the richest man in atherstone

I have long been an admirer of cashback websites such as Cashbin, TopCashBack and LineMyPocket - I find them to be a nice easy way of earning a little extra fun money (take a look at my article on Quidco gambling).

In a nutshell, these websites can save you money by giving you a certain amount of cashback when you buy from certain shops (usually a percentage of how much you spend). This can be very useful in itself, however it is possible to earn more cashback than you spend - for example, when joining bookmakers or bingo websites you may be offered £20 to put just £10 on a bet. And there's also the option of earning cashback without actually parting with so much as a penny - by applying (and being accepted) for credit cards.

At the start of the year, I set myself the goal of earning £100 in cashback by applying for as many credit cards as I could in one evening. I made the decision to do it all in one evening to ensure I was accepted for as many credit cards as possible. This is because every time you apply for a credit card, your credit rating is checked and every time your checked, it is logged in your credit rating. If a lot of checks are recorded, it adversely affects your chance of getting credit, so my thinking was that if I applied for them all at around the same time, my credit rating would not have been updated therefore giving me more chance of being accepted by the credit card companies.

I should add that one of the downsides of this project is that I have screwed up my credit rating for a while but as I don't really need credit at the moment and don't envisage I will in the near future, it wasn't really a big deal.

Anyhow, I found the following credit cards that offered a nice amount of cash for simply filling in a form:

• Goldfish - £41
• Post Office - £20.50
• Natwest - £24
• RBS - £24
• HSBC - £20
• GM Card - £22
• Vanquis - £20

The plan in place, I spent an hour and a half on the cold, winter evening of the 14th of January applying for the credit cards online (via cashback websites, of course). Goldfish and GM refused my applications, however I was accepted for the remaining five.

Over the next ten days or so, I received the paperwork and cards from the five credit card companies that had accepted me and phoned to activate each one - it took about 20 minutes. I'm not sure if the credit cards had to be activated to receive the cashback but I thought I'd be best to do it anyway to make sure.

I also checked that my applications had been tracked by the cashback websites and was happy to see that I would be receiving payment for all of them.

Well, here we are in July and I've finally received my final cashback payments and achieved my target of £100 (actually, I earned £108.50). HSBC and Vanquis were the first to pay up in March, followed by NatWest in June and The Post Office and RBS in July.

It's been a nice little earner (over £50 per hour for exceedingly easy work) and I've earned enough to take the family out for a few "free" meals. However, it's not something that can be repeated as I can only receive cashback from a particular company for a particular product once. As I said earlier, chances are that my credit rating is screwed for a while but as I don't need credit I'm not particularly bothered. It's also quite a slow process waiting for the merchant to pay the cashback website and the cashback website to pay me but as it didn't cost me anything, I was more than happy to wait.

Now, I just need to call up the credit companies to cancel those cards...