If your money means a lot to you, we’ve got you covered.
Are you stuck when it comes to finding affordable activities for the family that are fun and worth the effort?
London remains a popular destination for family breaks as there’s an array of things to see and do all year round, from taking in some of the most iconic landmarks in the world to going to watch West End musicals.
Here are a few suggestions on the best places to visit while in the capital.
Beyond the usual eight to 10 hours when the children are firmly tucked away in bed, and you’ve slogged for a couple of hours to tidy up toys and scrub of strange things from surfaces, walls and tables that you can’t imagine the ingredients of, it is possible to keep your home clean with the kids around…if you have a plan!
Here are some tips to keep on top of the mess and stay sane:
1. Slog alone and tidy alone for life!
Mess in the home is not created by you alone, so it takes a joint effort to get things clean again.Get everyone involved in the housework from day one and you’ll start to cultivate a culture of cleanliness.
Everything from tidying up toys to sprucing up rugs with carpet cleaning shampoo can be done by children if you teach them. But if you want to play the martyr, you’ll be slogging for life, so start while they’re young and it will make cleaning seem effortless.
The Suffolk County Council have promised their constituents faster broadband by the end of the year. The pledge was aimed at those who still rely on dial-up connections, most of whom reside in the rural parts of the county.
But with Council leader Mark Bee claiming that in some cases the connection speeds were slower than a dire 60kbs, how important is fast broadband?
The average broadband speed of the Suffolk region is cited as 5Mbps. That’s 1.7Mbps slower than the British average. To put things into further context, the British average itself is 37th in the world broadband speed test!
School holidays are typical times of the year when website traffic goes down – with juggling the demands of the children at home and just not having enough time or energy to browse, the impact hits everyone, so don’t get despondent if you notice that your website traffic suddenly takes a dive!
The main goal for most internet marketers would be to try and get as many visitors as they can. And yes – if you have an online business that you are promoting online, you fall into the ‘internet marketer’ bracket, too!
Driving more traffic can be very easy for some people, but for others it can be an impossible task – especially if you don’t really know what you’re doing.
The problem really lies in your strategy and the things that you write about on your website. Is it worth reading? Is it something that people will click on if they read the excerpt on Facebook?
On the back of the success of our sister set, www.babyonboardbadge.co.uk, we know that selling online is a lucrative way for anyone to make money. And for mums, it can give the earning potential and flexibility that many crave.
Is this your dream, too? Or maybe you already have an online store but aren’t making the money you know you can and should be making…
Once you’re successful enough to establish your own business online, you should move on to coming up with ways on how to increase your sales overnight. Here are two quick and effective tips to help you seeing a change in your fortunes:
Are you struggling to get a decent meal on the table because you’re tired when you get home from work? Are ready meals ruling your life, your pocket and your waistline?
Do you feel guilty your children don’t know that chips are made from potatoes and don’t come from a paper bag or box?
Do you wish you could get the time to bake like those perfect Steford-style mums at the school gate, who are constantly showing off their perfect cupcakes at every opportunity?
Does your heart race like an adrenaline junkie at the thought of making a Sunday roast for the in-laws, because you can never get it as perfect as how your mother-in-law says she does it?
Don’t feel guilty, do something about it – we tested out some products from Lakeland that will make cooking a doddle (ok, less than the effort you put in now!):
Did you know that you can claim tax on your utility bills if you work from home? Did you know that you can claim tax on that mobile phone you took out just for business?
Whether you’re self-employed or own a limited company, thee are tax breaks that many of us are unsure of the legality of claiming, or don’t know at all.
Listen to this podcast with mum, accountant and partner of Wellers Accountants Norma Stewart to find out what you should be claiming, and start clawing back something from the tax man in time for the January online tax return deadline.
Are you a mumpreneur or business mum who often works from home with the children on hand? We’ve got some product reviews that will help make the juggling act a little easier.
Do you drop of cake creations or other products to customers using your car? Do you drive to and from business meetings with your family car? And all with your standard car insurance policy?
If you answer yes, to even one of these questions, have you spoken with your current car insurance policy provider to check that you are covered?
By law, if you use a vehicle for work, you need to take out the right insurance cover. Even if you use your own car, a private policy is will not provide sufficient cover if the worst should happen. And even worse, not having the right cover may even be invalidated if you use your vehicle for business purposes.
I’m a firm believer that everyone has a business idea in them. Quite often, a great business idea is staring us right in the face, but we just don’t see it – and part of that blindness is thinking that every business needs tens of thousands of pounds to get it off the ground. Wrong!
You really don’t need so much money all the time – many businesses only need a little time and attention and minimal financial investment (less than £100) to get it off the ground. Quite often the huge investments that we see on programmes like Dragon’s Den are needed for big marketing and promotion campaigns, and perhaps to buy a huge bulk of the product to supply demand and grow the business faster.
If you’re looking for a way to fund your business, there are a variety of ways to raise that finance and the best for you depends totally on your product, your market, your business’s financial requirements and most importantly, your personal and financial situation.
A frustrating bugbear for many working mothers is having to attend meetings near and far that have cost implications as well as a knock-on effect on things like childcare and home life in genera. This is where telephone conferencing offers a variety of impressive business solutions.
Conference calls are a great way of staying in touch with a wide range of people all over the world without having to spend hours and potentially whole days at a time travelling to and from scheduled appointments with clients, suppliers or work colleagues.
This also means you can improve productivity and slash outgoings.
Kids retuning to school today? Feeling like you really don’t have the energy to get back on that work-life treadmill again? You’re not alone, but instead of looking for a pity party, take action today and things could start looking different by the start of the next school half term.
The trick is not to focus solely on the money you want to make – choose a business that you actually like.
If it uses your strongest abilities, skills, or talents, all the better. If it doesn’t, thats not a big deal – as long as you are willing to keep learning , you can develop the necessary abilities, skills, or talents as you go along.
Here are three tips for getting into the right business for you:
It never ceases to amaze me how quickly children young and older can create ingrained mess in the car, but it is a little embarrassing if your mum’s taxi never seems to be clean.
The essential car vac
There are a lot of car vacs out there, but a lot of them just don’t seem to have the suction power needed to really picky up crumbs other culprits from those hard-to-reach parts of the car.
Balancing a working life with family commitments can be a struggle for most people, not least mumpreneurs who work from home. While days can often drag out and prove frustrating in the office, mumpreneurs work with the children in tow, and they usually want nothing short of the impossible: mummy’s undivided attention.
One of the many challenges facing any business owner is that of cost control. As energy prices spiral, mumpreneurs and other firms are increasingly looking to compare business electricity prices to save money on energy bills. Listed below are five ways in which energy costs may be reduced as part of a cost control initiative.
