Hope everyone had a good Christmas. Ours was very busy and I'm looking forward to a few days off now to relax (as much as you can with a 15 month old in the house!).

Nearly at the end of the year, in fact the end of the decade. It's a good time to look back on what's happened and take stock of the past, present and future.

2009 has ended well. My competition wins in December (three arriving in Christmas week) cheered me up no end. Although I have had a few problems this year, particularly with work, I am at least in work and nothing disastrous has happened this year in terms of death or illness.

We are a bit poorer financially than this time last year, a trend which looks like continuing for the forseeable future (lottery win permitting), but things could be a lot worse and there are plenty of people worse off than ourselves around the world.

I'm already looking forward to 2010. I've been hammering the competition entries over the last few days and am extremely confident that prizes will be showing up in January. I've already set up my 2010 competition wins page in anticipation.

I desperately need to lose weight and something drastic may need to be done on this front. My gym membership has had to be cancelled and I haven't had chance to try out my new running shoes with all of the snow and ice underfoot.

Need to do something with this website too. The money making DVD is still available as is the free money making ebook but neither have been making me any significant money so I'm looking at changing track. Not quite sure where to go at the moment but I have some time now to give it some thought and come up with some ideas.

Happy New Year to everyone. Hope 2010 brings you everything you wish for.

My latest competition win arrived today and has been added to my list of 2009 competition wins. It's an Anthony Worral Thompson Breadmaker from the Gadgetspeak website advent calendar comp.

According to the invoice enclosed with it it's worth around £100. A nice win. It's going to get some use to. My wife made some pate (following Jamie Olivers recipe from last week) and it is going to taste even better on some fresh home made bread.

We just need some time now to look at the instructions and work out what to do. Time is in very short supply at the moment as our toddler seems to get more of a handful with each passing day. At the same time I'm moving all of our family bank accounts from Lloyds TSB and it's taking a lot of time and effort to get it all sorted.

Unfortunately Lloyds TSB have let me down badly. I was with them for around 15 years but this apparently counts for nothing with them. Nor does the fact that during this time I paid all of my bills with them for loans, credit cards and mortgages on time by direct debit.

I'm still trying to sort out problems with my mortgage with them after several weeks in which they appear to have forgotten I exist. It will end up with a formal complaint being made and, ultimately, I will be moving the mortgage elsewhere too.

They are not only losing my accounts but those of my son and wife too. Don't suppose they care much, although they should do judging by the empty branch this morning when I went in. Only one other customer in, I've never seen it that quiet before. Clearly others are being treated in a similarly appalling manner and leaving in their droves!

Once you lose a customer in that way you will never get them back. I certainly won't be using Lloyds or any of their subsidiary companies again.

Good service on the other hand should be rewarded. I recently wrote about a good experience with Virgin Mobile. As a result I've upgraded my phone with them and taken out a new contract for my wife in addition. It has all gone through smoothly and she's happy with the new phone, and I'm happy with the tariff. I would recommend them to anyone.

This is probably going to be my last post before the 25th so have a Happy Christmas everyone and a prosperous New Year.

The first of my two "mystery" competition wins has arrived today and can therefore be added to my list of Competition Wins of 2009.

It is a pair of Salomon XT Wings running shoes, courtesy of the SAAB in motion website. They look absolutely fantastic and they will certainly get used as I will be starting running again soon now my gym membership has ended.

A quick search online shows them to be worth between seventy and eighty pounds. A nice win and the type of thing I could never justify buying in "real life". I would have to look for a second hand pair of running shoes on Ebay if I were paying for them myself.

Just in time for Christmas too. I might wrap them up for myself as we are having a VERY low-key Christmas this year. Than and I aren't really buying for each other and will probably only buy a couple of little bits for our son. He's still a bit too young to really understand what's going on at Christmas.

A lot of people I talk to at the moment are doing the same. For many people Christmas has lost it's magic. It's just become far too commercial and starts far too early.

