This is Not Work - time and money saving tips for parents

Dutch bike for £165 - and a new law to protect cyclists, please

A lot of people around here cycle to work. And of lot of those people have stories about unhelpful staff at bike shops. There is a lot of bad feeling towards cyclists from motorists and pedestrians but when the people employed to get you on the road in the first place are at the core of the problem it makes for a fully rounded miserable experience.

So what to do? Nothing is going to improve in road-user relations without a change in the law that makes motorists properly accountable for accidents, that makes cyclists face death by punching for jumping red lights and I'd propose a system that allows riders of bikes with say three gears or fewer the right to coast along the pavement when necessary.

Three gears would be a way of easily distinguishing between the psychopaths in their spray-on Lyrca outfits, who belong with the cars, and those of us who would happily leave the car at home if we thought there was an odds-on chance of arriving at our destination in one piece.

The trouble is, these types of bike are so ridiculously expensive that our friends at the bike shop proudly boast that no one buys them. Well, if I've still got your attention I've found one that costs a mere £165, including free delivery. Here:

> Women's Dutch-style bike

> Men's Dutch-style bike

The drawback is that you have to assemble it yourself, which requires a couple of spanners and more patience than I can ever aspire to, but says the instructions, if you have trouble you can always take it to your local bike shop to assemble. Doh.

Related

Cheaper cycling

- Why cycling is good for your wealth
- Ride a bike and save money
- Keep bike thieves at bay

Cheaper motoring

- How to find cheaper petrol
- Cheaper car insurance
- Cheaper breakdown insurance
- Diesel vs petrol
- Cars with cheaper tax

Asus EEE PC901: a £340 laptop that does the business

The growing popularity of laptop computers is a complete mystery to me. They are vastly more expensive than the desktop equivalent PC and they are downright fiddly to navigate. Yes, say fans, but you can plug in a mouse and an external monitor if that's a problem. So save your money and get a desktop.

However, there is a low-cost alternative that is worth checking out. Our colleagues at the Mail on Sunday have just started video reviews of the latest gadgets and one that caught my eye is of the ASUS EEE PC901, a brilliant little laptop that 'does the business'. It carries out most of your word processing, household and web browsing tasks.  And it runs Windows. The downside is there is no hard drive or CD drive. But they argue, you don't need that. The plus side, and it's a huge plus, is the price: a mere £340.

Watch the video:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/moslive/article-1038667/Turn-Lives-video-reviews.html

Another site worth checking is:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/index.aspx

Money - a poem

At This is Money we aim to provide everything you need to about money; how to make it and save it. But as the credit crunch shows no sign of abating with some families facing severe financial pressure it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that money is not the panacea the increasingly discredited financial services industry would have us believe. So today, I thought we'd check out this fine work from one of our great poets, Benjamin Zephaniah. It's basically everything else you need to know about money.

http://www.benjaminzephaniah.com/content/index.php

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How to get out of debt

How to get a pay rise

On the day a website is claiming to reveal the salaries of your colleagues now may be the time to remind yourself how to get a pay rise.

This lunchtime, take a quick look at our guide. It may inspire you to make that appointment with your boss.

How to get a pay rise

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Some gratutious pictures from TV show The Office...

How to work out your tax bill

Over the years online tax calculators have proved to be notoriously unreliable. People who start out with the right intentions realise that it's a complicated business and give up. But here's one that seems to be having an admirable stab at simplifying the sums. You enter your pay and choose a couple of options and that's about it.

Take a look at ...

Listen to the Taxman

Related

How to cut your council tax bill and win a rebate

50 free international text messages

In February, our parent company Associated Newspapers launched a mobile text service, MailTXT, aimed at slashing the nation's phone bills. And now the popular service has got even better as new users are being offered 50 free international texts.

The messages can be sent to any number anywhere in the world and after you have used your free allocation it costs a mere 1.4p to text a fellow user and 6.4p for a non-user. User-to-user texts within the UK a free.

Find out more about MailTXT

Beer for less than £1 a pint

There are two ways to drink beer at less than £1 a pint. One: travel. To Somalia, home of the world's cheapest pint, or to West Bromwich, which claims the title for Britain. And two: make it yourself.

For me the incident in my mum's airing cupboard 20 years ago put paid to any hopes of running an experimental micro-brewery from my bedroom - so Mogadishu it is. But there is evidence that the popularity of home brewing is rising, not to mention that some of the results these days are actually drinkable.

The downside of course is the danger that you'll become an overweight malt bore whose friends leave you alone with your cloudy sediment-filled keg in favour of the sanctity of the pub. But it's a small price to pay. And once you've made the initial investment in a keg and other bits and pieces, the price comes down. So where to start?

1. Watch the How to make beer video - it looks so easy

2.  Read the Brew it yourself forum for tips and advice 

3. Get hold of a starter kit for around £20 

4. Get on with it.

That's apparently all there is to it. But like everything you need to persevere and not be put off if your house explodes first time round. And if this is all still too expensive, you could try making prison wine (not for the faint-hearted or easily offended).

Related

Pint Price checker

The part-filled pint that sums up the state of Britain

Coming soon to your local pub - the £4 pint

How to cover school books without glue, tape, hassle, heartache or money

As every parent knows, in Retail Land - that deranged theme park which is always two or three steps away from reality - 'back to school' begins exactly one day after the last day of last term. Frankly, if you haven't bought the new pencil case, set square, compass, glue stick, uniform, shoes, High School Musical merchandise and iPhone by now you are a bad parent - or so our marketing chums would have us believe.

But if you are about to head to the stores to fill your basket with packets of stationery and other stuff that really should be offered from a bin marked 'straight to boot sale', consider this: you can save an awful lot of hassle and heartache and a bit of money by learning this brilliant technique on wrapping school books with a bit of paper and... no, that's it. The simple fact that you don't need to buy and wrestle with expensive sticky-back plastic is always a plus.

The videos may not be the best but the system takes about a minute to learn and it works.

Try this one, it's short and to the point:
Metacafe: protect your books without tape or glue

Another version featuring a brown paper bag direct from YouTube:

Related
How to get the best value education for your child

What's the most entertaining company?

On This is Money we have news archives for every company listed on the London Stock Exchange, and some that aren't (NRK). You can access the archive from the pages in our Company A-Z.  Or take this link and change the Epic= at the end (the stock market code for each company, eg RBS).

Archives are all very well, but only if the content is worth looking up. For this reason, my favourite company and by far and away the most entertaining - because of the mischief-maker in charge, Michael O'Leary - is Ryanair. Spend some time in here:

Ryanair news archive

Delicious way to find useful information

Finding your way around This is Money is hard enough (we're working on that) but the entire world wide web is mind-bogglingly big. As big as a googol, let's say. The search engine Google has become the most-popular way to find your way around it all. But there are alternatives.

One site that tried to help is called Delicious. When you find a website you like, instead of bookmarking it to your computer you bookmark it on the site. Then you can see who else has bookmarked it and then see the other sites that person has saved. That way, so the theory goes, you can find a whole bunch of stuff you may never have found that you may also be interested in.

http://delicious.com/

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