If you’ve shopped at Ikea, you’ll know only too well how easily costs can add up when you pop in for a specific item and leave several hours later with a car boot full of cacti and scented candles. So here are our top tips to make your Ikea visits more efficient and cheaper – including freebies, store shortcuts, dodging queues and how you can ‘try before you buy’.

As I’m still in hospital battling Crohn’s Disease, I’ve been taking some time off from terrorising the supermarket till staff with my usual stacks of coupons… but what I have been doing is collecting them up for when I’m back on my feet. Nothing gets between the Coupon Kid and his coupons! As you may already know,...

The ‘Tempur Challenge’ is back and for many it’s the kind of deal dreams are made of –  what other offer have you seen where having a lie down gets you a £50 freebie? Until Sun 4 Mar, you can take the ‘Tempur Challenge’ – basically, it’s an easy bit of market research – to claim a...

Take a daytime nap and bag a free £65 pillow. It’s the kind of deal dreams are made of… Until Mon 7 Aug, if you’re near any branch of Dreams – the bed and mattress shop – you can take the ‘Tempur Challenge’ to claim a free travel pillow, which it normally sells for £65. Basically, it’s an...

Ikea’s hugely popular promotion, where everyone who scans its loyalty card when paying in stores gets a ‘free’ gift which could be worth £1,000+ or less than a quid, has been running since April but ends this weekend… It’s basically a prize draw, but a good one, and it’s been really popular in the past, because everyone who enters wins something – it...

If you’re shopping online for gifts, the deadline for ordering to get ’em in time for Christmas may be sooner than you think. Get it wrong and instead of presents under the tree, they could be held hostage at a courier firm’s out-of-town depot… To help avoid this, retailers now give their own final cut-off dates for orders you want...

Pucker up… there is a freebie you can claim this week which will send your Christmas spirit into overdrive – and I couldn’t keep tight-lipped about it. Starting today (Mon 12 Dec), Morrisons is giving away free sprigs of mistletoe to its customers at all 492 stores nationwide (find your nearest*). Over 50,000 sprigs will be given...

Platefuls of innuendos, rising drama and more than a sprinkle of controversy – The Great British Bake Off is nearly over for another year. With all eyes on the three finalists and their show-stopping baked beauties ahead of Wednesday’s final, we wanted to see if the high-end stand mixers they use in the ‘tent of dreams’ are...

Ikea’s promotion where everyone who scans its loyalty card when paying gets a ‘free’ gift, which could be worth £1,000+ or less than a quid. This was hugely popular when it ran from May to August, and now it’s back… This is basically a prize draw, but a good one, because everyone wins something – it might be a hot dog, which normally costs...