As a reaction to this more and more people I meet seem to have an anti-Christmas feeling. I know I would rather be on the beach in Thailand supping a bear on Christmas day. Maybe when our son is older we will feel differently. But for this year we aren't getting involved.

Anyway if I don't post again before Christmas have a good one, whatever you are doing, and here's hoping 2010 will be a LOT better than 2009, which has been a pretty miserable year chez nous. All the best.

Just had a thought that the bumper money making DVD might make a good novelty Christmas present for anyone you know who wants to make a little extra cash.

At only £4.99 with free delivery it could be a bit of a stocking filler for someone. Before you wrap it up you could download it onto your hard drive so you can benefit from the thousands of programs yourself.

It contains over 4.4GB of data. When I was copying it yesterday it showed a total of 1,752 folders containing 33,806 files! At £4.99 that's 0.01p per file - 100 files for a penny. Great value.

You could also use the disc yourself to make some other Christmas presents. For instance hypnosis CDs, coasters, keyrings, horoscope forecasts, novelty bank notes.

To see some more ways you could use the DVD to make great Christmas gifts visit the bumper DVD page which lists just some of the contents.

I'm making it my mission to put ALL of the contents on this website. This means exploring all of the 1,700 plus folders, using the programs and info and cataloguing them all.

There's so much on there this is going to take some time so I'll break it down into smaller chunks. At 10 folders per day it's going to take me nearly 6 months working every day to get through all of the data!

Still, there are bound to be some nuggets of gold hidden away deep within the 30,000 plus files. It's going to be fun finding them and you never know, one of them could be the key to my fortune! I live in hope.

So for the perfect novelty Christmas gift for under a fiver buy the IYF Bumper DVD while stocks last.

I've just finished entering my competitions for today. It feels like ages since I had my last win. In fact it's just over a month according to my record of 2009 competition wins.

That was only a promotional glass, it's been a couple of months since my last "proper" win. My lack of success in comping this year pretty much mirrors how life has been this year.

Despite my best efforts we've really taken a couple of steps backwards this year. We're in a position where our income is not really enough to cover our outgoings. It certainly isn't going to cover extras such as a holiday or anything that is not absolutely essential.

It doesn't leave me very hopeful for 2010. We've already cut back about as much as is possible and most of our shopping is now done at the car boot. I don't want to buy anybody any Christmas presents this year. After all, what is the point of spending money we can't afford to buy presents that people don't really want?

Miserable, miserable, miserable. I just need something positive, something to go right to cheer me up.

I know I should count my blessings. I'm healthy, as are all of my family, and although life is a struggle financially it's not all about money.

I once read a book called "How to enjoy your life in spite of it all". Quite a long read considering the thought behind it was pretty simple. Too many people are striving to make their life's better in the future without enjoying the current blessings they have. Although I can see that this is correct, and that it applies to me as much as everyone else, it is very difficult to get into the right mindset to really enjoy life as it happens.

I find myself regularly looking towards retirement, wishing my life away, when I might not even make it that far! I bet retirement is not all its cracked up to be either.

So I need to sort out my current situation. I'm going to start some training in computers (CompTIA A+) as it is something I'm interested in and would enjoy doing as a job. This should also, in the fulness of time, lead to a better salary and perhaps enough to pay the bills with a (little) bit left over.

In the meantime I will continue to keep this site updated in the hope that it will eventually start to bring in some money. A bit of a vague plan but I'm finding less and less time to concentrate on it and give it the necessary focus.

Bottom line is I need to stop worrying and be happy. I'm putting a smile on my face now. Cheer up, life is good.

Our second competition is open for entries and we have to date received 182. Actually we have received a great many more than that, but unfortunately these were sent from an automated bulk entry system and have been deleted.

As a result of this attempt to cheat I have added an extra field into the comp form (post code) plus changed the validation question. This seems to have stopped the auto spammers for the time being.

If there is any question that other entries have been submitted via this method or that entrants are making multiple attempts to enter (remember it is only one entry per household) they too will be deleted.

