I've written many blogs on how I like the best deal possible and I hate paying full price. A friend of mine was like " Em you should put all these little things you know about in one place so people can check them out."
I quickly made a list of some of the things I use or know about. There are alot more than what I am going to tell you about today, unfortunately, there just isnt time to go through all of them!
I've broken down my little bits into categories so you do not have to read the whole thing if something doesn't interest or apply to you. There is the traveler, the shopper, the bride, the foodie, the person who tries everything, the money maker/coupon cutter sections.... Some of them cross over so i try to put them in both, but i might miss a few...
In addition... if you have a smart phone, ipad etc... a lot of these sites have apps which make it even easier!!!!
For the Traveler:
There are tons of travel sites out there that will email you when prices go down on great deals. You can sign up for continental's airline emails and each week they email you specials. Sometimes they feature deals for quick trips that week out of the country. It might not be the 2 week long vacation you dreamed of, but a $200 flight to Turks and Caicos for 3 days might be the way to get your island dream trip in for a price you can afford.
If you know what city you are going to already and not just looking for a good deal, check out Smart Destinations . They have a list of cities where you can purchase a card at a particular price depending on how many days you are there that gets you in a long list of attractions for that city and saves you a ton of money on entrance fees!
For a great little getaway around the world, check out LivingSocial. If you can get three friends to do it with you, you can get it for free!
If you like exoctic places and have a little bit of money to play with check out Voyage Prive. Neat places all over the country and the planet to stay in at 30-80 percent off! Other shopping sites have travel deals as well but I'll cover those in the Shopper Section later.....
In addition TravelZoo and Sherman's Travel have tons of travel deals and if you sign up they email you weekly on domestic as well as international deals.
If you have a frequent flyer account, go on their website and you can see that if you shop online from their website, you earn miles. Every year when i order my christmas gifts from snapfish or if i order flowers online i do this. You can easily earn lots of miles this way. Especially when they do deals like 20 miles per dollar. Depending on how much online shopping you do, you can get away with a nice little sum of miles.
Companies like e-miles (notice how close it is to emily hehe) has you answer questions in exchange for miles, Sometimes its about your travel preferences or they ask you to watch something on the St Judes and for clicking on it you earn 5 miles. If you make a donation you earn more. They have shopping ones like that too. I never buy anything and over the course of last year earned over 1000 miles.
Another similar company is e-rewards. You do short surveys in exchange for currency that is traded in for miles or merchandise.
For the Shopper
I think all women like to buy things and there are plenty of men out there who do to. Unfortunately, we are not all Donald Trump and if you are like me and have no debt and would like to stay that way, finding things you want and can afford is always the best option.
If you like to shop and you like particular brands check out the sale sites Rue La La, Beyond the Rack, Ideeli and Shop it to me. All but Shop it to me, have deals on housewares, kids stuff and travel. I've bought something from each one of them and love it. Most of my Christmas presents came from Rue La La and Beyond the Rack. Once you join, if you share it with someone else and they purchase something, you get a credit. I've earned tons of credits which has actually been what purchased most of my items!
For the Bride
From all my experiences in weddings, I have found a few little things that do not involve buying a used dress or shopping on craigslist (which is a good idea too btw)
Again, Rue La La, Beyond the Rack, Ideeli have great deals and a lot of times, they have designer wedding dresses on sale. Just last week Rue had a huge deal on weddingt stuff, from the dress, to accessories, to gifts for your attendants, to bridesmaids dresses, to your lingerie... all at great prices!!! Their travel deals could even help on the honeymoon side too!!!
If you joined the Knot.com GOOD JOB! On there you should find a link to the Wedding Channel which also has a section for deals. You put in your zipcode and everyday a new deal is emailed to you. it could be something like a bride workout dvd set, to a photobook, or even something better like a deal on a venue in your area, your disc jockey, caterer, cake, photographer etc.... Definitely worth looking into!
For the Foodie
I love restaurants. Lately i joined something called IDine which rewards you for eating at restaurants. I wrote a whole blog about it. basically, you register your card and when you eat at any of their million restaurants, you fill out a survey online and they credit you up to 15% back on your total bill. Its awesome! They are part of something called Rewards Network. you can only have your card registered on one program but they offer several. Some reward you with miles, points all kinds of things. I got my first $20 American Express reward card last week. You can even register it and earn points for using it at a restaurant!
Restaurant.com is a great site. You can buy giftcards from them to purchase giftcards for cheap. I know that sounds weird, but for example. For $2 i bought a $50 giftcard from them. I take that giftcard and buy giftcards on their website. So I used a portion of that $50 to get a giftcard to Shade in my neighborhood. The card was $15 for $35 worth of food. That $15 came out of the $50 that i bought for $2. So basically i got the $30 worth of food for 50 cents! Its great if you have a special occassion and you cannot spend tons of money. it helps alot and it makes checking out new places great.
For the Person who tries everything
Most people already know this one, but sometimes there are a few people who have not heard of these wonderful things. Sites such as Groupon, Buywithme, LivingSocial, MyDailyDeals, and Bloomspot . They all have deals based on cities. These deals could be a house cleaning service to a get away. Living social offers great deals on travel as I mentioned above. They also have deals on restaurants, spa services, gym and fitness classes, skydiving.... anything. I've bought many for places that have prepackaged fitness food, fitness classes and spa treatments and have loved every bit of it. They are so great for a gift too, especially if the recepiant is in another city!
