Hi Guest,

We are now giving away one 12 month membership per week to the person who donates the best tip to the Savings Vault. Everyone can enter. If you are already a member you win an extra 12 months added on to your existing membership.

This week The Smiths has won 12 months membership to the Savings Vault with this great hint:

Deal-free mail box delivers real savings

We're saving over $600 a year by steering clear of discounts, two-for-one deals and coupons! We were signed up with several websites offering cheap grocery deals and discount coupons and we'd scour the weekly junk mail for grocery specials. Nearly everything we purchased was cheaper, never full price. We thought it was fantastic that we were saving lots of money on groceries, services (for example, my hair cuts), gifts and medicines and still getting the odd treat for ourselves.

Then, during our last $21 Challenge it hit us - nearly everything in our pantry and freezer had expired! Ice cream for $1.00/litre is not cheap if you throw out eight litres because it's so old it has turned into icicles! The groceries would often remain unused and we also started running out of places to store the 'cheap things' we bought that seemed such a good idea for housework or cooking. We even had a few restaurant vouchers that expired because we didn't get around to using them!

Enough was enough. We decided to cancel all electronic newsletters and put junk mail in the recycle bin before reading it. I now just buy what is needed and although we sometimes spend more on one item, we are saving overall. We shop at stores that we know are cheap, buy only what we need regardless of the special and Google discount codes prior to purchasing anything online. Our grocery bill has dropped by $25-30 a month and our miscellaneous spending has dropped by around $30 a month - that's over $600 a year - and we have less clutter! Our next step is to put a 'no junk mail' sign on the letter box!

The best way to win a membership is to write helpful, interesting, unique and error free hints. You need to include how much money you saved, how you saved it, what you did and how much you paid. The more detail you provide the more likely you are to win a 12 month membership.

You do not have to answer all the questions to enter the competition. Each hint entered is judged separately. If you send 5 hints. They will be considered 5 separate entries. Which means you have a much higher chance of winning by entering one or two top quality hints than if you entered twenty brief, vague tips. Quality is everything!

If you do not have an answer to a question, or it does not apply to you, please leave it blank.

Thanks for giving it a go. Good luck!

Many grins,
Fiona