What You've Missed with Coles/Woolworths Click and Collect

Whether you are on Centrelink or you are corporate high flyer, everyone has to do their groceries. The question nowadays is, how do you do your groceries? Of course there is the traditional way of shopping in person at your local supermarket. However, the supermarket giants have been offering two new ways to shop which are an answer to the internet shopping revolution upon us.

There is the delivery which is pretty self explanatory. You have your groceries delivered to your door around the time that you request them to be delivered from their website. Then there is the usual $100 minimum order if you want your shopping delivered which is a bit more than the usual weekly grocery bill for most households. 

However, many people have not taken up "click and collect". This is the service where you order your groceries online and the store will collate your order so that you can pick it up in store. Click and collect is free but there is a minimum order required. For Coles, the minimum order is $50 and for Woolworths it is $30. 

We have been using this service for quite a while with mixed results. Each time, it would take about 5-10 minutes of waiting around for the staff to get your order from the back of the supermarket. The advantage of this approach is that it even factoring in the wait, you do save some time and you don't buy a lot of the impulse purchases you normally end up with when you're cruising the aisles. Also, if they get the order wrong (which they do!) you can rectify it straight away. The other advantage is that we often receive more than what we ordered because when you order vegetables, fruit, meat or poultry, you pay for a minimum weight so the store has to supply at least that weight of the product. Often they would have to go significantly over when stocking the goods. For example, we ordered a 400gm steak and got a 600g steak for the price of 400gm. There is also no need to wait around for the delivery driver. 

The disadvantages? You can't order online some of those markdown specials that happen when items are closer to expiry. Also, the terms and conditions for click and collect suggest that if you forgot to pick up your order, you could end up being fined! From the Woolworths website, we see this 

If you do not collect your grocery order within the booked collection window then we may charge you a fee of up to $25 and and the cost of any perishable items (e.g. fresh fruits and vegetables) will apply. In this instance, we will endeavour to contact you or you may contact us to arrange for collection at a different time, and we may charge you an additional fee for that replacement order.

So having said all that, how will you do your next grocery run? Are you going to click and collect? Or are you sticking with the traditional pick and pay? 

Google Drive Flooded With Synced Photos

Recently, Google made all your auto backed up photos and videos available to Google Drive. This has meant that whenever you take a photo or film a video, the file is uploaded to your drive.google.com list. 

This can be quite annoying if you actually use Google Drive as it was initially intended as the Google Documents suite. Now, when you sort your Google Drive by "Recent" your Google documents and spreadsheets are interspersed by images and video files. This can be somewhat annoying. If you know a solution to this, please leave a comment. If you found this post because you are looking for a solution, leave a comment so that I know I am not alone!

Telstra $30 Sims for $1 at Coles

This week at Coles, you can get a $30 Telstra sim for only $1 when you spend $30 or more. Why would you want to get a sim card when you already have a phone? The sim card enables you to get $30 of Google Play or iTunes credit which you can use to buy apps, music or hire movies through those stores. Read more here to find out how you can maximise your $1 sim card from Telstra just by thinking outside the box.

Other posts

• How to Maximise Your Telstra $30 starter sim

Hotelclub - Best Times to Book a Hotel in Australia

Hotels and airlines have their revenue managers whose job is to optimize their revenue throughout the year and depending on where you are looking, there are good times and bad times to book a hotel. Thanks to Hotelclub, here are the good times according to their analysis, to book a hotel around Australia and how far ahead you should book.

Location	Cheapest month	How far ahead
Wellington	January	2-7 days
Auckland	July	1 day
Christchurch	October	61-90 days
Adelaide	July	1 day
Hobart	July	1 day
Canberra	August	2-7 days
Queenstown	May	1 day
Gold Coast	March	1 day
Brisbane	January	15-30 days
Melbourne	April	91+ days
Darwin	November	8-14 days
Perth	January	31-60 days
Sydney	July	1 day

Tips When Renewing Your Home & Contents or Car Insurance

I've just gone through the annual ritual of sorting out my car and home insurance and there were some interesting observations and tricks that I saw the insurance companies playing.

First of all, when you receive the renewal notice, if you want to stay with the same insurance company, you can still save about $20 on your car insurance or $70 on your home insurance by getting a new quote from the same insurance company online. This worked for me with RAC.

With home and contents insurance, I noticed that the amount insured for both the home and contents had increased by 5%. Standard practice but if you think you don't need to index your house to the 5% inflation assumption, you can manually adjust your amount insured down to what you want which will save you on your premium.

Also, it pays to shop around. Take some time to go through at least two other insurance company websites to get different quotes before committing yourself to another year with your existing company. Don't be deceived - their loyalty reward is often much less than what you can get from a rival insurance company - I'm particularly looking at SGIO who quoted my car insurance at $1,017 compared to RAC which was $557.

When entering your details in getting a new quote, watch out for changes to your selected variables. For example, when I changed the date to start my insurance on the RAC website, my excess figures changed as well from $500 to $650.

Of course everyone's experiences will vary but the above should save you a few hundred dollars. To those who can't be bothered shopping around and happy to pay the lazy tax, sorry I wasted your time reading this :)

New Eve Fireworks in Perth tonight

If you are looking to get to a fireworks display tonight for new years eve celebrations in Perth, here are the approved fireworks displays for tonight. Apologies for the format

• 31/12/2014 11:59 PM  SWAN RIVER OPPOSITE  THE LEFT BANK  RIVERSIDE DR  EAST FREMANTLE WA 6158  THE LEFT BANK NYE CELEBRATIONS 
•  31/12/2014 11:59 PM  EASTERN END HEIRISSON ISLAND OPPOSITE  CROWN CASINO  CAUSEWAY  EAST PERTH WA 6004  CROWN NYE FIREWORKS DISPLAY 
• 31/12/2014 11:59 PM  LEIGHTON BEACH  LEIGHTON BEACH BVD NORTH FREMANTLE WA 6159  BIB AND TUCKER NYE FIREWORKS 
• 31/12/2014 9:00 PM  WESTERN FORESHORE WAR MEMORIAL LEIGHTON RD HALLS HEAD WA 6210  CITY OF MANDURAH NYE FIREWORKS DISPLAY    
• 31/12/2014  11:59 PM  CANNINGTON GREYHOUNDS ALBANY HIGHWAY & STATION ST CANNINGTON WA 6107   CANNINGTON GREYHOUNDS NYE CELEBRATIONS 
• 31/12/2014 11:59 PM  SWAN RIVER IN FRONT  OF RPYC  AUSTRALIA 11 DR  CRAWLEY WA 6009  ROYAL PERTH YACHT CLUB NYE CELEBRATIONS 

Other parts of WA

• 31/12/2014 7:00 PM  ON BARGE  HANOVER BAY  ALBANY WA 6330  ALBANY NYE CELEBRATIONS 
• 31/12/2014 9:00 PM  ESPERANCE BAY  JAMES ST  ESPERANCE WA 6450  ROTARY OF ESPERANCE BAY NEW YEARS EVE 
• 31/12/2014 11:59 PM  VAL STREET JETTY  VAL ST  ROCKINGHAM WA 6168  ROCKINGHAM NYE FIREWORKS DISPLAY 
• 31/12/2014 10:30 PM  BUNBURY TROTTING CLUB HANDS AVE  BUNBURY WA 6230  BUNBURY TROTTS NYE FIREWORKS