This week, we’re looking at getting something for nothing … ever more important in these days of high inflation.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that you had to shell out around £20 for ANY DVD, let alone the classics. The stock of classic movies is rather lower these days, with many of the Saturday and Sunday papers giving away classic films with each edition. Recent freebies include Brassed Off, Educating Rita and a raft of classic Dr Whos.

Of course it may not have occurred to you to watch Ring of Bright Water or Carry On Christmas, but think of it as a chance to widen your viewing horizons! I reckon it’s worth the price of the Mail on Sunday for the freebie, and you can always hide the newspaper under your coat on the way home!

There are rather more A-list offerings from the Free DVD Club. Sign up, choose your free DVD, complete a questionnaire, and it’s sent to you free of charge. No scams, no catches, and current titles include The Matrix Reloaded, The War Bride, Chopper and The Shawshank Redemption – more at www.free-dvd-club.com.

We’d love to bring you voucher codes for free mobile phone calls, but I’ve yet to see one. You can get free topup vouchers for the orange, o2, T-Mobile, Vodafone and Virgin networks though. Go to www.myfreerewards.co.uk. You earn points for playing games online, signing up for free offers and taking part in online promotions. You then spend your points on everything from those £10 phone top up vouchers to free Sony PSP handhelds.

Now we have to say that you’d have to take part in a great many promotions to earn enough points for the PSP … but it’s a bona fide offer. For any of these signup schemes, I’d recommend you set up a new gmail or hotmail account and apply from there – otherwise you could find your inbox filling with spam email.

I’m a big fan of www.last.fm, an online radio station which has revolutionised the way music is delivered. You tap in ‘Bach’ or ‘Arctic Monkeys’ and it will deliver a stream of tracks by or similar to that artist. They offer some 200 free downloads every week … a great way to expand your listening and your collection. And if you like classical music, it’s worth checking out your local concert hall, town hall or even library, as there are often free lunchtime concerts by up and coming musicians.

If you’re having trouble getting there, sign up for www.liftshare.org, which is an online database of people around the UK offering free lifts. It’s green, it’s sociable and it’s free … and it’s the modern safe way of hitch hiking.

www.silverjewelryclub.com offers free silver bracelets, earrings and more. All you pay is a shipping charge of $8.99. Again, it’s a loss leading promotion, and you can expect a raft of promotional emails to follow your application, inviting you to spend more money. So again, use that free email account as a receptacle for all the rubbish.

You’d be amazed what you can get free if you just ask for it. Test drives seem to have gone out of fashion, but car companies are desperate to shift their products at the moment. If you fancy borrowing a flash motor for the weekend, it’s worth asking your local dealership for an extended test drive. Now obviously this isn’t going to work with Fred’s Secondhand Motors, but we have friends who’ve blagged test runs of Saabs, Mercs, even a VW Camper Van for weekends recently. You’re practically getting a free holiday!

www.asda-photo.co.uk and www.photobox.co.uk are just two of the photo printing services offering you free prints when you register with their websites, a generous 50 prints with the latter. It’s well worth signing up to get your holiday snaps printed even if you never use them again.

And on the subject of holidays, how about a free stay in somebody’s Parisian apartment of New York loft? Check out homeswap websites such as www.homelink.org.uk. You pay a small fee to sign up and you could save hundreds on your vacation.

Finally, why not trust to luck. I’m not a betting man, but William Hill always has free bets for new accounts, currently a £25 online bet, and other bonuses such as £50 to play in its online casino – more at www.williamhill.com.

I’ve merely scratched the surface here … there is a HUGE amount of free stuff online and elsewhere. You just have to use your imagination and Google it.

Related articles: How to save money on shopping, Free haircuts and makeovers, Free dental treatment, Free tickets to attend TV recordings, Get free trades from Paddy Power

Tags: How to get free stuff, freestuff online, free

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.

Could this be the ultimate student dream. Poring through the small ads in the London Evening Standard today (well you can’t spend all your time reading the financial pages can you) I come across a box screaming ‘Ecstasy Research … participants required’. Intrigued, I read on to find that the University of East London will pay you a £25 gift voucher if you participate in and complete their study. The only prerequisite is that you should have ‘used Ecstasy or any other illicit drugs’ at some point in the past. The study, by UEL’s Psychology department, is to ascertain the effects of Ecstasy on eating. Little did I ever imagine that you could earn money for taking drugs.

