Competition-Mad student wins enough to pay her fees
A competition-mad student has won £14,000 of prizes - enough to cover her first year at university. Chloe Bingham spends two hours a day entering the contests, and racked up her huge haul in just 5 months.
Chloe, who is originally from North London and is reading Film Studies at the University of Glasgow, told her student newspaper, The Tab, that she won 42 competitions between August and December - winning everything from tickets to V Festival to a VIP karaoke night. However, her biggest win so far has been a Currys and PC World competition she won last August.
She used glove puppets to act out the scene in Harry Potter when Harry is told he is a wizard. The competition was aimed at students, and she said she relied on the fact that students are quite lazy - so there wouldn't be too many other entries. Her film won her £10,000 towards her university fees, plus a tablet, toaster, headphones and an iron.
She has kept most of her prizes, or given them away to friends and family, but isn't averse to selling them and helping boost her university fund further.
Could you win?
Chloe has been entering competitions since the age of 11, and has become something of a specialist. She says she enters competitions with useful or interesting prizes, and tries to hunt down competitions where she feels there won't be many entrants.
If you want to follower her example, there are a few ways to get ahead of the pack.
1. Track down as many competitions as possible. One useful resource is theprizefinder, which lists current competitions. You should also keep your eyes peeled on social media and in the supermarket.
2. Look for lesser-known competitions too - such as those in local papers, or run in your area.
3. Split your time between those that are easy to enter and those that require you to do something - like take a photo or make a film. The harder ones tend to have better prizes, and fewer entrants, but the scatter-gun approach of entering lots of competitions can also pay off.
4. Set up an email address purely for competitions, because it will generate a lot of spam.
5. Employ technology. There are loads of shortcuts for competition fans. These range from rhymezone which will help you come up with a cunning rhyme to win a slogan competition, to oneacross.com which will help with crosswords, and roboform which automatically fills out forms for you.
But what do you think? Are you tempted to try your luck?
