I am traveling in Chicago for several days and found another CHEAP deal for a fabulous hotel room on one of my favorite discount sites for hotel rooms and rental cars: Hotwire.com
Look at this fantastic completely updated room for only $ 39 a night! It is in a great location near everything I wanted, including Woodfield Mall and Ikea!
This room is in a Holiday Inn Express Hotel and it is super! I initially was concerned about booking at Holiday Inn, not knowing what the quality might be, but these hotels are geared for the business traveler and are terrific!
Inside the chest beside the desk is a refrigerator and a microwave so I can even have a snack or light meal in my room!
I also have noticed that the lower price hotels include FREE Internet access and a free breakfast!
Would it surprise you to know that you can buy coupons on eBay that can greatly reduce the cost of buying groceries? Recently, a grocery store in our town offered triple coupons for a week! They would triple the value of any coupon up to 99 cents! What a deal!
The technique I have used to capitalize on this offer makes the process super easy! I signed up for the e-mail version of the weekly specials to be sent to me on the first day of the new week. I then check what they are offering as super deals that week, paying particular attention to the Buy One Get One Free offers. I went to eBay and in the Search Field, I type in the names of the products that are on special to see if there are coupons available.
Recently, I was able to find 10 peanut butter coupons for 40 cents off each, for total cost of $ 1.49 plus 42 cents postage. That’s a grand total of $1.91 for 10 coupons! That’s a $ 1.20 reduction for each jar of peanut butter! I order the coupons from the eBay seller on the first day of the store sale, so they can be mailed to me right away so I get them in plenty of time while the sale is still in progress.
I took these to the store, where my final cost, after all the deductions, came to 30 cents per jar of peanut butter! Combined with all the other coupons I had for other products, I was able to save 50% on my grocery bill!
That’s like someone handing me $25.00 cash that I didn’t have to work for! I will take it!
I accomplished this task in 10 minutes drinking coffee at the kitchen table and you can too! It couldn’t be easier!
Wouldn’t it be amazing if, just because you asked, you were given a 25% reduction on the exact item you wanted to buy?
Well, that is precisely what happened to us recently! My husband and I had been searching for just the right rug to go in our kitchen. It had to be a certain style and color and lo and behold, we came upon it on our weekly trip to Costco. There were numerous rugs of this style and type, all wrapped up in a tight package, and then we spotted the exact rug in the color we wanted!
This rug was unrolled and our impression was that someone had purchased it, then returned it. It had no label and clearly had some lint on it, which indicated it had been tested out at someone’s home. As anyone who shops at Costco knows, you can return items to Costco with no questions asked. We assumed this was the case with this beautiful rug. We laid it out on the warehouse floor and looked it over carefully. It was flawless!
My husband said, “I wonder if they would give us a discount on the price since it is out of the original wrapping and has no paperwork with it?” We learned a fabulous maneuver long ago, after reading that Donald Trump said “He who mentions a price first, loses!” That meant we did not say how much we wanted as a reduction. We would leave that up to them. We could always attempt to negotiate the price if they didn’t offer to reduce it enough.
So, we found the store manager, who looked it over and said “I couldn’t take anymore than $ 75 off!” We were speechless! This was a $300 Wool 8′ by 10′ rug with nothing wrong with it except that it was out of the package– so that amounted to a 25% reduction!
My husband casually responded, “Well, I guess that’s okay. We’ll take it!”
It looks fabulous in our kitchen!
Are you beginning to see how easy it is to save money and gain wealth?
Did you know that one of the largest profit centers of an eye doctor’s business is the sales of glasses and contact? In this day of reduced insurance company reimbursements, eye doctors are looking for profits wherever they can– and selling new glasses and contacts is a cash cow!
Several years ago I had the good fortune to run into a man that had worked as an optometrist at the large ophthalmology practice where I had my vision tested each year. He told me that the lab that fabricated the glasses ordered through this fancy eye doctor’s office was the exact same lab that made glasses for the vision centers at Wal-Mart!
Before this conversation, I had always pictured a minimum wage Wal-Mart employee sitting in a back room, piecing together the item most important to my eyesight– my glasses. I thought I would be compromising my precious vision if I ordered glasses from a place like that– just so I could save money! Not So!
Now that I know my glasses are being made in the same way at the same place as the the fancy eye doctors office orders–I only get my glasses from Wal-Mart. The last time I ordered a new pair of glasses, they were 40% less than what the fancy office had quoted me for the identical product! Wow! I also order my brand name contact lenses from Wal-Mart for the same reason!
It is the law that you are entitled to your vision prescriptions, so you can take it anywhere you want to have it filled. Get your eyes tested by the ophthalmologist at the doctor’s office, then order the glasses elsewhere. The lovely people at the vision center will even adjust them if they ever become loose!
Invest the money you save, so YOU get richer–NOT your eye doctor!
Did you know that the moment a car is driven off the lot, it is worth alot LESS than when it was purchased 5 minutes earlier? One of the very best and easiest things you can do to save money, build wealth and get rich is to ONLY buy USED older model cars.
Remember the rule we have practiced for 32 years–We try to only invest in appreciating assets–NOT depreciating assets. Because our goal has been to save as much as possible, we have NEVER invested in new cars!
Buying used cars has put loads of extra money in our hands which we used to buy stocks, mutual funds and investment real estate. We’d rather gain wealth than try to impress other people and make automobile companies richer!
So, in keeping with that philosophy, 3 years ago we purchased a used company car, as it was about to be sent to the auto auction. The car is a 2002 Ford Taurus, it has 170,000 miles on it and we only paid a couple thousand dollars for it. It’s not super pretty, but it gets us where we want to go!
We figure we have saved $12,600 on that car in the past 3 years, since the average car payment is about $350 per month times 36 months = $12,600. Invest that money for 20 years and you’d have almost $60,000 if you could earn 8% on the money! The car still runs, so we are continuing to save money each month!
We’ll take the money rather than the new car or the admiring glances!
The other day, my 23 year old daughter called me to ask the name of the bagel shop where I get fabulous sun dried tomato bagels because she wanted some of them. I gave her the name of the local bakery and told her they have bins off to the side marked “Last Night’s Bagels” and they are half price.
In my typical frugal fashion I said “Get them out of that bin and ask if they’ll give you 2 packages for $ 2.49” ! She said Ok–I will try. She was amazed! They gave her 12 bagels for $ 2.49– Just for asking!
I discovered this bargain several months ago, when I was in the bagel shop and spotted this bin. I decided to give it a try and buy a package of 6 bagels for $2.49. I had become reluctant to pay the outrageous higher price of $ 1.29 for ONE “fresh” bagel, so I thought– Hey, how BAD can they be?
When I got to the cash register that first time, the lady took one look at me, dressed in my garage sale appropriate clothes after a long morning of scouring yard sales and she said–You know what? Right now they are 2 Packages for $ 2.49! I got the message! She thought I was POOR– so she was going to help me out and give me extra bagels for FREE!
I said Well alrighty then and grabbed another sleeve of 6 yummy bagels! I got 12 bagels for a grand total cost of $ 2.49! That’s 21 cents per bagel!
That saved me over $ 12 for 12 bagels! That’s $ 12 free money–that I didn’t have to earn by working!
We lightly toasted the bagels and they made fabulous sandwiches! They were great! There was NOTHING wrong with them! Now every time I go to the bagel shop–I ask them –Could I have 2 packages of day old bagels for $ 2.49? They ALWAYS say YES!
Try it next time you have a taste for bagels!
Be generous and get a whole bunch of the bagels and donate them to the food pantry so other people can enjoy them too!
