How You Can Save Money & Energy the Easy Way

According to the Daily Telegraph it’s easy to save over £235 a year (nearly $500) on your energy bills. I’ve summarised each point.

• Be cold - Turning your thermostat down by one degree centigrade could save a typical home £49 a year.
• Be dark - Switch off four unnecessary lightbulbs and you could save £32 a year.
• Be thrifty - If you always boil the amount of water needed for one cup rather than boiling a full kettle, you could save £30 a year.
• Be dirty - Washing laundry at 40 to 60 degrees centigrade in your washing machine could save you £12 a year.
• Be even colder - Setting your heating to turn off one hour before you leave the house and come on half an hour before you get home could save you £51 a year.
• Eat with your hands - Only using your dishwasher when it is full could save you £15 a year.
• Be sensible - Leaving your TV and all accessories attached to it on standby all the time could cost you £46 a year.

British Gas (link to their Energy Savers Report) reckons that for every £3 spent on heating and lighting our homes, £1 is wasted through poor energy efficiency. Fair enough, sounds like becoming more energy efficient is a good thing for the environment and your wallet. Investing in solar energy is getting cheaper however it currently takes about 26 years to pay back the investment in savings. I think I’ll wait. Soon we’ll look at various ways to help the environment and yourself. After all, green is the new black.

Lend Money to the Developing World

Kiva is a non-profit site that allows you to lend money to someone in the developing world, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty. Essentially you can “sponsor a business”. It works in 4 steps:

- Lenders pick a business and make a loan using their credit card.
- Kiva transfers funds to local partners. Partner disburses loans to each business.
- Over time, partner collects repayments and provides business updates at Kiva.org.
- Funds are returned to lender. Lender may withdraw or re-loan.

The website says:

“Kiva is using the power of the internet to facilitate one-to-one connections that were previously prohibitively expensive. Child sponsorship has always been a high overhead business. Kiva creates a similar interpersonal connection at much lower costs due to the instant, inexpensive nature of internet delivery. The individuals featured on our website are real people who need a loan and waiting for socially-minded individuals like you to lend them money.”

If you’re looking to invest some money, why not give it a go?

Found via: Read/Write Web

Find jobs for people. Find people for jobs

Zubka is a site that allows you to recommend people for jobs and allows you to be recommended for ones too.

Based on the idea of social networking and personal recommendations, the site pays you financial rewards for finding people for jobs they have on offer.

Usually this is between 6% and 8% of the jobs starting salary, so can be a nice bonus for you. It’s relatively cheap for a company to advertise on the site and the fee is no more than a normal recruitment agency charges.

Source: Springwise

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