But I will be watching tonight thanks to a well known betting site that is allowing its customers to watch for free if they have a funded account and as far as I can see there is nothing in it’s terms and conditions to prevent you from depositing money before the match then withdrawing it straight after the game, although obviously they hope you will place a bet on the match.

So I haven’t really saved myself any money as I wouldn’t have paid anyway, but I will at least get to watch the match!

Come on England!

Planning a bike ride around the Isle of Wight I knew straight away I wanted to cross the Solent by hovercraft. Costing the same as the ferry but making the journey in just 10 minutes it really was an easy decision for me, but it really became a no-brainer when I realised I was able to take advantage of a special £1 fare offer. Compared to the usual price of £8 each way, I was able to save £14 and have a little bit of fun too!

Whilst it sounds like a lot of money the gym did serve it’s purpose with me shedding 45 pounds helping to get my weight down to a more reasonable level.

There was no fad dieting, no extreme workouts and no personal trainer. Instead I built my fitness levels up slowly, making working out part of my regular routine and slowly the weight came off.  In many ways this approach is similar to Millionaire Adventure where I am gradually increasing my wealth, changing my spending habits and without the aid of paying for any financial advisors.

I’m not however going back to my lazy ways and I’m determined not to put the weight back on. From now on I will be looking for free (or at least cheap) ways of staying fit with plenty of bike rides planned, including a quick tour around the Isle of Wight next week.

Giving up the gym this month and switching to other forms of free exercise means I’ll save £218.75 over the rest of the year, which gives my Millionaire Adventure total a nice little boost.

I’d love to hear your suggestions for how I can keep fit for free. You can leave your suggestions using the comment form below.

I was therefore very disappointed when I logged in to discover that tickets were not available for some of the events they had promised and absolutely furious when I discovered that prices ranged from £179 to £399 for the events they had originally mentioned in their email. So within hours of signing up I fired off a complaint by email requesting a refund.

What followed was over a month of being either being told I couldn’t have a refund or simply ignored. However I knew I was entitled to a refund as the advertising regulations state that “any stated price should be clear and should relate to the product advertised” which in this case was arguably not the case.

Regardless of that, the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations gives me the unconditional right to cancel an order as long as I give notice within “seven working days from the day after that on which I agreed to go ahead with the contract”, which I clearly did.

And my commitment and conviction finally paid off after 5 weeks of arguing my case as they agreed to refund me the £50. Result!

I also discovered last week that I had been charged 48p by O2 for mobile internet charges despite the fact that all my attempts to connect to the internet had failed. So again I fired off a quick email stating my case and requesting a refund. Within 48 hours they responded to tell me they would be crediting my account. Result!

Now you might think that chasing a 48p refund is a waste of time, but writing that short email took me less than a minute. So if I spent a whole hour writing similar emails I could potentially earn £28.80 per hour, although clearly O2 wouldn’t keep paying out for the same thing.

In contrast chasing my £50 refund took 6 far longer emails stating along with a couple of phone calls, taking in total about 2 hours of my time which works out at £25 per hour. So chasing a 48p refund actually worked out as a more profitable use of my time.

A surprise benefit was also receiving 6 free weekend tickets that we could also use throughout the year and we used the first of these this weekend travelling up to London to watch the England v Slovakia friendly match yesterday. This saved me £17.90 compared to what I usually pay and also finally meant I got round to getting an Oyster Card, which will hopefully save me more money in the future rather than lazily just adding a travelcard onto my train fare even when I am only doing a single return journey within zone 1.

The cost of needlessly wasted food to UK households is £10 billion a year, £2 billion higher than previously estimated. Researchers found that more than half the good food thrown out is bought and simply left unused or untouched. For example, each day 1.3 million unopened yoghurt pots, 5,500 whole chickens and 440,000 ready meals are thrown away in the UK. The study revealed that £1 billion worth of wasted food is still “in date”.