If you are interested in turning your misspent youth to profit, then email Rhani at r.j.allen@uel.acuk or ring 020 8223 4423. Your confidentiality is assured. This rather puts us in mind of the days when you could earn money for donating semen (a lark that disappeared with the confidentiality of sperm donors, meaning your £20 cheque would be dwarfed by your unknown progeny turning up and demanding 20 years back pocket money), and for undergoing medical research. After the unfortunate deaths of several participants in recent drugs trials that little earner now appears remarkably unappealing too.  Check out our Free Stuff archive for more unexpected freebies.

If you still haven’t explored VOIP phone technology, then you’re missing a trick. VOIP means making free phone calls over the web and it WILL SAVE YOU A FORTUNE. IT can be used PC to PC, PC to phone, or even phone to phone (though the calls are still always via the internet). And it’s easy to set up a VOIP phone system.

The biggest player is Skype. Their software offers free computer to computer calls, and you get massive reductions on calls using your phone too. As someone who makes daily business calls from London to Italy … and pays nothing for the privilege, I can hugely recommend the Skype service.

I’m assuming you’ve got a reasonably new computer and a broadband internet connection. You’ll also need a cheap headset, with earphones and a mic. Then, You simply go to the website of any of the hundreds of VOIP providers and download the software. I won’t go into the technicalities here – we’re interested in saving you money, not grappling with complex new technology, so if it isn’t as easy as peeling an orange I won’t recommend it.

For this reason, I’ve stuck with Skype. A lot of computer geeks don’t favour it, as there are simpler and cleaner packages out there, but it’s easy to set up and lots of people are already using it – so you’re going to find it easy to find other users to make PC to PC phone calls to if you use Skype. You will find a VOIP phone call a slightly different experience. You can occasionally get time lags and ‘drop outs’ of dead air time, as the ‘packets’ of information that are being sent don’t quite deliver properly. Though this improves hugely with the quality and speed of your broadband connection. But the actual quality of sound is extraordinary, like moving from a crackly old vinyl album to CD. You suddenly realise how poor the average landline (and especially mobile) call quality is. Wearing headphones, it does give the slightly creepy sensation of having a conversation with someone inside your bed, but you soon get used to it.

Of course you don’t want to converse just from your computer, or only to people who also have computers running Skype. Luckily VOIP telephony solutions abound nowadays – there are now a host of VOIP providers in the UK. No problem. You can call from PC to phone too, or indeed phone to phone. With more and more phone calls being routed over the internet ANYWAY, this technology is increasingly LESS about new technology and MORE about new and hungry firms smashing the price models of BT and the rest. VOIP phone software is now easy to set up and easy to use – in some cases you don’t even need software. Take a look at one of the biggest providers, jajah, and you see a link for Jajah Direct, phone to phone VOIP.

You simply dial a local number (a London number in my case) and when you reach the automated switchboard you then dial your friend’s number. It’s a slicker version of those phone cards you see on sale in markets all over the world, targeted largely at people ringing home to Africa, the States or wherever. And you can use your regular landline. And that should give you pause for thought when you’re on holiday. Don’t use expensive hotel phones (and certainly not rip off mobiles). If you take your foldaway headset, you can use a VOIP service to make your calls free from the hotel computer.

A service such as Vephone doesn’t even demand that you download any software, as it’s web-based, so everything is happening on the company’s servers. You get a ‘real UK telephone number’ that anyone can call, and all you have to do is log in to an internet enabled computer. Services like this, where you get a proper phone number, could be the answer for those of us who are unwilling to dump the expensive landline and just use a mobile.

Of course, making phone calls from your computer doesn’t have to mean you’re stuck at your desk. Think about it – with the growth of mobile broadband, handsets that surf the web, and the Blackberry of course, we’re increasingly carrying our PC in our pocket anyway. It’s a short hop to turning your mobile phone into a webphone. Mobile is, of course, one area where VOIP has lagged behind, as we tend to buy our mobile with a call-plan attached, whether it be Orange, O2 or whatever. This will, inevitably change. Check out the voipproviderslist website for some interesting stuff on the future of mobile VOIP.

Price comparisons are notoriously tricky. The phone companies change their tariffs even more regularly than the gas and electricity providers, with BT recently slashing the cost of weekend calls to users.
And the VOIP providers too have a bewildering array of tariffs. Some will be free to the USA, some will be cheap for PC to phone, others better for phone to mobile calls, and so on. The best advice is to figure out WHERE most of your calls go (a bit like setting up your BT friends and family list) and then head to voiproviderslist.com, where you can match a service to your needs. One thing is sure – you NEVER need to pay for PC to PC calls, and Skype really comes into its own for my company making conference calls, sometimes between the UK, Italy and the United States. With an attached instant messaging service, you can even type in notes, references, URLs of handy websites etc, during your conversation. It’s a terrific business tool – and it’s FREE.

