How I got £4000 of free money in 4 months [Clickbait]

This is a PSA - We’re all sick of clickbait titles.

Understand a good load of these titles are churned out to grab your attention or generate anger/debate

I thought I’d use this post as a way to help raise awareness of how these titles are created to grab your attention. I know what you’re thinking, it’s the fake news sensation that Trump has made into a trending topic. This article isn’t telling you how to spot fake news, after all many of today’s articles can be genuine news just.

A while ago, I was scrolling through articles on Apple News. This one article grabbed my attention. Disclaimer, I don’t like Love Island. This title just really got me.

Clickbait ahoy: Love Island: Joe snubs Lucie in SAVAGE tweet

As soon as I saw that title, I thought: “What could they have said?? It’d have to be really bad to be deemed SAVAGE in caps”…

Well what was it??

My Reaction:

If you can’t tell already, I’m of course being sarcastic. That tweet was neither SAVAGE nor a burn. In the way media is consumed nowadays, Yes that title did the exact thing that it aimed to. Get you to read the stupid article, and generate anger (mine was more a by product on how shit that article was).

So a few key takeaways after reading that article:

• This is a personal one, but I stopped using Apple News. In fact I stopped consuming the vast sources of media that came in written format. There’s only a handful of sources that I would read and believe. This isn’t Apple News fault, it’s just a huge aggregator of news sources.
  • My personal advice to tackle this is to find a handful of media sources you trust, and use a RSS Reader to consume.
• Try not to jump to conclusions with reading titles of articles. Ensure that for both yourself and others, that you don’t just immediately come to a conclusion as soon as you read the title. It’s clickbait shit like this that spreads uncertain news, and fake news.
• Be extremely picky/careful where you get your news from. The quality of the journalism/writing should speak for itself. Proper journalism has great research and integrity. Bad journalism usually starts with something like according to Reddit user. Reddit is not a great news source, it can be used for some news but isn’t a credible source.
  
  

Basically, understand that news sources available to you should all be scrutinised. You don’t know how some of these people get their sources… and as entertaining as it is, you don’t want to be this type of person:

Now don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s quite entertaining reading news from a questionable source. Sometimes it’s nice to read funny articles (I’m looking at you Dear Deirdre from the Sun), but you shouldn’t take them as gospel and run with them. Some new sources out there are truly after your clicks to get a lot more money. Where as some news sources are out there, with subscription options, to get you a better, more accurate, read worthy news/articles/stories. Choose wisely what media/news you consume.

I came here for free money, where’s the free money.

Ok well since you asked. This isn’t a big deal, but I’m in the middle of getting a mortgage. My wife and I are first time buyers, so we qualify for things like Help to Buy or the lifetime ISA. How we got the £4000 for free?

Well it’s simple, I can get a Lifetime ISA, and my wife can get a Lifetime ISA each. We paid in the maximum each for that tax year in March time (19/20). And then when the tax year renewed (20/21), we put the maximum in again. So for each tax year, we both got £2000… 2 x 2000 = 4000.

That’s literally it.

Now I could have stretched that thing out with such weird complex things and how to save money and blah blah… I’m more respectful of your time. I wanted to use this post to raise that there are hundreds of misleading articles with titles just like mine. Stay safe out there and be careful of the media you consume.