Are you looking for apps that can help you save money when shopping? I am not surprised! I was too. Everything just seems exponentially more expensive than it was a year or so ago. The cost of living is always rising and making it harder to save money. Restaurant prices seem to have added another £5-10 to everything on the menu. Even when you try to be good and cook from home, it seems like that food bill is creeping up all the time. It would be better if this price inflation was restricted to food items but inflation is rife across the whole economy.Retailers are being forced to pass the increasing supply chain costs onto the customer. So, it’s 100% a good thing that you are looking for apps that help you save money when shopping.
What About Cashback Websites?
There are some decent cashback apps out there such as Quidco, I think I’ve earned around £23 cashback from them. My girlfriend is the real expert with £292 in cashback and another £62 tracked! However, it’s not always convenient to use websites such as Quidco. You also can’t use them on the retailers you regularly shop at.
It’s the big ticket items and regular purchases that we want to target. We need continuous and effortlessly earned cash back coming back into our wallet as we go about our day.We also need a way of automating the process of earning cashback so it’s not such a conscious effort to click through a link. Then wait months for the cashback to arrive so we can withdraw it. Our psychology is based on instant gratification and we need to get that money back in our pocket right away.
The Search For Apps To Help You Save Money When Shopping Is … Over
There is a fantastic app called Curve that can meet all your cashback needs. It’s the perfect solution for helping you save money on your shopping. It’s so easy to earn cashback just by paying on the card! It’s even easier to spend your cashback. It gets better. Curve is a payment card that aggregates multiple payment cards through its accompanying mobile app, allowing a user to make payments and withdrawals from a single card.
Don’t worry, there is a ‘go back in time feature’ that lets you switch the bank card you paid with even after you have already paid. It’s pretty fun to see the ‘flux capacitor’ from Back To The Future Wirr Up For A Few Seconds, as you rewind time to move the payment to a different card.
How Does The Cashback Work?
There are different layers of cashback with your Curve membership and you can upgrade or downgrade each month. It’s quite flexible and there aren’t any lock-ins. With a regular Curve account (which is FREE) you’ll receive 1% cashback on everything for 30 days. You can also use the cashback offers they have at the time. These offers come and go but there do seem to be brands that have consistently featured.Since joining Uber Eats has been a regular feature on the available regards with between 20-31.5% cashback, as has Uber 21% cashback and Amazon Kindle (25% cashback). Tell me where else you can get 21% cashback on your Uber trip.
However, you can also upgrade to get:
- 1% cashback on three selected retailers for an unlimited time with ‘Cuve Black’.
- 1% cashback on six retailers ‘Curve Metal’.
At the time of writing this article I’m using Curve Metal and have been using it for around a month. With Curve Metal you also get Worldwide Travel Insurance, Phone Insurance, Car Hire Excess insurance and discounted lounge access via Lounge Key. Along with Access to fair FX rates and unlimited Fee-free foreign ATM withdrawals.
All this can add up to some serious savings if you are buying all of these individually. However, Curve Metal will cost you £15 per month so you have to weigh up the cost vs the benefits as it could be quite close. Curve Black is slightly less at £10 a month and you still get Worldwide Travel Insurance. Access to fair FX rates and unlimited Fee-free foreign ATM withdrawals.
How Much Money Have I Earned So Far?
My six selected retailers are Sainsbury’s, Marks And Spencer, Booking.Com, Netflix, Lidl and Morrisons. This combined with the 1% cashback on everything has earned me £8.57 so far. That’s just from going about my day making my regular purchases for 30 days. Don’t forget the likes of Sainbury’s and Morrisons also have petrol garages so if you are filling up every week you can earn some serious cash back just by filling up your car.
I also used £1.75 of that to buy a coffee during my rare trip to the office. As you can either set your ‘Curve Cash’ to spend automatically when a purchase is under your current Curve Cash balance or switch it off if you want to build up your cashback balance.
Unfortunately I didn’t start using the Curve Card until my recent visit to Seville and Cadiz otherwise I would have earned back a decent amount with the current 3.93% cashback on booking.com and 2.62% on Expedia. We must have spent close to £400 on hotels which would have been around £15.72 cashback with Booking.Com. So I’m looking forward to my next trip so I can use all the cashback offers and the airport lounge access!
Conclusion… Curve Is An Ideal Cashback Solution
In an ideal world, we should be layering up our cashback offers where possible to get those extra savings. For example, use Quidco, reward card and your Cuve Card all in one. For example, I went to Sainsburys the other week and got:
- 1% Curve cashback (because you get 1% back on every purchase in the first month)
- 1% with my 1% cashback because Sainos is one of my selected retailers for cashback.
- Regular Nectar Card Points because my Curve card is connected to my Nectar Card
- 500 bonus points because I added my Sainos Bank credit card to my Curve Card.
I’ll admit layering up in this way is a rarity for me, even for a money blogger I’m pretty slack when it comes to cashback. It’s usually my girlfriend that prompts me to use Quidco.
This is why Curve is the optimal solution for me, I don’t have to keep looking for apps that help you save money when shopping. This automated approach is the fundamental reason I use a range of Fintech apps to streamline the process of saving money. For example, Snoop can compare and find you better deals on your bills.
It just happens automatically and transfers the cashback earned into a usable balance. Which can then be used to offset my spending and ultimately save me money. When I go shopping, I’ll just use my Curve Card to earn the cashback and the Nectar Card points (for example) all in one go.
A Curve Card Is Better Than FREE…
So look, there’s absolutely no cost to signing up for a Curve Card. You can combine all your cards into one and get some decent cashback for 30 days. Once you feel familiar with the card app, check out the upgrades and work out if Curve Black or Metal would work out for you.
With Curve Metal, you also get a card made of Premium 18g metal in one of three colours. So it has that extra premium feel. Which is a reason in itself to upgrade for a month to test it out! Oh, and I almost forgot! With my link you get £5 for just downloading the app too!
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