We’ve found some great deals on printers, phones and other electricals from Currys. The electrical giant seems to be having an almost permanent sale just now. Again, you don’t need a code for these ones … they are just fantastic price cuts. A random selection brings up £100 off the Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop; 50% off the Hoover Freespace Cylinder Vacuum Cleaner, and £10 off the Lexmark Z1380 Inkjet Printer - which is now an astonishing £19.99 …. a great budget printer for the home office.

Related: www.currys.co.uk

Tags: Currys, electricals, sale, savings, personal finance advice

The DIY and home improvement stores are feeling the pinch. With fewer of us moving, fewer of us are fitting new bathrooms. Their hopes that we’d stay put and invest in our homes are looking very optimistic with most Britons stubbornly refusing to spend. Bathroom Heaven have taken an admirably aggressive approach with its Summer Madness sale. You’ll find reductions of up to 80% on mirrors, cabinets, bathroom lighting, wet room screens and much more. And we’re talking everything from pocket change basics to top of the range bathroom fittings costing thousands. Well worth a look at www.bathroomheaven.com, and no voucher code required.

Related: www.bathroomheaven.com

Tags: Bathroom Heaven, discounts, sale, savings, finance tips

Free iPod touch from Orange: Blink and you’ll miss this deal. UK Orange mobile phone network Orange is offering a free iPod touch player when you sign up for a £35+ mobile contract on selected handsets only from orange.co.uk.

This deal is only valid Monday 18th August until Thursday 21st August, so you’ll have to get in quick. For more on this free iPod touch from Orange, go to the Orange website.

Tags: iPod touch

Related posts: Voucher codes archive 

No, you don’t have to assemble them yourself … in fact you can even keep your old number. In the spirit of doing everything cheaper than the competition, furniture giant IKEA this week begins its Family Mobile pay-as-you-go package, which promises to be 25 per cent cheaper than comparable offers. The IKEA pay as you go phones have no contract and a flat UK call rate.

The IKEA pay as you go phones package is available exclusively to ‘IKEA Family’ loyalty card holders, and they will be charged 9p a minute for UK calls and 6p for texts. The deal is being offered in tandem with Mobile Partners UK, whose MD Teddy Pederson described the UK as ‘a price jungle.

Get free trades from Paddy Power: a lot of independent traders are staying out of the stockmarkets just now, spooked by the ‘will it won’t it’ behaviour of the FTSE 100 in particular. Over the last few days, the FTSE has repeatedly flirted with the psychological barrier of 5400 points, dipping below for coming back up for air. It’s not all bad (honestly), as there are some good deals on offer for us small fry. In particular, lots of the online trading companies are offering freebies just now, as they feel the chill too.

A very good one caught my eye today, with big online bookie Paddy Power offering you £75 in free trades to sign up for an account. You can get free trades from Paddy Power by going to their website and fulfilling certain conditions (but of course).

You have to place €250 (£170 in your account) and place four trades by 31 July 2008 and then you’ll get free trades from Paddy Power to the value of €150 or £75. Incidentally, if you’re a nervous newbie to training, the Irish bookmaker has a pretty good demonstration account to get you started. Trade for imaginary money - great fun if seriously addictive, and definitely the best place to learn.

Tags: spread betting

See our Walletwatcher financial deal of the week archive for more great deals.

Spending money on holiday can be an expensive business - the problem is you often don’t know how much you’ve been charged for those cash withdrawals from the hole in the wall until you get home. Typically you get stung twice - first with a transaction charge (why?), secondly with a poor exchange rate. Alternatives to now have been travellers’ cheques (a nuisance to change and not very flexible), or changing all your money before you left home (not a good idea to wander around Naples with a thousand euro in your back pocket. The new generation of currency cards is a much tidier idea, and the FairFX.com currency card
is hard to beat.

Here’s how it works. The FairFX.com currency card is a debit card, but one you charge up with currency before you leave home. You can get one for euros or US dollars, and it will cost you £9.95 to sign up (though moneysupermarket.com are doing a deal where you get the card free if you sign up before 31 August. FairFX says it delivers savings of 10 per cent against cash bought from a bureau de change and 5 per cent against ATM withdrawals or buying things on your debit or credit card. Cash withdrawals cost €1.50 or $2. Another bonus - exchange rates are fixed when you load the money on, not when you spend it, so you can lock in a good exchange rate if you’re smart on your timing.

The reason we like it is that FairFX says it aims to undercut major rival CaxtonFX at all times. Not written in stone, but the FairFX.com currency card is certainly cheap compared to the competition, some of whom run rates of 4 per cent. Of course you could get burned by exchange rates turning against you, and note that the money on the card doesn’t earn interest, so you’re losing on money that could have been ticking up interest on deposit. Beautifully simple and secure though, chip and pin protected, and a good option for youngsters setting out on their gap year travels perhaps?

‘The base rate is five per cent and likely to fall…’ So starts the sales pitch from Landsbanki of Rykjavik for its one-year fixed rate Icesave savings account, fixed at a very interesting 7.01% AER for a year. Whether the base rate will fall from 5% is open to conjecture of course. The Bank of England was split down the middle on base rate during May 2008 and decided to leave interest rates unchanged. And a rise in interest rates is the Bank’s only real tool against rising inflation of course, and as we know inflation is creeping worryingly toward the 4% figure. But … this is a terrific rate of interest, and largely fuelled by the Credit Crunch. Banks are so short of cash that they are having to offer increasingly good rates of interest, well above the Base Rate, to entice us to deposit with them. And Iceland’s banks, heavily leveraged and so with little reserves of their own, are desperate to get more cash in the vaults in order to keep liquid and keep trading.

