clubs and hacks

Clubs and hacking but we’re not talking about my golf game for once!

 

Important update August 2016 – Unfortunately this hack does not work anymore as Topcashback & Tesco have removed the option to withdraw your cashback as Club card points. Which is a big shame! However Topcashback still remains a great website to get some of your money back on your purchases and even frugal spenders should be able to get at least £100 a year out of it. I’ll leave the article up just for reference as it hopefully gives people good ideas of where to look for other decent life hacks.

 

If you read around any group of personal finance blogs you will no doubt come across one sooner or later that is based in the US crooning over how they just got $3,000 worth of flights and 8 nights in a hotel for free. (Sorry DoneBy40! I’m not jealous… much! 🙂 )

Unfortunately the situation in the UK for travel hacking is rather limited (but I would love to be proved wrong if anyone knows something I don’t?) so we have to take any scraps of financial hacks we can get our hands on! It was for this reason I was pretty impressed with myself for discovering this Tesco Club card “hack” – it’s so simple you could argue it’s not really even a hack, but it is thoroughly effective that’s for sure.

clubcard hack ingredients

To perform the clubcard hack you will need…

  1. A Tesco Clubcard
  2. A TopCashback account (affiliate link 1) – If you sign up through this link you will get £5 worth of clubcard vouchers to get you going with the hack 😉

Maybe this did not need saying but I thought I’d be complete in my instructions. Onto the method…

 

clubcard hack method

  1. Once you have both accounts in place you need to start earning some cashback in your TopCashback account! Or if you already have one, then you can move straight onto step 2 if you want. Just remember to check TopCashback before you make any online purchase to see if cashback is offered. I would say 90% of the time it will be! See below for some easy cashback opportunities to build this up as quickly as possible
  2. Once you have a decent amount of cashback in your account (anything over £20 should be fine but it is optimum to wait till you have £50 if you can!) you then go to the Account section:TopCashback Tesco Clubcard Hacking
  3. Then Payout:TopCashback Tesco Clubcard Hacking
  4. Then scroll down to the Tesco Clubcard option and click See Info:TopCashback Tesco Clubcard Hacking
  5. Then on the next page you can enter your Clubcard details
  6. TopCashback Tesco Clubcard Hacking You can then withdraw up to £50 worth of vouchers into your account! They give you an extra 5% boost so you will receive £52.50 worth of vouchers – actually £57.50 including the sign up bonus (affiliate link)!
  7. Wait until the vouchers hit your account and then we’re onto the final part of the hack…

 

here’s the kicker

I’m sure anyone who owns a Tesco Clubcard (which is basically everyone) can see where I am going with this already but once you have your vouchers you can then change them up to quadruple up the value on all sorts of things! This can pay for a day out with the kids or a date night with the missus at a nice local restaurant 2

This turns your £57.50 into a nice wad of £230 worth of vouchers which if used wisely will go a long way.

If you have a significant love muffin then you can obviously double your vouchers and get £460 of quadrupled up loveliness!

By my calculations with an average cashback of 5% on purchases that is £460 back on a spend of only £2000, so you don’t have to be spending like a Kardashian wannabe to hit that figure, I am sure online purchases for even the most extreme savers out there would hit that after one year between a couple.

This works out as an effective cashback rate on purchases of 23%, not too shabby eh, squire!?

 

good items to get cashback on

You can supercharge your TopCashback account with purchases you’d normally have to make anyway such as:

  • House insurance
  • Car insurance
  • Holiday insurance
  • Any household items, furniture, DIY stuff, Tools etc…
  • Pretty much anything really. Always check before buying online!

You can also get some extra sneaky cashback by:

  • Check out the free cashback option in the top right hand side of the menu bar
  • Opening an account with Ladbrokes or William Hill sports betting account, putting a bet on a sure fire win (low odds such as 1/20 or 1.05 – if you don’t understand what this means it’s probably best left alone 3) and then withdrawing your money straight away – gets you £20 cashback for each

I am sure there are some other great ways to get cashback that I haven’t thought of yet, if you know of any let us know in the comments.

🙂

 

Do you use topcashback? Do you know of any other decent hacks to boost your cashback payouts? Let us know!

Notes:

  1. This page contains affiliate links, each one is brought to your attention with the cryptic denotation ‘(affiliate link)’. You know what one of those is right!? No…!?! OK well it’s fairly basic… If you click on, sign up through or buy anything via these links I may receive a small fee, which will help to support theFIREstarter blog. The key thing is that it will not cost you anything extra to use these links, although don’t go clicking on them willy nilly just because it may help me! If you think you will find the product/service useful and do click through, then a sincere “thank you” for your support.
  2. That you we’re already planning on doing of course! We don’t want to fall into the increase your consumption just because you got something for “free” paradox do we now? 😉
  3. There is also the chance you could lose the bet of course! DYOR etc…!!!