We’ve gotten into the habit of letting each other know before we’re about to purchase something big — something that costs in the neighborhood of $150 or more.  When I tipped my plans to get a rather expensive 10th anniversary gift, my wife thought that we had better uses for the money at this time.

This leniency extends to other gift-giving occasions like Christmas, birthdays, and even Valentine’s Day.

She lets me off the hook.  But there’s a catch

One of many tricks that master copywriter Bob Bly shared with the readers of his newsletter was with regard to giving holiday gifts to clients.  He doesn’t feel pressure to give his best clients a gift each year.  These are people who spend five and six figures (or more) a year for his services.  If anyone should get a gift at the holidays, it would be these folks.

How does he get away with it?  His trick is to give gifts at totally unexpected times.  He might send a book to a client on June 13th as a gift.  “Just because.”  This gets him off the hook for a slew of Christmas gifts because there’s no expectation of one.  He gives gifts that are more memorable for the recipient — and he gets to give them when he wants or when he’s inspired.

I’ve adopted that trick a bit.  I’ll bring home flowers, just because it seemed like the right thing to do.  $10/year around once a month buys a lot of slack around Christmas, anniversaries, and Valentine’s Day.

So it’s not that I don’t get my wife gifts.  I just get them at different times, when they’re not marked up horrendously.

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If you’re planning to save yourself a whole boatload of stress and buy most (all?) of your gifts online this holiday season, then I hope that you’ve become well-acquainted with rebate portals like Mr. Rebates.  If not, then here’s a super-quick introduction to saving money with Mr. Rebates:

1. Sign up.  Once you’re in your account starts with $5.
2. From now on, instead of going directly to Target’s website (for example) to buy stuff, go to Mr. Rebates and click through to Target from there.  Just one extra hop.
3. Mr. Rebates keeps track of what you buy, and you get a cut of your qualifying purchases deposited into your account.  (This is currently 4% at Target.)
4. Once you’ve got $10 or more in available rebates, you can request payment through PayPal or by check (in the US and Canada).  It’s that easy!

I used Target as an example but there are well over 2,000 online merchants for which you can get some kind of kickback from Mr. Rebates.  What’s more, Mr. Rebates is offering extra rebates on nearly a quarter of these merchants.  For example, PetSmart’s rebate jumped from 5% to 12%, and this will stay in force through Christmas Eve.  One I may take a peek at is Skullcandy (from 5% up to 7%); I’ve got my eye one some headphones.   Check out the link in the upper right of Mr. Rebates to get the link to the full list.

I’ve loved Mr. Rebates.  They pay on time, too.  The rebates hit my PayPal account promptly at the beginning of the month following my request.  I wish I had found them a long time ago.

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Personal finance authors have it pretty tough these days.  With so many personal finance books on the market, it’s always a challenge to present a unique view on the topic.  Some of the (small number of) critical reviews (one- and two-star reviews) of this on Amazon mentioned that the advice given in parts of the book was nothing new.  But I don’t hold that against any personal finance author, because good personal finance advice truly is “nothing new.”  Spending less than you make will always be good financial advice, and it always has been.  Of course.

Approach a new finance book looking for that one good idea

Given that some of the stuff will be things that you’ve heard before — like “live within your means,” “pay off your debts,” “embrace the magic of compound interest,” etc. — treat the book as a treasure hunt.  Look for new spins on parts of the topic.  Look for that One Good Idea that will more than make up the cost of the book — maybe pay you back hundreds of times.

The book has eighteen chapters:

1. The Savvy Life Philosophy
2. The Golden Rule
3. Savvy Habits
4. You Can Afford It
5. Where We Spend Our Money
6. Home
7. Entertainment
8. Wardrobe
9. Beauty
10. Food
11. Money
12. What is Important to You?
13. Savvy Shopping
14. Celebrity Savvy Life Role Models
15. The Core of the Savvy Life
16. Tricks to Stay Motivated
17. Your Savvy Life
18. Favorite Resources

(I’ll let you in on a confession.  I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on the Beauty chapter.  Now that that’s out of the way …)

Different people will resonate with different chapters of the book.  For me, it was the chapter on food.  What hit me right between the eyes was this statement on page 138:

There is no longer an excuse of not knowing how to cook.

