Friday, December 29, 2006

Making Money from online Casinos

Is it possible ???

The quick answer is yes. The long answer is yes most of the time, but at least you won't lose anything.

The method essentially utilises two aspects, firstly casino sign-up / deposit bonuses and secondly something known as Perfect Blackjack.
Perfect Blackjack is a statistically designed template of how to play a hand given your cards and the dealers cards and should narrow the odds down to nearly 50:50.
The casino's are desperate to get your money. The main reason being that over the long term every gambler loses money. I read somewhere that most gamblers lose an average of nearly £200 per month. That's money in the pocket of casinos, so they will try anything to get you to sign up with them...mostly in the form of cash incentives and bonuses. Although the rules will stipulate that you must gamble the money a certain a number of times, playing perfect blackjack should reduce the odds of losing to about .4 - .5 of a %. this means that you should be able to play through the required amount and still walk away with the bonus the casino paid you to join them.....
Simple.

As an example....

100% sign-up Bonus at a casino means you deposit £100 and get £100 bonus
That's £200 in your account.
The rules state you must play through the bonus amount 25 times so that's £2500 worth of bets which I admit sounds a lot, however using perfect blackjack at £5 per hand that's 500 hands (keep a tally). Remember though that your money will go up and down. If at any point you get down to £100 then just stop and withdraw your money...nothing lost.
Using perfect blackjack though should result in you only losing 0.4% of the time which over £2500 is £10. So theoretically you should walk away with £90 of the £100 bonus the casino gave you as clear profit.

I need to set up an account with a casino to take advantage of this... sounds too good to be true so lets see if it is.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

New Year Goals

To Go from nothing ( or less than nothing ) to a million pounds is quite a big jump, so I think its best to split it down into much smaller goals which are all perfectly achievable in a shorter time period.
So with that in mind what are my goals for the first year.

1. Get rid of ALL remaining non-mortgage debt.
2. Build a cash pot for Annual Bills and pay into it monthly.
3. Build a cash pot of "rainy day" money with an initial value of £2000.

Less than a week to go and I'm getting excited at the prospect of really taking control of my spending and building a future rather than living day to day, hand to mouth.

I guess I'll have to go and get all my accounts and paperwork up to date.....lol

Monday, December 25, 2006

Merry Christmas Everyone

Hope you got what you wanted from Santa.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Get Back At The Casino's

Hmm...Really !!!

Apparently so. I've stumbled across quite a few pages detailing how to legally and fairly easily make money out of online casino's with NO RISK !

I'm going to investigate further, but my maths brain seems to think it works.

I'll keep you posted

Car cost...£1500 and counting

Yup.... That's the damage.
I don't know what I've done being not very mechanical, but its gonna cost £1500 to fix, plus the cost of the hire car. Still if they are virtually rebuilding the engine at least I should get another couple of years out of it.
At the end of the day, £1500 is cheaper than spending 5 or 6 grand on a new car.
Not a great start to the project...HOWEVER....

I have a couple of Aces up my sleeve.

Firstly I get paid 4 weekly, but most of my bills are monthly. This means I get 13 pay days but effectively 12 cost months so one of my pay days is free...if you get my drift.
Secondly I am in the company's SAYE (Save As You Earn) scheme. They have 3 and 5 year schemes. I have been doing this for quite a while and have the maximum ( £50 per month) in 5 5-year schemes running at the same time. i find this a fantastic way to save as it comes out my pay packet with the tax so I don't realise I'm missing it. Sure, its £250 a month which seems a lot, but each year I get about £5000 worth of shares to keep or sell...I always sell cos I need the money. but £250 per month for 13 months is £3250 saved each year and a profit of about £2000. So its definitely worth it in my opinion.
Unfortunately this years shares are already allocated as I owe the parents £5000 but fingers crossed, next year it will be mine...All Mine !!!

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Letter Sent

Ok, So I did it today. Sent the letter to reclaim all my bank charges from he last 6 years, well, started the ball rolling anyway.
Step 1 is to contact your bank to get them to send a list of all charges from the last 6 years as its available under the data protection act. It costs a maximum of £10 so I sent a cheque too.
They have 40 days to respond so I'll put it in my diary to be ready to go to the next stage if they don't send the info.
Car goes in tomorrow.... Cost £65 to get it transported and i dread to think what the bill will be....still, its got to be done.

Monday, December 18, 2006

A&L Bank Account set up

Er....Thats it
The parachute account set up so I can effectively try and get all my bank charges back from the last 6 years and if they close my account it won't matter.
I guess I'd better get writing those letters.
The best bit is that the new account give 6.1% interest on all credit balances up to £2500 and a credit card with 0% balance transfer for 9 months ( 2.25%fee )
6.1% on a current account !! Thats incredible.

And if you refer a friend and they open an account you get £25 each for doing nothing !!
Talk about money for nothing !

So let me know if you want one ...lol !!!

Sunday, December 17, 2006

A Rough Total

Ok...So the countdown to the start of my project has started. 14 Days to go.

I thought I would just have a quick tot up of my current situation.
Mortgage -£134,000
Credit card 1 -£1,500
Credit card 2 -£35
Current Account 1 -£2500
Current Account 2 +£1000
Savings Account 1 +£0.57
Savings account 2 +£2.00
Neteller Account +£100
IG Account +£40

I think its blatantly clear that I have too many accounts. With this in mind I've just applied for another one..... yes, really.!
The reason being that I have been looking into the growing trend of people reclaiming their bank charges. Its a trend thats growing rapidly and the banks will do something about it soon, so I'm getting in while the going is good. The first step thats recommended is to open a new account as some banks close your account if you claim money back. I'll go into more detail as and when I start the proceeding. Suffice to say if you have had problems with debt in the past 6 years and ended up with charges then you should be able to claim them all back. On the moneysavingexpert.com forum board people are claiming back thousands !
I want to be one of them !

