Oli Townsend

Assistant Editor – Deals

Oli has worked across MSE's Deals & Features team since November 2015 and assists with planning and editing the team's content. He also writes our cinema deals & tips guide, supermarket coupons round-up, Disney+ deals guide, and our Amazon Prime Day coverage.

As an MSE spokesperson, Oli has appeared on national and regional radio stations covering a variety of topics, including supermarket savings, motoring, online shopping tricks, saving while on holiday, cheap days out, TV streaming tricks and more. He previously joined the TalkRadio Breakfast Show for a weekly deals slot from December 2017 to March 2020.

He has provided comments for numerous publications, including the Daily Telegraph, The Sun, the Daily Mirror, Grazia magazine, and the Belfast Telegraph. His TV credits include contributing to two episodes of Channel 4's Tricks of the Restaurant Trade and ITV's Martin Lewis Money Show.

Before MSE, Oli worked as a presenter for a group of commercial radio stations (now known as More Radio) in Sussex, and wrote a monthly music column for a regional magazine.

In his spare time, Oli enjoys hiking and visiting new places. He's attempting to learn Spanish on Duolingo (the free version, of course).

Latest from Oli Townsend

Sainsbury's says it's unable to deliver the majority of today's (Saturday 16 March) online grocery deliveries due to a technical issue, which is also affecting contactless payments in its stores.

16 March 2024

If you've shopped at Ikea, you'll know how easily costs can add up when you pop in for a specific item and leave hours later with a car full of cacti and scented candles. So here are our tips to make your Ikea visits more efficient – and cheaper – including its furniture 'buyback' scheme, where to find ex-display or mildly damaged bargains, and how to get free tea and coffee.

12 March 2024

If you're particularly egg-cited for your Kentucky-fried fix of chicken, we've hatched some compre-hen-sive MoneySaving tips and tricks to save you a clucking fortune so you can build on that nest egg.

9 February 2024

Money Saving Expert's trick to get 2for1 movies and meals for a year for about £1

Meerkat Movies and Meals gets you 2for1 at cinemas on Tuesdays or Wednesdays and discounts at various restaurants (plus other discounts on takeaways and more) FOR A YEAR when you buy a qualifying product via comparison website Compare The Market.

8 February 2024

Amazon will be pumping out thousands of deals from 12.01am on Tuesday 10 October until 11.59pm on Wednesday 11 October for what it's dubbed 'Prime Big Deal Days' – try saying that quickly three times.

1 October 2023

Supermarkets try all sorts of tactics to make us spend more, and a trick of the eye means you could be missing out on the best value items every time you go shopping. Eye level is buy level, so it pays to look elsewhere.

14 September 2023

If Burger King takes the crown as your favourite fast food joint (or is one of them), then we've a royal rundown of tips and tricks to help make sure you don't pay a whopper of a price, and get more burger for your buck.

29 August 2023

Summer brings out the bookworm in many of us. And if you're looking for a page-turner to keep you gripped while on the sun lounger, digital books can't be beaten for convenience. So we've updated our 16 easy tricks to access thousands of e-books and audiobooks for free.

20 August 2023

Netflix axes cheapest ad-free plan for newbies.

Netflix has axed its cheapest 'Basic' advert-free plan for new and rejoining subscribers. It means they'll now have to pay £4 more a month (£48 a year) to watch with no adverts at the lowest price. The alternative is to pay less but to put up with adverts. Below we've got everything both new and existing users need to know.

19 July 2023

The MSE Forum's fourth Ask An Expert event was themed around travel and holidays. Lots of you posted questions, and deals expert MSE Oli answered some of them on camera. Read on for holibobs-themed wisdom, including whether or not you should be buying branded sun lotion and waiting last-minute for flight deals.

13 July 2023

Online retail giant Amazon will be pumping out thousands of deals from 0.01am on Tuesday 11 July until 11.59pm on Wednesday 12 July for its annual Prime Day* event. Despite the name, it actually takes place across 48 hours.

2 July 2023

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Prepayment meter customers typically pay more for their energy than those paying by direct debit. But the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt says from 1 July the "prepayment penalty" will end, cutting bills for over four million households.

14 March 2023

Millions of people have a hidden MoneySaving expertise, that even they are not aware of. While at work in current or past jobs, they learn insider tips or tricks about how things really work – and when they're in consumer facing industries, that means we may all gain.

20 February 2023

Energy companies have been called on to voluntarily stop the practice of forcibly moving customers to prepayment meters without taking every step to support households struggling to pay bills first. The message has been put forward in a letter to firms from business and energy secretary, Grant Shapps. It follows a reported surge in households being moved to prepayment meters over recent months.

22 January 2023

The MSE Forum staged its second Ask An Expert event last month. This time, deals and shopping were the focus. Our expert MSE Oli, Assistant Deals & Features Editor, took questions on everything from return rights to fancy Advent calendars.

20 December 2022

Three of the major mobile network providers incentivise customers through loyalty app offers, and in the last year, millions more can access these rewards with Virgin Media broadband customers now able to use Priority (previously just for O2) and Three launching its Three+ app for its mobile customers.

17 October 2022