STUDENT Alesha Gallagher was struggling to save cash around her full-time education, but now she’s earned £500 by nipping to the supermarket for her family with a “super easy” tool.
The 19-year-old, from Oldham in Greater Manchester, keeps on top of the food shopping for her family as her mum works long hours and doesn’t have time to go.
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Alesha is resitting two A-levels at Crompton House Sixth Form with the hopes of going to university next year, so she has to weave in earning extra cash around her studies.
The savvy saver regularly sells second-hand items on Vinted and picks up odd jobs to save cash up on the side.
That means she has to juggle doing jobs for her family like keeping on top of the food shopping on top of studying and making money.
But after discovering a simple tool, she’s turned the household chore into a side hustle.
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Alesha has raked in £500 this year just by doing her family food shop by buying gift cards from a cashback app.
Alesha discovered the app Cheddar last January through an advert on Facebook and decided to sign up, as it said she could earn cash back in just minutes while shopping.
She was sceptical at first and didn’t really use it for the first few months after downloading it, as she’d seen dozens of similar adverts before that hadn’t worked.
But last November, the app notified her it had added gift cards that users could spend at their favourite shops, and they’d get cash back for doing so.
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Alesha found she could buy gift cards to spend at Tesco, where she does her family shop, and each time she uses a gift card to pay she earns between 2% and 4.5% back in cash.
“I usually earn about 2.5% in cashback, but sometimes there are bonuses so I earn 4.5% back instead, it’s super easy,” Alesha explained.
“What I love is that I can just earn the cash back while doing the food shopping, which I was doing anyway, and I get to keep it.”
Alesha is now saving around £500 a year just through cash back from her weekly food shop, but she also uses the app if she spends at other stores.
“I also get vouchers for shops like Primark which I use if I ever want to spend there – if I was going to buy something anyway it’s like free money,” she said.
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How does Cheddar work?
Cheddar is a cashback app where users can get cashback while shopping at partnered shops automatically by linking their bank account to the app.
For example, Cheddar says users could get 4% cashback by booking a trip on Trainline or 10% back on orders at café Joe and the Juice.
Users can also earn “instant cashback” by purchasing gift card credit to spend at certain stores, and the cashback tends to be greater value.
This feature was added to the app in November and is how Alesha generates most of her income.
Using gift cards works the same as automatic cashback except users can access the cash instantly, whereas cashback from regular spending is subject to a “pending” period of several days.
Shoppers can earn up to 6% cashback by spending at supermarkets including Tesco, Morrisons, Asda, Sainsbury’s, M&S, Iceland and Waitrose, according to Cheddar.
While the gift cards are bought through Cheddar, they are issued by the stores, so even if something happened to Cheddar they would continue to be valid unless the individual stores went bust.
If a retailer goes bust and you have a gift card, you become a creditor in the company and may get your money back from its administration.
What other ways can I earn cashback?
There are several apps and browser add-ons that allow you to earn cashback while shopping.
TopCashBack, for example, says its 18million users typically save hundreds of pounds a year each by shopping through its app.
You can check whether the retailer you want to shop at is partnered with the app, and if it is, just click the link inside the app.
Anything you then spend will generate cashback to your TopCashBack account.
Rival cashback app Quidco works in a similar way, but each app has its own exclusive offers and may be partnered with different stores.
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It’s worth signing up to several so you can check which has the best cashback offer before you spend.
Money saving challenges
Here’s some of our favourite money saving challenges to h
Here’s a rundown of some of the most popular schemes:
- Weather saving challenge – Save the amount equal to whatever the highest temperature was that week. £1 = 1C.
- 1p challenge – save 1p a day for everyday of the year, but it increase the amount by 1p each day. So day one you save 1p, 2p on day two and 3p on day three. When you reach 100 days you start adding a £1 coin each day too, while this increases to a £2 coin each day plus pennies at 200 days, and £3 each day on top of pennies at day 300.
- 20p a day challenge – Start by putting 20p in savings, then increase the amount by 20p every day. For example, the first week will look like this: 20p, 40p, 60p, 80p, £1, £1.20, £1.40.
- £5 a week challenge – Like the 20p challenge, put aside £5 a week and increase it by a fiver each week. Eg £5, £10, £15, £20
- Round-up challenge – Every time you buy something, round up the purchase to the nearest £1 and put the difference in a savings account. Eg. You pay £2.60, so you put 40p in savings. You can use an app such as Monzo or Starling to do this.
- Bingo challenge – Here you have a bingo card with different numbers on it and you tick them off when you’ve put that amount in your savings account. It can be ad hoc but you have to tick them all off by the end of the month.
- Monday to Sunday challenge – With this challenge, you simply save £1 on Monday, £2 on Tuesday and so on until the weekend where you don’t save on Saturday or Sunday.
- 365 day challenge – Every Sunday you put aside £1, followed by £2 on Monday, £3 on Wednesday and so on. On Saturday you’ll put away £7, and then the process repeats and you’ll put aside £1 on Sunday as the new week begins.
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