That knocked me back a couple of feet, because I really don’t know how to cook, and I know how easy it is to grab a sub at Sheetz, or grab Chinese at my favorite takeout place.  But knowing how to cook really does make a big difference.  My parents know how to cook — both of them.  And they both happen to be quite well off now.  I know there’s a connection between how much you eat in and what your net worth is.  So this chapter gave me several good ideas on tackling the problem of eating out too much.

The other “good idea treasure trove” was the chapter on Home.  One example related directly to the chapter on Food:

Keeping a clean home also helps save you money.  When the kitchen is clean and there are no dirty dishes in the sink, it’s much more inviting to cook.

So after reading this I try a little more to stay on top of the dishes — and the kitchen in general — to make it more inviting.  And it also brings a small improved sense of control, which feeds positively on other areas.

Overall, I enjoyed the book.  It doesn’t take a whole lot of new stuff in a book for it to be worth my while.  If I get a good idea out of the book — and I got several out of this book — then it’s worth my time.

And I think that Living the Savvy Life will be worth yours as well.

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This past weekend I took a trip to Costco to pick up a few things.  Some places my wife and I hesitate to get generic (store) brand because it was weak, didn’t work, tasted nasty, contained ingredients that gave her a headache, and so forth.  This is a side effect of the manufacturers creating an acceptable product at a much lower cost.  Something has to give to meet price.

I don’t have the same reservations with Costco’s store brand, Kirkland.  Their products are almost always more than just inexpensive and acceptable.  They’re quite competitive on quality.

So, I ventured into a product area that probably puts generic to the test more than just about anything else.

I bought Kirkland beer.  A case of Kirkland Handcrafted Ales was $18.99, which was a good $5 cheaper than name-brand competitors like Sam Adams (which is tasty, don’t get me wrong).

One of my fraternity brothers in college often said that there are two kinds of beer:  good beer, and better beer.  Now that I’m (more than) a bit older, I’ve reached the conclusion that there is such a thing as bad beer, too.  But let’s give Kirkland brew a fighting chance: is it good, or better?

I was pleasantly surprised with the taste — definitely at least at par with most name brands in the “expensive” section of the grocery store.  The IPA had a nice bite to it, and the others were true to form.  By no means were they alcoholic dishwater.  (The labels on the bottle are plain, but who cares?)

It’s true that not all generic items are created equal, but in my experience Costco’s store brand is high enough quality across the board that you can feel confident at least giving it a shot.

Even with beer!

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There are three basic mechanisms for companies to get more revenue:  (a) increase the number of paying customers, (b) increase how much those customers buy on each trip, and (c) increase how often those customers buy.  Getting a brand new customer is relatively expensive compared with selling to an existing customer because, presumably, they already like doing business with you.

Have the motives of coupons always been this overt?

Lately, it seems that stores are practically bludgeoning their intentions with the coupons they offer to existing customers.  After buying something at Borders, I’d get a coupon good for 20% off purchases of $25 or more, good only for some specific window of dates in the future, so (a) I couldn’t just ring up another purchase while I was right there, and (b) the deal would go away if I waited too long.  Basically, “Come back soon, or you’ll pay more.  But not right now, or you’ll abuse it.”  Or with other retailers’ reward programs, after a certain number of purchases there will be a relatively insignificant rewards amount accumulated, and those rewards will go away pretty quickly — sometimes as quickly as a month.  Seems pretty overt to me that they don’t want me to accumulate enough to buy anything outright.  I mean, what can I buy with $0.34 in eBay Bucks?

How to use these types of short-fuse rewards smartly

The rewards are better than nothing, I suppose, but reacting like Pavlov’s dogs when coupons hit the e-mail inbox is exactly what the companies want you to do.  Here are a couple of ways to use these kinds of coupons to your advantage:

• Do you really, really need anything from that store before the coupon expires? Just like with any other discount, it’s not a deal if you don’t need the item.  Just because a store offers you a bait doesn’t mean that you have to bite.  If the reward is small compared with the purchase you’d have to make, then the decision is easier.
• Combine the coupon with clicking through a rebate portal. Usually the “kickback” from a rebate portal like Mr. Rebates or Coupon Cactus is separate from coupon codes”stack” those savings.
• Buy items that give you the least out-of-pocket expenses. I had a fair amount some Best Buy Rewards at my disposal (I think it was $25).  This is a decent amount.  I think the total of my purchase was under $27, so it cost me less than two bucks out of pocket.  Likewise, if you have a $50 item and a $100 you want, and have a coupon good for $10 off a purchase of $50 or more, go for the $50 purchase and wait for another coupon to get the $100 one.
• Use the coupon online if you can if the store is a bit away from where you live. Driving 20 miles and spending two hours to use a $10 coupon almost negates having the coupon in the first place.  Buying online might result in you saving more money, even after shipping charges.  It certainly saves time.

