I paid about $1000 in fees/taxes for 5 return adult flights to Christchurch, everything else was QFF points. Plus my wife's annual dive trip to Bali is always QFF points too.

with your credit card can you get QFF and awards or is it one or the other

Dunno, what's the difference between QFF and awards?

the awards is for getting your food mixer and the like

OK, yes I think you can spend the points on both but I only ever spend them of Qantas/Jetstar flights

Cheers ,I'll check it out.

Get your ass outta oz . Its just so goddam expensive

I use the Woolworths card to pay for the groceries and it also acts as the rewards card so you get the points when they scan the barcode at the till as well as for the dollar spend each month.

Flown so far on Everyday Rewards/QFF points:
A business-class flight Perth to Johannesburg
An economy return Perth to Sydney
3 economy class flights Salzburg to Gatwick
3 economy class returns Perth to New Zealand
3 economy class flights Shanghai to Hong Kong

Only about 8000 of the points that I have, have been obtained through flights, everything else is on Everyday/Citibank rewards and I still have 125000 miles left.

Over the years I've done:

1 x Brisbane-Canberra-Brisbane
4 x Brisbane-Hong Kong-Heathrow-Singapore-Brisbane
2 x Business Upgrade: Singapore-Brisbane
2 x London-Paris,
2 x Amsterdam-London,
2 x London-Barcelona-London
2 x London-Prague-London
2 x London-Inverness
2 x Brisbane-Christchurch(NZ)-Dunedin-Christchurch-Brisbane

..and similarly almost all from regular spending going through the credit card.

QFF points don't have to be used for flights. You can exchange them for all sorts, eg Myer gift cards. Useful as I get DJ gift cards from the CC points.

I agree about the 6watt LED GU10 bulbs. We replaced all our lights in the hall and corridor with them and they are brighter than the 50 w halogens were. Daylight (5000 deg) bulbs are brighter - the warm white ones are daylights with a coating so can never be as bright.

Try to find a mentor to help you along and motivate you. Saving money sounds like an easy, comes assembled right out of the box, type thing but in reality it can be quite time consuming to come up with a good plan that you can splice into your everyday life.

For more general things:

Get rid of the CC cards unless you are one of a very small exception that pays them off on time and thus not incurring interest charges.

Re-evaluate all of the regular bills, i.e. your mobile bill, internet bill, electricity bill... and try to see if you can reduce them by moving to a cheaper plan within the provider (telstra internet you can to this) or by contacting the company and re-negociating price or threatening to leave. Do your home work first so you know what you can get and for how much, as the prick on the other end of the line will know and will tell you to get on your bike and piss off if you don't know what you're talking about...

Don't eat out for any reason.

Do you need more than one car. Emphasis on need

Find alternatives where possible. One thing about Australia is price vary wildly so do due diligence to find the best price. Op shops for cloths - I go there for my work cloths. Being in accounting now, fashion sense isn't a high priority. Instead of paying 100 for pants I pay 10.

Eat well. An expanding waist line will cost a great deal in needing new cloths. And eating well is actually cheaper than eating processed shit (meant literally and figuratively). Don't feed the kids, that way they won't grow and you'll save on new cloths... Also they'll be too weak to join sports and cost you more in reg fees and the likes.

Most important for longterm success.

This will take a few months to get to a point where it will pay off.

Make a spread sheet that accounts for every penny with everything itemised in columns along the top and the months and years along the left side.

Also separate them into fixed cost essentials and non-fixed essential (i.e. rent or mortgage, doesn't include groceries - will explain later) on the left, and non-essetial on the right. And total along the bottom of each period you track i.e monthly totals, weekly totals, what ever you think is the best metric for you. I do monthly totals and over all yearly totals.

I wouldn't break things down too far. I.e. don't try to track your milk expense just track overall grocery expenses, but do track alcohol on it's own or cigarettes... Track overall car expenses but make fuel a separate tracking item. And have a misc column for all those items that don't fit; like illegal drugs probably shouldn't be allocated it's own column for obvious reasons, maybe call it medicinal stuff...

After a few months of building up the data you'll be able to identify areas of spending that need to be looked at closer by the totals at the bottom of each period.

Groceries are put in non-essetial because there are many items you buy that are not essential and or are expensive and you need to cut them out, find alternatives or reduce them.

With that data in excel you can graph it all and and put in trend lines (if you don't know how to do graphs and trend lines google them - they're quite easy once you've done a couple). That way you can see progress and or see if improvement is needed. A falling trend line is always good. And when you get really good you can start to exclude outliers to reduce the influence of extremely unusual events like having to pay for your sex change operation or something like that.

So now you need to start making the trend lines fall as time goes by. Having everything in a spreadsheet will go a very long way to make this happen as you will have a picture of what, for the most part, is happening. Trying to work it out in your head is nearly impossible without such an aid as a spreadsheet.

Which is about 97% of the population. So in theory it's a sound idea, but you need to be very honest with yourself and make the decision based upon how well you think you can actually pull this off every month. It takes a very short time for cc debt to go completely pear shaped. CC companies are basically state sanctioned loan sharks nothing more and they love it when you get all out of sorts.

Then start buying "home brands" from woollies of ham and such. There's nothing natural in them to attacked flies.

I am 35 and I have never owned a credit card. I don't think this is clever and it doesn't make me any better than someone who does have a credit card.

I understand that credit cards can be very useful, especially overseas and travel booking I expect.

But I have made it through 35 years without the need for one and I can't see it changing any time soon.

Nothing wrong with owning a credit card at all, its just I have never filled out the forms sent by the bank (on many many many occasions)!!!!

Dickens got it about right -

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.

In short, spend less then you earn each month.