn a bit of extra spending cash so be sure to have fun and Good Luck.

Legal Disclaimer: Because this method involves third-party websites that are subject to change, I cannot guarantee that everything will work as stated and disclaim all inaccuracies in this post. See my Website Disclaimer for full details.

Earlier today, I was looking back at the origins of my journal and I discovered this post. Written just over two years ago, it describes my financial situation before I started my quest to achieve financial security.

Back then I had £4607.69 to my name (discounting my house and mortgage) from ten years of labour. Actually, this would have been more like £3'500 due to the fact I'd just been paid and the following months expenses would take a big chunk of that cash. I didn't have a clue when it came to my finances and up until then I didn't care much either.

Looking over this post, I had the opportunity to reflect upon the previous two years of my life and how far I had come in that time.

My assets (excluding house and mortgage) now stand at £9'700 - more than double what I had two years ago - and should reach over £11'000 by the end of the year.

This achievement, has come primarily by following Clason's primary tenet in his book 'The Richest Man in Babylon' - namely saving at least 10% of my income. Of course, his other principles have gone a long way to maximising my profits - finding good investments, safeguarding capital and increasing income to name but a few.

I originally created this website to document my progress as I devoted five years of my financial life according to the rules set down in Clason's fables and now I am approaching the half-way point I can look back at the last couple of years with pride.

These days I am a lot more financially-savvy. I enjoy looking after my money and still get a buzz when I see interest deposited in my accounts or earn a little extra income from an idea I've had. Granted, the nine-and-a-half grand I have accumulated is not a lot - I think I'd struggle to survive longer than six months with that - but the knowledge I've accumulated along this path is priceless.

I feel I have a sound foundation to support me as I move on to bigger and better things. The next phase is to create an income for myself and my family without relying on a job. Not a few quid extra spending money but a proper income from multiple streams that will not reduce our standing of living. This phase is imminent.

The birth of our third child has made my 9 to 5 job incompatible with my life. Despite a good remuneration, I am no longer enjoying my full-time job and am frustrated by the inflexibility of the hours. I frequently find that I don't have as much time as I'd like with my wife and each of my children. I can't be the father and husband I want to be and so something more flexible is now a necessity. The only way I can choose my own hours is to work for myself.

So that is what I am going to do.

Towards the end of last year, I happened upon a webpage describing an income-generation technique called The Bum Marketing Method - so-called because, in theory, a 'bum' could be taken off the streets, taught the method and start earning cash.

Basically, the strategy involves writing articles that contain your own unique links to affiliate products/services and posting them on article websites. When people search the web, they find your article, hopefully click on your link and make a purchase from which you earn a cut of the profits.

I found the method quite interesting and was curious as to whether it would work or not, so I decided to give it a try. What follows is my review of the Bum Marketing Method.

What I did...
The first thing I did was sign up for a free ClickBank Affiliate Account. ClickBank is a marketplace for affiliates and publishers of digital information products (software and e-books) to get together. Affiliates can search through loads of products to find something that they want to market. When the affiliate has found a product, they can create a unique link that is used by ClickBank to ensure that the affiliate gets their share of the profits when something has sold.

I found an e-book about Ragdoll Cats and wrote a couple of articles about them using information freely available on the web. I used the Overture Keyword Tool tool to find commonly searched phrases in this niche and scattered them around the articles.

I also wrote articles for a PlayStation 2 Repair e-book, PDF Writer software (2 products in 1 article) and a flower pressing e-book using the same method. The latter, I also knocked up a quick website for.

These are the articles:

• Ragdoll Cats 1
• Ragdoll Cats 2
• PS2 Repair
• Flower Pressing
• PDF Writing

And all articles were submitted to the following article websites that were either recommended in the strategy or found via Google:

• Article Dashboard
• Go Articles
• SearchWarp
• Amazines
• Article Alley
• Idea Marketers

I also created some Squidoo lenses about the particular subjects:

• PS2 Repair Lens
• Ragdoll Cat Lens
• PDF Software Lens
• Flower Pressing Lens

To speed up indexing by search engines, I also put links to them on this website (at the bottom of the right sidebar). Search Spiders come here every day, so they would discover my new pages by following the links.

Finally, I wrote a quick web script to log all the hits I got.

It took about 15 hours in all to get all this done.

The Results
A few months later and I have sold 2 copies of the flower pressing ebook and one copy of the ragdoll cats ebook, earning me around $46 (£23).

Altogether I have got 1350 hits through my affiliate links, so that's a sale every 450 hits - or to look at it another way, an average of 17p per hit. I put in around 15 hours work and got back around £1.50 an hour.

The lions share of the clicks came from SearchWarp and Squidoo and the product that achieved the most clicks was the PS2 repair Guide, despite not making a sale!

