A couple of years back, Halifax and a few other banks started offering incentives to shop with certain retailers if you activate a specific “discount”.  I think my biggest credit so far via this scheme was £3.40 for a tasty but overpriced Harvester breakfast.

Despite the relatively meagre pickings on offer I’m in the habit of activating all the offs available to me but never change my spending patterns to match.  I once generated 15p I hadn’t expected buying lunch in Waitrose when working in London and a couple of pubs have rebated modest amounts that I hadn’t expected because I didn’t realise they were part of a chain where I’d activated an offer.  Always a nice surprise, but in the great scheme of things small fry.

In reality, the offers I get seem to be for clothes retailers I’d never use, niche car hire companies and holiday firms I’m reluctant to utilise due to poor reputation.  But I do proactively trigger the offers just in case.

I waxed lyrical about the joys of TopCashback the other day and earned £15 on a car hire booking for the Atacama desert in Chile.  Yes, I will be driving Chris across the planet’s most arid landscape in something similar to a Ford Fiesta!

And I was more than pleased with the price I got and the cashback earned.  I usually prefer to use Avis for my car hire because they give me Avios back and, due to my preferred status, they automatically upgrade me and don’t try to flog he a series of insurances costing twice the price of the hire.  Avis don’t seem to operate out of Calama airport in the north of the country though so I checked a price comparison site and saw Europcar were there or thereabout for best buy.  Straight to TopCashback, purchase made, £15 cashback tracking, happy Dave.

But in the early hours of the morning, with insomnia in control, another moment of excitement in my life.  One of those offers from Halifax that I’d activated with little intent to use was Europcar.  An extra £23.90 will land in my bank account at the end of March that wasn’t even on my radar.  Easy money earned without realising it and generating of warm feeling of joy from getting two different discounts on a single purchase.

It’s not quite Extreme Coupining but I’ll take it!