Any other tricks?  Or do you just pass these coupons by and avoid any temptation?

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Sites like Groupon and LivingSocial aim to get great deals for consumers.  The deal I took advantage of when it was offered was the 50% Amazon.com deal from LivingSocial.  We purchase things from Amazon all the time, so why not?  It was practically a free $10 gift because there are so many things available there.  For smaller businesses, the discounts can be even higher, and usually are.  Posies’ discount was 54%.  No matter how you slice it, Groupon and other sites like it do bring visitors to your place of business.

Now, of course, Groupon doesn’t do this for free, and the monetary washboarding that businesses take when selling their services and goods at a loss — plus paying for the privilege to do so — is apparently just the start of a business owner’s struggle.

But I tend not to care how much a business loses on these kinds of things.  It’s not my problem.

A few years ago, we went to sell a few things at our local flea market.  I knew there was a charge if we had wanted to rent a table, but I asked if there was a charge if we brought our own tables.  The person I spoke to said no.

The day of the flea market, though, the story was different.  Someone came around to collect money. When we said that we had brought our own tables, she said there was still a charge for selling even if we brought our own.  I contested this, and said that an employee at the citizens’ center said otherwise.  At this point, she said something to the extent of: “You honestly thought that you could just come here to sell stuff for free?”  To which I replied: “It seems a little odd, but who am I to argue?”

Exactly.

Likewise, who am I to argue if a massage parlor (hypothetically speaking) sells a $60 massage to me for $15?  Hey, I just got a $60 massage for $15!  It doesn’t matter to me that massage parlor had to pay half of the discounted price ($7.50) as a commission to the middleman discounter-advertiser.  It doesn’t matter to me that the owner had to pay the masseuse $30 (or more) to provide the massage.  It doesn’t matter to me that the owner shelled out money for the essential oils, the electricity for the calming music, the rent for the building, the whole nine.

That business offered the $15 massage to me.  It was a calculated business decision on their part to get me in the door in hopes that I’d come back.  If they added the figures wrong when making that business decision, that is completely not my concern.

And if you’re the beneficiary of a great deal, I don’t think it should be your concern, either.

(Thanks to A Gai Shan Life for including this post in the Carnival of Personal Finance!)

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So what?  Royalty does have its privileges, but many of the same luxuries that the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have at their disposal are surprisingly affordable.  This is a tip I picked up from one of Michael Masterson’s books — I think it was Automatic Wealth.  “The best money can buy” doesn’t equate with “gold-plated and encrusted with jewels.”  It does equate with superior quality and comfort, and this is usually not enhanced by adding expensive decoration on top.

Quality is always in style

My mother-in-law’s father was a dairy farmer.  He had said that if you don’t buy quality the first time, you’ll end up buying it three times for the same amount of use because the item will break faster.  Buying quality for something you expect to keep a while is wise.

Taking this a step further, if you pay for the best with the items you’ll use the most, then your purchase gives you even more bang for the buck: more quality and comfort per hour of use.

Here are some suggestions for items you might want to shell out the extra money to give yourself the royal treatment with top of the line:

