Thanks to a great tip-off from the wonderful girls over at beaut.ie, I ordered my free silver jewelry from www.silverjewelryclub.com - like the girls, I was a little skeptical at first, but Aphrodite did a good bit of research into the company in question and it was all above board - though it beats me as to how they are making any money off this!

Best explained by Aphrodite:

This is how it works. Four pieces of jewellery (it could be rings, earrings, bracelets, pendants, for men or teenagers etc) are displayed for 15 minutes or so. The stones are usually amethysts, garnets, periodots, citrines, topaz and the like - very nice. The clock ticks down and when they’ve had their 15 minutes of fame they’re replaced by other pieces. Click on the item you like and you’ll get lots more details about it - gemstone weight, value of the piece etc. Click on the Get This Free button and you’ll be taken to a page so that you can pay the $8.99 for postage. If you have a Paypal account you can pay this way, but if you don’t then it doesn’t matter. By clicking on the Paypal link you get an option to pay by credit card.

I ordered 7 pieces in my first couple of hours on the site! They are gorgeous looking and well photographed. 5 of my pieces arrived in the post today and they’re well worth the $8.99 shipping fee (even if it only cost the company $0.84 to send them!), even if the pendants are a little smaller than I expected - major kudos must be given to their photographer, he certainly knows his macro shots! But they will make perfect little stocking fillers.

One final thing to be wary of - choose your size carefully on the rings - one of the ones I ordered was a size 9, and I figured that I could always wear it as a thumb ring, but it’s swimming around even on that finger (I do have fairly skinny fingers), so I’ll have to see if it will fit any of my friends!

If you’re not patient enough to wait for the items to change every 15 mins, then you can go directly to their full catalogue at www.peora.com where you can purchase all of the silver jewelry items and many more things for low prices.

So what do you think of my choices?

With Xmas coming, people are starting to buy their Christmas presents and more and more of these are being bought online. If you’re anything like me, then you try to get the best value for money and I’ll certainly be doing some of my shopping on ebay this year.

One thing that bothers me about ebay is that I hate having to constantly check on my auctions, even keeping track of them via email can be a pain! I also end up spending more money if I get into a bidding war in the last few hours of the auction, often going past the limit that I had set for myself!

I’ve now found a tool that helps me to control my spending and helps me to win more auctions. AuctionSniper is a fully automated tool that will place your max bid for you just seconds before the end of the auction, helping you to avoid bidding wars and win your auctions for the lowest possible price.

As a nice touch, you get three free snipes just for signing up, after that it only costs you 1% of the final auction value, with an min of $0.25 and up to a max cost of $9.95 - but be honest, how often do you purchase something worth $995 or more??? They bill the charges to your credit card, but only when your balance exceeds $2.50, otherwise it gets rolled over to the next month (for a max of three months).

Best of all, you can earn another three free snipes for each person that you refer to AuctionSniper - so if you fancy trying it out, please click on My Referral Link, sign up and earn me a few more free snipes!