The Money Maker/Coupon Cutter
I try to earn money or save money in all ways that I can. Several months ago i learned about a few sites that let you earn money for checking your email. Everyday i get emails from http://www.sendearnings.com/ and http://www.inboxdollars.com/. They send emails with deals that they want you to you buy and if you do they reward you with cashback. I NEVER do those deals. i just click the emails and you make several cents per email. Sometimes they send surveys where you earn more money along with other deals for extra cash. They will also send you emails asking if you want to sign up for other survey companies and they wil give you a cash reward. I've signed up for a few, but found I only have time to just click on the emails and then delete them, i dont have time to answer a bunch of questions. Oh and if you like onine games you can earn cash for them too! When you hit $30 they mail you a check. I currently have one in the mail. They also have coupons that if you print them out and redeem you earn 10 cents for each coupon! You can refer friends and earn a percentage of their earnings too.
http://www.mypoints.com/ is my favorite! It works the same as the others, but you earn points that can be redeemed for merchandise or gift cards. The points rack up so quick! You get point for clicking emails, surveys, shopping through their site to your favorite stores, using coupons, playing games, and even more! I've earned almost a $50 reward card. I'm just letting it build up and up until I just feel like cashing it in.
If you are a coupon clipper ( i am!!!) I search out for coupons all the time. Unfortunately, most of the food i eat isnt in the paper with a coupon so the sites above sometimes have some but i've found if there is a speciality product you like, go to their website! A lot of times they have coupons on their site, or if you sign up with them they will send you promotions and coupons (chick fila does... and if that doesnt excite you then well you need help). I love these ThinkThin protein bars and you cannot find a coupon on a coupon site, in the paper or anywhere.... but i went to their site and they have 50 cent off to dollar off coupons for their products. i wait til they go on sale and use my coupon and then i do not feel so bad about how much they cost! Since you cannot find coupons for fresh produce and meat ( usually) I find the best use of coupons is for household items, cleaning stuff, and makeup. Those are usually the high tickets items that make my grocery bill jump from dang to DAMN!
Also, if you shop at a particular store, you can look up their coupons online. Target has a lot of great coupons for more than just food! HEB has additional coupons than what they have in the store, and if you go to http://www.pgsaver.com/ it will load coupons directly onto your shoppers card at various stores!
There are various coupon sites online but I have found most of them link to the smartsource website. If you are a diehard couponer.... couponmom.com can email you a list of all the products you want and what paper to find it in and what page. Thats a little too involved for me... lol but it may be right up your alley. I'll admit, if i had the time, and if Houston double and tripled coupons, I'd be like those people on the extreme couponing show. Well i wouldnt buy 100 tooth brushes, but i'd try for a zero balance!
Happy Money saving!
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Why I am glad the Osama incident happened right after the Royal Wedding...
I'm really happy of the timing because I feel the issues of the war and terrorism etc greatly outweigh what dress Kate, I'm sorry Katherine, wore on her wedding day....
While I'm very aware of the significance of the Royal Wedding and that it is part of our history. It was blown out of proportion and thats why i get annoyed with it. I think its great that 2 people fell in love and can have a real life Cinderella fairy tale. I think for many women they live vicariously through Kate (sorry not gonna type out katherine every time), but as with a million other celebrity issues, our nation gets so wrapped up in the superficial. I do not think I heard one person comment on their vows or how in love the look, it was all about her dress, how he isnt cute anymore cus he is bald, what other people were wearing, her ring, etc.... We do this at a lot of weddings. Isnt the point that two people are commiting their life to each other? Isnt that why we cry at weddings because we are so happy to be in the presence of eternal love? Maybe I am a hopeless romantic, but isnt that the real reason to wake up at 2 am to watch the wedding?
Not just the US but the world economy is not doing well. Our own nation is struggling to pay for the education system, meanwhile our nation's broadcasting spends millions to cover days worth of replays of the wedding and chitchat on opinions on her dress and flowers and all that. Why the overload? Is one channel not enough? Do we really need days worth of covering in times of DVR and OnDemand? Can't that money be invested in our own children's education system for goodness sakes amongst a million other things that we need to fix over here. Its like when Michael Jackson died and the nation had nothing else to report on for a month! Ya he influenced our lives, our music and our culture, but there was a lot more going on in this world than MJ!
While getting my coffee last week the news was on and they were mentioning the wide spread of products that were on sale because of the wedding. Someone had produced " the royal condoms" and " kiss me kate beer" amongst a million other things. Props to them for capitalizing on it, but shame on us for having our priorties all mixed up. While the purchase of these things does boost the economy, cant we spend our money on other things to help our economy. here is an article just on how much money was made from all these things.
Now what about that actual wedding.... see this article on the breakdown of a few things and how the
taxpayers had to pay for security which so happened to be the most expensive thing on the ticket.
The wedding was speculated to boost the economy, the extra day off cost lots of productivity in England which hurt the economy.
So while the wedding was a happy break from the recent disasters in Japan and constant economy talks, and war.... an even happier and more important issue happened right after. Osama Bin Laden was found and killed. While the planning has been under wraps for awhile, I'm sure we will hear more details of what happened as time continues. We can his death at the almost 10 year mark of 9/11. A real significant moment in our history! I'm sure all of us remember that day and where we were and how it impacted our lives. I'm sure we all know at least one person who has served over seas as a result of that day. I am so grateful to all of them for sacraficing their lives, their time, their happiness even to be in the conditions they were in to keep us safe and free.
So anyways, I hope people understand the importance and significance of this is and that while the Royal Wedding is a good and happy thing, like anything else, it should remain in context and in control.
Have a good day. GOD BLESS AMERICA!
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