All of which may start to ring some alarm bells … could you be investing in a bank that’s likely to go bust? Martin Lewis of moneysavingexpert.com has some useful observations On the Icesave account, (don’t worry about the fact the post was on April Fool’s Day!), and suffice to say it’s well worth sticking a few grand away to get this very good rate of interest. If you are committed to regular, keep your paws off, saving, then this is a good place to start.  The Icesave account pays 7.01% a year, or 6.79% if you take interest monthly, and Moneyfacts made the account a Best Buy at the end of April.

Check out our previous Financial deals of the week here.

I’m not a big drinker myself, recent heroic boozing episodes include having a half glass of champagne at my son’s birthday party and having to retire to sleep it off (and there’s no way you should be going to bed before the six year olds is there). But I understand that for many of you a meal isn’t complete without a little something to wash it down. So, the perfect accompaniment to dinner, lunch, breakfast, or indeed a packet of crisps in the park, the once ‘reassuringly expensive’ Stella Artois hits new price lows with an offer of Cheap Stella Artois at Morrisons supermarkets this week.

Here’s the deal. Morrisons has a 24-pack of Stella Artois 440ml cans at just 44p a can. You’ll need to be quick as the offer is in stores only until Monday 26 May and is limited to six cases per person. A perfect time to stock up on supplies for those summer barbecues I should have thought. And the obvious ploy here, if you go shopping mob-handed with the family, is to get all of them to buy their allocation. I reckon this one is going to sell out pretty damn quick so stock up now on you cheap Stella Artois at Morrisons.

Morrisons gets an honourable mention as just about the cheapest of the UK supermarkets by the way (I know I will now get hit with data from Tesco and Sainsbury’s proving that they are cheaper for eggs, bread, falafel and whatever, but my experience of Morrisons, which is largely in the north of England, is that they’re startlingly cheap). We’re sure as grown ups that you DON’T have to be reminded to enjoy alcohol sensibly, but we’ll drop it in anyway. As well as cheap Stella Artois at Morrisons, Check out some of our previous ‘financial deals of the week‘ here.

Laptop computers under £200? Impossible I would say. In fact, show me a laptop computer under the £200 mark and I’ll show you a child’s toy. But there’s a certain irony here. Supercheap laptop makers Asus has pitched its Asus EEE computer at children. And there are certain refinements you’re not going to get on a sub-£200 laptop computer. No DVD player, and no big screen – the EEE has a 7inch number that is never going to compete with the whizzy Apple numbers.

I’m not going to go into too much technical detail on the Asus EEE and its stable mates, I’ll leave it to the computer journalists to tell you about the RAM, USBs and the rest. But what interests me is that a bare bones laptop, ostensibly aimed at the play room, can become a superb workhorse, allowing you to run your spreadsheet software, do your household accounts, access your online bank account, and the rest. All this from a laptop computer under £200 – I’m impressed.

In fact, while the Asus laptops retail for a little over £200 (the discount online stores are knocking out the EEE for around £210) anyone registered for VAT, will actually be picking up an Asus laptop for something like £178. A complete ‘no brainer’, as computer type people have an unfortunate habit of saying. In fact, you could dump the old home office set up and thus free up a room, your office being where your laptop is. This laptop computer under £200 could definitely save and make you money long term as you get your finances onto the PC and thus organised.

Read more of my financial deals of the week, Asus Eee PC 900 suppliers

Tags: Eee PC, Asus Eee PC, EEE-PC

Petrol prices in the UK have been going only one way over the last few months. Conversations in my house tend (rather monotonousl) to have followed the pattern ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever got £50 worth of petrol in the car’, to be followed swiftly by ‘That’s the first time I ever got £60 worth of petrol in the car.’ With that in mind I paid a visit back to Petrolprices.com to see how much difference it could actually make to my weekly fill up. Petrolprices is a typical Web 2.0 interface, the classically Google-simple front page simply offering a large type-in box where you enter your postcode. Register, the work of moments, and you are given the five cheapest filling stations for your unleaded, diesel, premium or whatever.

Now Ive been slightly sceptical about fuel price comparison sites in the past. The way I buy buy petrol is 1) I notice I’m low and 2) pull in at the next filling station. The idea of driving out of my way to get to a cheap petrol station (thereby using petrol notice) has always struck me as counter productive and distinctly ungreen. I’m also wary of becoming the sort of middle-aged man who obsesses about petrol prices and discusses them with his workmates. Such conversations often continue with the relative merits of leaving the M6 at Junction 5 or Junction 6. But with local variations from 105p a litre up to 118p, I’m saving around £6 a time on each fill up. Using my unreliable maths, I work out that the additional driving I’m doing is costing me 30p … though is it worth an extra 30 minutes of my time to drive there and back? A complex sum which you’ll have to do for yourself.

Incidentally, a quick look at the petrolprices.com blog (I kid you not) reveals the usual litany of ‘NuLabour are a bunch of thieves’ and ‘this country is finished, I’m moving abroad’ complaints, so I’ll not be lurking there for long. But petrolprices gets an honourable mention as this week’s financial deal of the week.