• Your bed. Funny how they call the larger sizes “queen-size” and “king-size”?  (These terms have only been around perhaps 50 years, so there’s no royal back story.)  Odds are very high that it won’t cost much more than a grand for the most comfortable bed you can buy.  (That’s the price range we’re looking at for a bed to replace our 10-year-old one.  We’re looking at a Select Comfort; my wife had a full-size before we got married and it still holds up just fine.)  If the bed lasts ten years, this works out to only a few cents per hour of sleep.  Cheap!
• Your office chair. We scored three Steelcase chairs at a yard sale a while back for peanuts and they’ve served us very well.  Since I spend a lot of time in front of the computer (and my wife in front of the computer and the sewing machine) good work chairs are a great investment.  Aeron chairs are also highly rated.  Most of these are priced under $1,000, though some venture into four figures.  It’s recommended to try these out before buying if possible, because some high-end chairs are better suited for different body frames than others.
• Your playing cards (for example). The difference between the best playing cards and run of the mill is not that much: a few bucks per pack.  Being handed a royal flush is that much sweeter when it’s dealt with Bicycle Shadow Masters.  Then again, you can get four times as many packs for the money if you get classic Bicycles by the 12-pack.  (Note: I chose playing cards for the “royal” theme, but substitute your favorite pastime and you can find similar high-quality equipment for whatever you like to do.)
• Your pen. Some pens are just a pleasure to write with.  For only $6 a Pilot Dr. Grip can be yours.  It’s just comfy to hold, and it’s just smooth to write with.
• Your shoes. Most people wear shoes half their lives, at least.  Buy quality, and your feet — and the rest of your body for that matter — will thank you.  I’m pretty hard on my shoes because my feet are weird, and I need to buy twice as many pairs because my feet are different sizes.  (I give the others to NOSE or try to sell them on Odd Shoe Finder).  I ran across (!) my Propet Village Walkers and wow, they were comfortable!  Well worth the $180 or so I had to pay.  I don’t think I could do much better.
• Your car. Getting back to that Aston Martin again:  Should you shell out for a nice car?  Shelling out for a reliable, comfortable car is worth it.  Shelling out for a luxury car?  Probably not, unless you have a whole lot of money.  For most people, cars are virtually a necessity, but they are an expense, and they do depreciate pretty quickly.  A one- or two-year-old quality used car with a good reputation would qualify as “best” in my book in this case.

Living like royalty doesn’t mean spending like royalty.  Long live the commoners!

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“What?!  Of course the Mighty Bargain Hunter is frugal!” was what I was thinking.  But he continues:

“Don’t get me wrong, we cheapskates like to get the best possible value for our money.  So yeah, when we shop, we do our best to scope out bargains.  But the difference between a cheapskate and a bargain hunter is that cheapskates generally don’t like to shop.”

(The emphasis in that quote from Jeff Yeager’s book is mine.)  I guess I fall somewhere in the middle.  There are times I enjoy shopping, and other times I don’t.  I enjoy shopping most in places that things are already very good deals:  thrift shops, garage sales, pawn shops, auctions, and the like.  I shop for clothes only when I absolutely have to.  (So maybe I’m a bargain cheapskater?)

How retailers win half the battle

Deep down, the truly frugal realize the power that advertising has on people’s perception of needs and wants.  Deep down, they know that businesses have won half the battle the moment they walk in the store.  Because once they’re in the store, they get bombarded with scientifically researched end-caps, colorful signs, strategic product placement, helpful smiling employees offering you free samples.  (First one’s free, kid!)

Businesses have to hit people with both barrels the moment they walk in the store.  The capital investment tied up in these stores is enormous.  They have to work as hard as they can to get that credit card out of the wallet.

But what do they do to get people in the store in the first place?  Deals, and lots of them!  Coupons.  Special sales.  Preferred customer status.  These are cold calculating moves, too.  Businesses have already factored in the cost of coupons in their pricing.  They’re still doing just peachy even when they sell an item for 25% off.  Limited time special sales create a sense of scarcity and urgency.  (“One day only!  Don’t miss this blowout!”)  And if someone has reached preferred customer status, well, they’ve probably already spent a ton of money, so it’s a no-brained to throw them a bone to get them to spend even more.

In short, bargains are the retailers’ way to hook people, get them into the store, and get them to buy things they might not buy otherwise.  What’s more, they just appear to be bargains!

How the cheapskate can bargain hunt with a clear conscience

Again, Yeager says that cheapskates like to get bargains.  (Who doesn’t?)  I think the key is that they don’t let the marketing weasels cloud their judgment. They have a list of things that they want to buy, but (a) it’s usually a short list, (b) they stick to it, and (c) the purchases aren’t urgent ones.  Let’s look at each one of these:

• The list of to-buy items is short. If it were long, then that would mean more money out the door, and truth be told, frugal folks make do with a lot less than most, and they enjoy having less stuff to burden them.
• They don’t deviate from the list. Just like it’s a great idea to shop at the supermarket with a grocery list, it’s a good idea to have a list when going into other stores as well.  Unless something is a true screaming bargain that is something that they forgot they needed or could use — which is very different than not realizing that they needed it — they stick to buying what they came for.
• They can wait to buy the items. Retailers love people caught between a rock and a hard place.  Why else do the price of flowers double on Valentine’s Day?  They typically plan ahead enough that they can look around for the best deals.