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Link Added

I'm quite excited...

I know this site is really easy to use, but I've just added a link on the right to one of my favourite sites.
Moneysavingexpert.com is a site run by a journalist called Martin Lewis.

Go There....Read it....Its Genius

More History and a bit of a plan

So back to the original reason for the blog, we were in debt and sinking rapidly.

Firstly I think the resounding "light bulb" moment was when I realised we were struggling and couldn't cope.
I think the biggest problem that most people in debt face is not realising its out of control, thinking they are managing but just sinking slowly further into the mire. It's almost like having an addiction and being in denial.
At the end of the day, if you are paying as much as you can but your debt is getting worse, even by a penny, then you are in trouble and its time to sort things out.
I was paying everything I could yet we were still getting into more debt.

So we sat down and worked out exactly how much we owed....no recriminations, all hidden accounts out in the open ( thats another tell-tale sign of being in trouble...hiding credit cards from your partner) and believe me it was a real shock !

Anyway, a couple of days later we had an appointment with a financial adviser. She basically went through our figures and we looked at remortgaging the house.
Obviously remortgaging isn't for everyone. We had a couple of things in our favour, first lots of equity. The house was worth £200,000 and the original mortgage was only £104,000 so we had nearly 50% equity...very handy.
Secondly we were still relatively young ( early thirties ) so we had plenty of time left to pay it off.

So we went for a 30 year flexible mortgage at a fixed rate for two years. The reason it was 30 years was to try to get the monthly outgoings lower so we could actually save a bit of rainy day money ( for emergencies such as the car breaking down...lol)

I have also done a bit of reverse engineering on my finances. What that means is that I took out all the "must" pay items then calculated a required amount to save for annual bills then what was left was used for the mortgage. Hopefully this means that we can pay everything we need to without having to put it on a credit card or pay it off monthly at a higher rate. Most people pay the mortgage first then hope to have enough left for bills which is really the wrong way round.

And thats roughly the position we are in now.

The Car is Condemned

Well...Not quite, but nearly.
Apparently the Cambelt has snapped, not that I'm mechanically minded and know what a cambelt does, but its gone.
The village garage can't fit it and the renault garage can't do it until Wednesday next week. This leaves me up the proverbial swanny.
So, Hey ho, I've had to rent a car for a week because I need to go to work and I can't really walk the 20 miles each way...... thats £260 wasted before I even have any work done on mine!!
So the plan is well on track except that I will be a million pounds in DEBT by the end of it ...lol

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

GRRRRR

I don't believe it !!!

Christmas on the horizon, about to start my grand scheme then......

The bloody car broke.
Just coming home from work and it died....nothing...
I can see a huge bill coming from the garage, just what I don't need.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

A bit of history

Ok..so, how did I get to this stage.
Well I've always been a bit of a spendaholic... not particularly a shopaholic, I just seem to leak money like a bucket with a hole in it.
When child number 3 came along we needed more room, so like most people we extended to make the house 4 bedroomed. This wasn't cheap, and with decoration etc the cost just kept building and building.
That was a couple of years ago and since then I've been juggling the debt, thinking that I was clever enough to make it all go away and not really dealing with it.
Things came to a head this summer when I started putting all my financial information into Microsoft Money.....It suddenly became blatantly clear...
I had a £100, 000 mortgage, a £20,000 loan, 3 credit cards with about £15,000 in total and a £2000 overdraft....
Totting up I was paying nearly £1500 a month to service this debt and that was only the minimum on the cards.....
Given that my take home pay is only £1350 a month and I had all the other bills to pay to run the home its no wonder we were sinking evermore into debt...I had to keep transferring balances and borrowing more moey just to stay afloat.

I'm sure I'm not the only one. !!

So Me and the missus had a bit of a discussion. A rather heated discussion as she wasn't aware of most of the debt !!
We decided to stop being victims, because I believe all of us hard working families caught in the trap of spiralling debt are victims. And we decided to do something about it.

And this is what I'll discuss next... What we have done so far, where we are now , and what the plan is for the future.

The millionaire project starts on January 1st 2007.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

A Quick Welcome

Hi

So.....The Millionaire Project........ whats that all about then??

Well, first let me say its not a get-rich-quick scheme. So thats most of you immediately clicking away...Bye

Still Here?

Ok, so whats it all about.
Well the quick answer is that I want to be a millionaire, who doesn't ? But the long answer is that this blog is my way of keeping myself on the straight and narrow. I don't expect it to happen overnight. In fact, I've set an arbitrary timescale of 20 years !!
Yes, I know, 20 years !!
Like I said...not get-rich-quick.
What I'm hoping to do is to save a bit, invest a bit, keep a close eye on my finances and slowly build up a cash pot that over time will build into a million pounds.
The blog is mainly for myself to stay focussed, but I hope to generate a few of us with the same dreams who can support each other.
At the end of the day I think of myself as a typical Mr Average with the same trials and issues that the vast majority of us face in this country.
I have a decent job, partner and 3 kids, a fairly average / large mortgage and a dread of going to work everyday and being a wage slave.

I want to break the cycle.

I hope you come along for the ride !