Half Price Half Terms? Yes Please

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This year has been the most difficult financially for us in the last 13 years we have been together.

With the cost of living rising in record time and money just not stretching we have had to make choices over the last year that have meant life has not been as fun as it has been in the past.

We have made choice to cut costs and in order to do that we have often just not visited places or eaten out because we just couldn’t afford it. However, with yet another half term approaching and funds still not readily available as they had been in previous years I have been looking at ways we can cut costs but also for us to still do something fun things with the kids. 

Recently I was signed up for something called tastecard membership and I was a little sceptical that we would save masses of money using it. After all I work for the NHS and have a ‘blue light discount card’ … But I was wrong. 

Before I share things on here, we decided as a family to test drive the tastecard membership to see if we could in fact save money so we can plan to do fun things with the kids this half term but at a much reduced cost.

The Test Visits:

I logged onto the tastecard app to see what restaurant deals in Nottingham there were for us to take advantage of. As a family we adore Bella Italia but often its out of our budget as it can be a little pricey 

So this week we visited our local branch of this lovely Italian and decided to see what we could save. 

All 4 of us went and had 2 courses, a starter and main and drinks. The bill came to £79.19 .. which was a little eye watering since we are trying to save money. We firstly asked the helpful staff if they could try out my NHS blue light discount card to see what the bill would be and that came back with a discount for us £19.73 off our bill. So was feeling rather smug. Until we tried our QR code from my tastecard app and it saved us a shocking £30.97 on our bill! blowing out my previous go to discount.

What was even better was the fact that anyone can apply for membership for the tastecard and it currently has an offer to trial it yourself for 60 for the cost of £1 or buy a full years membership for £34.99. We have decided with purchasing a further year’s membership when our trial runs out as you only need to have 2 meals out a year, and you are already saving hand over fist! The key to saving the most money is to ensure you read the small print. Sometimes kids’ meals are included and sometimes they aren’t so making sure you read the notes on the discount page means you can then maximise your saving.

In order to realistically look like what other savings we could make using it. We decided to look at booking something our family does enjoy and that’s visiting the cinema. On a normal cinema visit for us when we book tickets its costs us £42. However, when we purchased ticket codes from testcard for our local ODEON cinema there was a massive saving to be had as shown below, showing a saving of £19.76!  

ODEON is not the only cinema you can pick using the tastecard app as most major cinema operators are listed on there so I am sure you could find once locally to you too. 

Our total saving using tastecard = £50.73 with one cinema trip and one restaurant visit.

There are hundreds of restaurants and attraction providers listed so this half term I have doubling the fun and halving the cost with some much needed family time out out .. 

What are your plans this half term?