Of course, VOIP provisioning is quickly going mainstream. In a couple of years time, this will all look different, as we dial VOIP direct from our landlines, and big players like TESCO are already in the market. But for now, take the plunge and get VOIP’d. You’ll save a small fortune.

Links: VOIP providers list, Skype, jajah, Tesco internet phone

Tags: voip phone system, voip telephony solutions, voip

Why not get free flights to your free hotel room. If you’re a big credit card user, then check out the various cards from British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and the like. I’ve sung the praises of reward credit cards before – providing you pay off your balance each month so don’t end up paying interest. BA and Virgin Atlantic offer air miles with each purchase, so every shopping you do could be paying for your next holiday.

Links: www.virgin-atlantic.com, www.britishairways.com

Tags: free flights, free airline travel, free airmiles

Perhaps all this money saving is tiring you out and you need a break. Then snap up a free hotel room! Every day all over the world, hotel rooms stand empty – and of course they can’t sell that empty room tomorrow. Hoteliers would generally rather have a body in there than not – it keeps the hotel busy and you’re likely to be spending money while you’re there. So many hotels give the rooms away.

Links: www.freebiehotels.com

Tags: free hotel rooms, free hotels

There are lots of websites pointing you to free stuff now, with many companies using online signups as a way to get information about new customers. The freebies change every day – one day free catfood, the next free mobile phone calls, so it pays to check on a daily basis. Beware that this CAN get addictive! One of my current favourites is www.free-stuff.co.uk, while other up to the minute sites include www.freebielist.com and www.freestuffjunction.co.uk.

Links: www.free-stuff.co.uk, www.freebielist.com, www.freestuffjunction.co.uk

Tags: free stuff, free stuff uk

Maybe it’s Britain’s rampant inflation (albeit cunningly disguised by Messrs Brown and Darling) but I must confess to being slightly staggered by the British public’s thirst for something, anything free. Free stuff online (computer free stuff being a current hot favourite) seems to be this year’s hot topic, and I guess sits neatly alongside all the newspaper articles we’re currently having to endure about ‘how I just discovered LIDL’ and ‘why Netto is the new Waitrose’. Website freestuff.co.uk is meeting the need manfully, and I admit I’ve succumbed to the odd free sample of Purina catfood myself (for the cat you understand, it’s not a personal taste).

But what can you get? Well free kids stuff is a perennial favourite as any cash strapped parent will know. This can be very good for holiday times when you’re desperately trying to find affordable tickets. Along with free stuff for kids, free baby stuff online is always a biggie. Manufacturers or nappies (diapers for our American readers) and other baby product know how much new parents, particularly first-time parents, will spend on this stuff, and try to hook us with freebies. I say take the freebies and move on! Baby coupon discount free stuff searches will yield you some gold too.

Free beauty stuff online is a rich seam too – you’ll find loads of samples from the mundane to the high end. But even if you never venture out of your disturbingly decorated bedroom, there are freebies for you. Free Star Trek stuff, computer free stuff … you name it and you’ll probably find it online. It has its critics (rather unfairly I feel) but I think freestuff.co.uk is a cracking little site. There are grumblings that very often the stuff doesn’t arrive, but to be fair that’s the nature of this beast – very limited supplies of stuff, so it’s going to be first come first served.

Tips on getting your freebies then. Think laterally – I’ve given you a list of the best websites here but they will get hammered for stuff. Some people spend all their time looking for freebies! If there’s a product you’re interested in Google it (and use msn search and Yahoo too) adding ‘free’ to the product name. Most people don’t even bother going away from the well travelled main highway of search. Enough dodgy metaphors – go get your freebies!

Related links: 

free stuff for kids http://www.freeukstuff.com/free-kids.html

Free stuff online www.freestuff.co.uk

Baby coupon discount free stuff and Free baby stuff online http://www.babyfreebies.co.uk/

Free beauty stuff http://www.healthandbeautyfreebies.co.uk/

Free star trek stuff http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~hwloidl/ST.html

Computer free stuff http://www.computerfreebies.co.uk/

Also, don’t forget to check out some of our other posts on free stuff, including a great deal on getting Marks and Spencer Coupon Codes online.