My journey into comping!

I’m trying to win an iPad 2 in the iSave, iWrite, iPad competition from PlayPennies.com!

Five or six years ago I became aware that some companies online gave out freebies, mostly small samples of their product for us to try before we buy. I joined a website that used to collate all the freebies and had a lot of fun there, made some friends and received quite a few things through the post. After a while there one of the friends I'd made told me about sites that list online competitions and I was curious, I'd been doing the weekly magazines for years and only ever won a set of make up brushes from Take A Break many many years ago! So off I trotted to the Competitions Time forum on MoneySavingExpert.com, to say I was shocked and totally overwhelmed would be an understatement! There were so many companies offering prizes ranging from stationery and promotional materials to houses, cars and even a boat!

So I had a look around and read some of the posts and started entering a few each day, a couple of weeks later I found an email from one of the magazine's online websites saying I'd won a prize from them (a pet poets calendar and book) I was amazed at how easy it was and started to enter a few more. Before long I was spending hours and hours online each day entering competitions but the wins kept coming, sometimes I'd have an email or telephone call telling me I'd won something but other times things would just appear in the post. It felt like Christmas most days when the postman delivered and I found myself getting more and more hooked as the more hours I put in the more things I won.

 At first I won things for us, then I started winning the Christmas and Birthday gifts for our family and friends, they knew how we'd got the gifts and seemed to be happy with them as everyone was getting much better gifts than we could have afforded to get them by buying them. This year has been more difficult so far though, a lot of people have started comping recently, some see it as a quick and easy way to make money when they see people winning lots of things and if you're lucky it can be but it can also be a lot of hard work, the trick to it is to not mind, to hope you will win something but to not rely on it and to make friends within whichever community you are a member of, seeing a friend win something when you have had a dry spell really does help keep you going and hoping for the comping fairy to smile down on you again.

I view my wins as all bonuses, lovely little surprises that turn up every so often and you can see how my winning has been going on my Kims Wins blog if you're curious. I've also just recently helped my Fiance's Sister's fundraising efforts by donating some of the things I'd won to top up her sponsorship when she ran the London Marathon and if you would like to sponsor her she's also doing both the Great North Run and Great South Run later this year for the Guide Dogs her sponsorship page is here.

So after hearing all that you probably want to know how come this is money saving, right? Well, in the past 3 years I haven't had to buy any toiletries as I've won loads, far too many for one woman, but they make great gifts don't they ;-) I've won things that we would have purchased anyway (a TV, Wii & Sainsbury's Vouchers) And I have a mountain of laundry detergent which I'm working through still not to mention all the cereal and just don't get me started on iPods, I think everyone we know has one of them now!lol I even won the Slimfast that I've been using to help me lose weight! So if you have a few spare moments I'd say try out a few, the only competition you really cant win is the one you don't enter ;-)