The environmental impact of food waste is enormous, because of all the energy and resources which are used to get food to our homes, and when it reaches landfill, there is a major carbon impact. Tackling the problem of food waste would be the same as taking 1 in 5 cars off of UK roads.

Julia Falcon of WRAP’s campaign, Love Food Hate Waste, said: “This report shows we could all be saving money and time by making better use of our food. We’ve found there’s a real demand for quick and easy ideas and lovefoodhatewaste.com can help with tips which turn into good habits in the kitchen.”

Some tips to help you reduce your food waste:

1. Have a quick check in the fridge each day and plan meals around what needs using up first.
2. Those leftovers from last night’s dinner can make a great lunchbox to take to work & save money.
3. Date labels don’t have to be difficult – check for “Use by” dates and see if the product can be frozen if it can’t be eaten it in time.
4. Before you hit the supermarket try to make a list.
5. We waste a lot of fresh fruit, vegetables and salad – keep them in the fridge and they can last up to two weeks longer.
6. Many convenience foods can be frozen – when choosing them in the store check the label first.
7. Try buying a mix of frozen and fresh foods to give you more choice and time to eat them.
8. Meals made from leftovers can be delicious and save you both time and money

I have found one of the best sites to print off vouchers is VoucherCodes.co.uk which has an excellent collection of high street and restaurant vouchers on one single page.

In the past month I have found myself eating out several times and by being prepared and printing off vouchers in advance I have managed to take advantage of a free main course at Pizza Express & Gourmet Burger King, and a main course at Zizzi for just £1.

The only downside was letting down my guard in GBK and ordering a local organic ale without checking the price first. I felt rather stupid when paying the bill to discover it cost £5 for a single bottle virtually offsetting the saving I had made on the food.

Despite this setback I still saved myself a total of £18.75 across the 3 meals out (and no I don’t normally eat out this often!).

There was no obvious reason for this regular surge in consumption so I embarked on a process of trial and error, switching off different devices each day to find the cause. After a couple of weeks I was left with only the lights left and it was very unlikely to be them so running out of ideas I switched the electrics off at the fuse box inside my flat. To my amazement the meter kept spinning away…

So wherever the electricity was going it wasn’t inside my flat! Next step, to the meter itself where there is an emergency cut off switch which is linked directly to the meter, that had to stop the meter spinning and it did.

Unfortunately it also cut the power to my neighbours flat, oops!

Stupidly the meters had been mixed up, a case of a ‘crossed meter’ to use the electricity companies terminology. I had been paying for the neighbours electricity and he had been paying for mine. What followed was over two months of constantly chasing the two electric companies involved to resolve the issue and several weeks of debating how a revised bill should be issued.

Now I am a qualified accountant and consider myself good with numbers, but not even my qualification could help me understand how electricity bills are calculated. I have never come across anything so complicated.

But after weeks of arguing and creating many scenarios on spreadsheets we finally reached an agreement. This meant that despite using more units than my neighbour and therefore leaving me facing a higher bill, a compromise was reached whereby they would actually reduce my bill, a total saving of £39.29 compared to what I had previously paid. A lot of hard work, but nevertheless a nice result in the end.

Whilst people don’t call me names in the street I am however excluded from the majority of high street stores who either simply do not sell these half sizes or rarely have them in stock. So whilst others were over indulging in the post Christmas sales my search for a new pair of shoes was hampered by the lack of availability of anything in my size.

Having being largely shunned by the high street I moved my search online to one of the few retailers that do sell shoes in my size, Marks & Spencer. The only downside being that I would be forced to pay a delivery charge for the inconvenience of not being able to buy my particular size in their stores.

As stubborn as I am, there was simply no way I’d pay more just because they chose not to stock half sizes in their stores. So I held out for almost a month waiting for a voucher or discount of some kind to negate the £3.50 delivery charge. Eventually I found a 10% off code and was able to buy the shoes along with a new work shirt, both in the half sizes I needed and saving myself £3.44 off the in-store prices had they stocked my size.

And happily I can report both fit perfectly.