Unfortunately, I haven't got my hands on the cash yet because Clickbank won't release earnings for new accounts until at least 5 different purchases have been made. I am reliably informed by multiple sources, however, that Clickbank is a reputable company and does pay out without hassle once this requirement has been met.

Conclusions
Some might say that the Bum Marketing Method is not worth the effort as it only earned me £1.50 per hour - way below minimum wage. Based on this experiment, I'd have to agree however it's worth noting that I only marketed a small sample of 5 products. The method does recommend writing 90 articles (one per day for 3 months).

Looking at the results of the experiment, I certainly can't justify writing that many articles so I don't plan on using this method in the near future. I imagine that the more I did it, the more I would learn and subsequently the more I would earn, but at this point in my life I don't really have the time to do this. But I do think it may be a worthwhile activity at times when there is nothing more lucrative to do. It would only take the right article for the right product being in the right place and it could mean a nice little earner!

Despite the inadequate earnings, this experiment has taught me a lot. I can now quickly write articles on subjects I know very little about and understand a lot more about marketing on the Internet. I have also learned a great deal about Search Engine Optimisation and the use of keywords/key phrases. This knowledge is worth far more than any money I could have made.

UPDATE: 11/10/2007
Hooray! I finally made enough credit card sales to release my cash!

I've not done any more Bum Marketing since I wrote this article but it's been ticking along nicely on it's own. I should be getting a check for $80 sometime this month.

Here's a screenshot of my Clickbank account (it's not as fancy as those you see on other websites).

NOTE: Ignore the $2.95 sale - that wasn't from Bum Marketing

Cashback Credit Cards are one of the best things I have discovered since taking control of my finances. Basically, the credit card company pays me for using the card. I earned almost £100 last year of free money by using my cashback credit card for purchases.

Of course, I have to make sure I pay off the balance each month or they start charging me instead of paying me.

I currently own two credit cards; a Morgan Stanley Platinum Card which gives me between 0.5% and 1% cashback, and a GE Money Everyday Card (now withdrawn) which gives me 3% cashback for petrol and groceries and 0.5% on everything else.

Thanks to the excellent newsletter from money saving expert, Martin Lewis I have discovered that Capital One are now offering a Credit Card that pays an excellent 4% cashback - although only for the first 3 months - and a very respectable 1% thereafter.

This looks like a fantastic deal, so I applied for the card over the Internet and received a formal offer a few days later. I have signed the agreement and posted it off and now eagerly await my new credit card. It is perfect timing as well because I have a few large purchases to make over the next month or two.

I've been doing a little marketing for my journal over the last few days and one of the things I did was create a Squidoo Lens about 'The Richest Man in Atherstone'.

Squidoo gives individuals the opportunity to create their own webpage about a particular topic of interest. It also gives them a chance to earn money for themselves or for charity from the pages they create.

I've recently discovered that a presence on Squidoo can aid search engine rankings and, of course, it's another 'doorway' for people to discover my website so I'm looking forward to seeing how big an effect creating my Squidoo Lens will have.

Having settled into our new home and got used to our new mortgage, we've decided to make a concerted effort to overpay our mortgage to reduce the overall amount of interest we pay and reduce the term.

Ideally, we would like to pay it off as soon as possible, but doing this also gives us a bit of a cushion should we fall upon hard times - overpaying now will give us the option to take payment holidays in the future.

We chose a mortgage with ING Direct because it has a decent variable interest rate (5.8% at present) and gives us the flexibility to make overpayments as and when we want. It also has no upfront fees (the valuation fee was returned upon completion) and no leaving fees. The lack of redemption penalties was important for us in case ING Direct suddenly made their Standard Variable Rate uncompetitive once they had their quota of customers like they did with their savings account. It would seem inertia is a good money-maker for banks!

When we moved house a couple of months ago, our mortgage was £64'950. This month we paid off an additional £1000 of the loan with cash left over from the money we put aside for moving expenses - I find it's always best to over-budget.

On top of that, two monthly repayments of just over £400 have reduced the debt to £63'741.

After a little bit of jiggling with our accounts, we have budgeted a further £150 per month of mortgage overpayments for the rest of the year. This should reduce the capital by around a further £1000 by Xmas.

(By the way, I used my MORTGAGE CALCULATOR to help with the calculations. As well as working out your monthly payments and showing a complete amortised schedule, it will also show the effects of making overpayments to your mortgage - and best of all, it's free to use.)

Whilst I was playing with the figures, I got to thinking about how the interest rates on my savings compare with the interest rates on my mortgage. I then realised that unless my savings and investments interest rates can at least equal my mortgage interest rates, the money would be better spent on my mortgage because the interest earned would be less than interest spent. This is something I've never considered before and puts forward a good argument for putting more money into my mortgage.

Well, that's something to think about some more and discuss another day...