It's only fair to the genuine competition entrants that people trying to gain this type of advantage are excluded.

Remember when entering competitions to check the rules before you enter if you are thinking of making multiple entries. Some competitions do allow them, or allow entries on a daily basis.

We don't, so keep your entries honest and you'll be in the draw for the mobile phone in December, despatched in time for Christmas.

Good luck to all.

I already have a page dedicated to free stuff which is for permanent free offers.

Occasionally I come across time limited free offers and these will be posted on this blog.

I've received an email from the Nokia music store today offering me 5 free tracks. They can be downloaded and played on a PC so no need for a Nokia phone.

They sent me a special link to sign up, however at the bottom it stated that there are more spare accounts (for a limited time only).

Click here for 5 free music tracks.

By signing up you are also entered into a competition for Christmas shopping in New York with $1500 spending money!

The PC software downloads quickly and easily and now its just a matter of choosing my free tracks.

Keep checking back for more free offers, in particular the free money making ebook which will shortly be available online.

It was around this time I anticipated posting my first excellent news about how much weight I had lost. However.....

Things have not gone to plan and I haven't lost any weight at all so far. Only good thing is I haven't put any on either. I've bounced around within a few lbs like a yo-yo.

In Wii Fit terms I have been bouncing between the top of overweight and the bottom of obese. Whenever I hit OBESE it gives me an extra push to exercise a little more just to get back to overweight.

I could go into a number of reasons for my lack of weight loss, however I'm old enough and wise enough to realise that I would just be making excuses. I just cannot seem to get motivated enough.

In an effort to motivate myself I'm going to set myself a goal of losing three stone by the end of the year. I might even consider getting sponsored to do so to give me a little extra push.

It is ambitious, but I would rather set a hard goal than make it too easy and try to do it all at the last minute. Three stones in four months means I have to start now and start working hard straight away.

I'm going shopping later and I will take a look at the diet pills and products whilst avoiding the cake and biscuit aisles.

OK some of you may think it is too early to be thinking about Christmas but it will soon come around again and many shops will be starting their Christmas displays in the coming weeks.

One of the reasons for this blog entry is to talk about budgeting for Christmas so the earlier you read this the better.

It is difficult to be indifferent about Christmas, most people love it or hate it. Personally I am nearer to the latter category thanks to the rampant over-commercialisation and the expectation of a food/drink/cash binge.

However, as my wife and family don't agree with me I have to make a token effort (and it will be a VERY token effort) and buy a few gifts, food etc.

As money is tight, finding an extra couple of hundred quid in December is not going to be easy so I have set up a better way of budgeting.

Over the past few months, in light of a very tight budget generally, I have restricted food shopping to once a week. We make a list in advance and try not to deviate from it.

At first I did not restrict how much we spent, I just monitored the situation to find out exactly how much we were spending. It worked out around £55-60 per week.

Then I set a budget of £50 per week and added up the items as we went around (much to my wifes displeasure and embarrasment!) to make sure we did not overspend.

Once we were managing at £50 per week I reduced it to £45 per week and this has been the figure for several weeks now. It is difficult to go below this as it includes formula milk, nappies, wipes etc. for the baby which we can't skimp on!

By the way, we are not exactly starving on this new £45 budget, as can be seen from my belly photo, so a lot of the extra cash we were spending was just wasted on unecessary items.

So we are spending around £45 per week on food and around £15-20 per week on diesel (I can't reduce this as I need to get to work).

I have obtained a cashback card which gives me a 5% discount off my shopping and petrol. This is NOT a credit card, you have to load it with money first.

We are loading it with £300 on the first of every month and this covers our shopping and diesel costs of around £250, leaving around £50 in the account each month.

By Christmas this should have accumulated to around £200-250 (we started in August), enough to pay for Christmas, plus we get 5% off everything we spend.

Using this card gives us more control over our spending as well as the added bonus of a 5% discount.

This is a much better idea than putting Christmas on your credit card and worrying about how to repay it in January.