Conclusion?  Bargain hunting and frugality can go hand-in-hand, but only if frugality is the stronger driving force for the purchase.

What are your thoughts?  How do you balance bargain hunting and frugal living?

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But I’ll admit I don’t get soaked for flowers on Valentine’s Day for a couple of reasons, and it’s not because I don’t procrastinate.  First, our wedding anniversary is Groundhog Day, so I can usually get by with a “two-fer” if I get flowers then.  Second, I surprise my wife with flowers a few times throughout the year at random times.  So, my wife doesn’t expect flowers.

But let’s say that you do want to get flowers for your lady the day of.  That’s fine!  I doubt she’ll complain.

If you shop on the Internet — and odds are, you do! — then it’s easy to spend less on a nice arrangement of flowers than to order online through a rebate portal like Mr. Rebates.  It’s literally as easy as signing up and clicking through to one of well over a dozen online florists.  Eleven of them have cash back rebates of 10% or more:

• Flora Flora, Organic Bouquet, and USA Florist have cash-back rebates of 10%
• 1800Florals.com, Florist.com, From You Flowers, and Proflowers.com have cash-back rebates of  12%
• FTD and Fleurop have cash-back rebates of 15%
• And 1800Flowers.com and TeleFlora currently have cash-back rebates of a full 18%!

Flowers aren’t her thing?  There are over 200 stores that have extra cash back through Valentine’s Day at Mr. Rebates.  Here are but a few:

• David’s Cookies has 10% cash back
• FragranceNet.com has 10% cash back
• Ghirardelli Chocolates has 10% cash back
• ICE.com has 12% cash back
• Perfumania has 10% cash back
• See’s Candles has 7% cash back
• Yves Rocher has a whopping 30% cash back

Again, there are over 200 stores with extra cash back.  That’s only part of the over two thousand stores that participate with Mr. Rebates!  The best part?  It costs nothing to join, and they’ll stock your rebate account with $5 just for signing up.

So spend a little time now to find the best way to show your Valentine how much you care, and avoid paying through the nose the day of.  Your buck is worth more bang than that!

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We’ve bought “open-box” computers at places like Circuit City (remember that chain?) and Best Buy, and they’ve generally performed well.  They’re not brand-spanking new out of the box, but in most cases they’re pretty close to it: a customer bought the computer, forgot to save the packaging or the manuals or something, and brought it back, and probably paid a restocking fee.  We buy the computer without the pretty box, and save $50 or $100, cha-ching.

We’ve also bought a computer from a pawn shop.  This is a little riskier, but we were fortunate.  The computer was well-used, but still worked, and gave us fair service for the money.

We haven’t bought all of our computers used, though.  We’re not power users — we’re not doing much beyond surfing the web, I’m not a hardcore gamer, I’m not a performance freak or an overclocker, etc. — so the $400-ish desktop models have been reasonably-priced enough that we haven’t balked at buying new.  We just make sure that we have a reasonable amount of memory in the machines so that the operating system doesn’t have to go to the hard drive all the time.

Enter the world of refurbished laptops

Nonetheless, I did spend some time checking out Newegg.com (for which Mr. Rebates offers 1% cash back) checking out both the new laptops and the refurbished, or “recertified,”  ones.  What surprised me was how wide the range of experiences was for the refurbished models.  Some people got great deals, but almost as many really wished they hadn’t tried to save a few bucks this way.  Some people saw their refurbished laptop fail the same day they received it.  Another reviewer received one that was really dirty.  And one reviewer couldn’t even make a judgment on whether the product was good or not, because he hadn’t even gotten one that worked!

We’ve bought a number of items from Newegg.com and we’ve been happy with them.  They’ve all been new items, though.  Buying a refurbished one from there is riskier, if the user reviews are to be believed; I don’t really see people taking the time to post a bunch of lies, especially in the form of plausible stories.

My take on low-end reburbished computers

I’d think twice about getting a refurbished computer if you just need an inexpensive one for basic “connectivity to the outside world” kinds of stuff.  The new ones are so reasonably priced that the $50 to $100 difference isn’t a good tradeoff for the potential headaches.

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