With the plan to get things for free I have been entering competitions. The other day I went to the Radio Times festival with tickets I won on their website. I got to see a talk from the writer of one of my favourite shows which was wonderful and would have cost me £30 for the 2 tickets. Entrance to the actual festival area was free which was not very well publicised so we could have gone and just not see the show and still had a good afternoon and if they run this again I might do that. There was a BBC experience where you could try all sorts of things including reading the news, doing the weather (which was emailed to you!) and having a fake photo with DR Who (printed out there and then for free), the CBBC Arts magazine were doing free crafts for children and best of all the ITV stand were giving away free water, popcorn and pick and mix sweets! 

However as this is supposed to be a money saving page then need to fess up about being disorganised as something else came up in the morning and as a result spent some money on the day which had not been the plan. Firstly parking - I did not leave enough time to park a little further away and walk so ended up in the paid for car park £8 (could also have saved money if I had pre-booked). I also did not manage to make the planned picnic so spent money on a pizza which was very tasty but cost £12, we also left the water bottles we nearly always take with us on the side at home (as my 6 year old companion pointed out 5 minutes down the road) so we bought some drinks before we discovered the free water from ITV.com.
So on balance £25 for the day was over budget but we still managed to get about £45 worth of freebies for the day and really enjoyed ourselves and it definitely counted in my eyes of one of life’s little bonuses.