Entries Tagged 'Frugality' ↓

Rather than paying for songs on iTunes or buying CDs from the store, here’s a popular option for those of you who always have an internet connection – online radio stations. You can save a lot of money just by pointing your browser over to sites like Pandora and Last.fm. There’s an added bonus of the sites recommending new artists (or new songs from old artists) so you can get exposed to newer things. All of it is for free!

If you’ve ever bought the Microsoft Office suite before, you know that it’s ridiculously expensive. Once you’ve learned that, you’ve probably checked out Google Docs, which is Google’s free offering of office productivity tools. While Google Docs is a great service, I wanted to introduce yet another player in the free productivity suite space – OpenOffice.org.

OpenOffice.org 2 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

Learn more about OpenOffice.

You can stop paying for television and avoid the slammer by shutting down all them torrents because you can get a lot of television shows online absolutely free once they’ve been broadcast on regular television. There are a lot of free and completely legal means of watching your favorite shows while dropping the $30 – $80 a month price.

For many stations, visit their main website to see if you can watch shows there. NBC and ABC offer this through their website. Another website that offers free shows and movies is Hulu.com, a partnership between NBC Universal and News Corp.

If you’ve been buying anything online and haven’t first checked MSN Live Search’s Cashback, you might be leaving some serious cash on the table.

What you will need:

• An MSN Live account: Sign up for one here.
• Next, you’ll want a Paypal account to get the deposits.
• Third, just start searching for products via Live and be eligible for Cashback!
• Profit!

Here are more details. I recently bought a new Lenovo laptop and took advantage of the program to get 10% cashback on my purchase. Some places are even offering up to 62.5% cashback!

Did you know that expired coupons are valid at commissaries and base exchanges for six months after their expiration date? Me neither! So rather than recycle them, send them to someone you know or send them to The Happy Housewife. She’ll send them along to her and she’ll send them to the troops. Contact her at coupons4troops (at) comcast (dot) net for details.

Hat tip to Chief Family Officer for this hack!.

My wife and I don’t go to many movies in the theaters these days because the cost of doing so has just gotten pretty ridiculous. I recently saw a movie theater in Baltimore, the Landmark Theater in Harbor East, charge $10.50 for a ticket. Those are New York City movie prices in Baltimore! While the Landmark Theater is certainly very nice on the inside, ten dollars for a movie is pretty ridiculous.

Our local theater in Columbia, MD is a Regal Cinemas with reasonably comfortable seats and matinee/student discount ticket prices of around $7. You can buy movie vouchers from Costco for $6.50 a showing if you have a Costco membership. I recently joined the Regal Crown Club for kicks and found that the benefits were pretty solid.

First, the reward schedule is a bit unique but essentially you get a free ticket for every 120 points. A point is earned each time you spend a dollar. If a movie at regular price is $9, each point is worth about a nickel. Each movie ticket purchase is about 35 cents (so you save more with Costco tickets).

However, you get a free small popcorn every Tuesday and you get free stuff at 40 point increments. At 40 points you get a small popcorn, at 80 you get a small soft drink. So at 120 you get a ticket, at 160 you get a popcorn, at 200 you get a drink, at 240 you get another ticket. Joining the club gets you slightly more “stuff” than buying the tickets alone.

Couple that with a Citi mtvU card that gives you 5% cashback at the movie theater and you’re talking even more savings!

An anonymous reader left another great way to avoid one-way surcharges on rental cars:

While this fee cannot be avoided sometimes, here’s a way I minimized it on a recent trip. We landed in Calgary, AB and had to drive to Jasper, AB, getting on a train to Vancouver, BC three and a half days later.

The rate for the car that was a one-way rental was almost $150/day! The rate for a car rented and returned to Jasper was $55/day.

I rented the Calgary-Jasper car for 24 hours, with a new rental starting at the same time on day 2 in Jasper that I returned the first car.

I cut the rental bill from about $520 to $290 when the taxes, fees, etc were removed.

This is a great trick and I’m disappointed in myself for not thinking of it myself. While the surcharge was a single line item charge on my original rental bill, I never checked how much the car would’ve cost on a daily basis if it were an in-town rental. Considering the size of the islands, trading the car in multiple times wouldn’t have been a significant hassle and may have saved us some money.

Thanks anonymous reader!

They do, but you don’t need them.

Back in the day, only the premium grade of gasoline had all the fancy detergents and cleaners found in fuel injector cleaner products. It was like that because only the top of the line cars were fuel injected. Now, almost every car is fuel injected and so every grade of gas will have detergents and additives that will keep those injectors nice and clear.

In fact, according to Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers of Car Talk fame, say that the best thing you can do for your injectors is to replace the fuel filter every year.

Oren Etzioni is the brain behind Farecast, a predictive engine for airline tickets, and he shared eight tips for finding the best fares. To give you an idea of the magnitude of Farecast, if you’re not familiar with it, it tracks 175 billion fares at 79 airports. That’s a lot.

So what’s the advice? Don’t buy far in advance unless it’s a peak time like Thanksgiving and Christmas, otherwise the best fares are between eight and two weeks away. If you see a price drop, buy ASAP because it’ll likely be gone in two days. Midweek flights are cheaper than weekends and price drops come most often at the beginning of the week. Lastly, add an extra day and you can save some money.

Tracking Air Fares: Elaborate Algorithms Predict Ticket Prices [Wired]

Weddings, babies, engagements, what do they all have in common? Apparently in our consumerism driven society, they all have gifts in common. Getting married? Wedding shower! Having a child? Baby shower!

As with all potential gift giving occasions, retailers have registries! And with registries come one of the best inventions of the 21st century – the 10% coupon for completing your registry after the event. For example, Target will send you a coupon for 10% that you can use to buy anything off your registry. The nice little hack to go with it is that you can add things to your registry even after the event has been completed. This means that you get a 10% off coupon at Target, though Target’s return policies have become more and more restrictive.

So, after your event, get the 10% off coupon and have a field day at places like Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn, and Restoration Hardware where you can stuff much cheaper than usual.