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Posted
Sep 24 2007, 11:01 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
The Fed's decision to lower short-term interest rates last week stimulated fear among some money managers that prices for consumer items could rise. Investors are watching carefully as the Fed tries to steer a course between inflation and recession.
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Posted
Oct 03 2007, 07:46 PM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
A columnist at Living a Better Life offers insider tips on maximizing savings at garage sales. Consider this gem: Drive up in a fancy car and you won't have credibility when you haggle. Providing a new take on regifting, she's not ashamed to say she searches for items she can give as gifts. (She's also looking for stuff she can sell on eBay.) She must know what she's talking about: Her son was a shrewd negotiator at yard sales, and went on to a sales management career.
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Posted
Oct 17 2007, 04:00 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
The new Consumer Price Index shows noticeable increases in the cost of food and energy. So why doesn't that necessarily mean we're experiencing inflation? Philip Brewer at Wise Bread explains the difference between the CPI and the "core" CPI (which doesn't include food and energy prices ), and why the core is a valuable tool in the Federal Reserve's efforts to predict inflation. The new core doesn't indicate inflation, Brewer writes. But the CPI contains sour news for us common folks: Rising food and energy prices cause our standard of living to decline.
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Posted
Oct 29 2007, 09:19 AM
by
Donna Freedman
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
If the Toys “R” Us Big Toy Book is here, can Christmas be far behind?
Well, yeah. Fifty-eight days behind. But face it: No matter how much we whine about too-early holiday marketing, retailers aren't going to change their ways. We're the ones who have to change, i.e. adjust our reactions to the hype.
"Beebegurl," a Smart Spending message board reader, pays no attention to the retail calendar. In a thread called “Christmas Gifts,” she wrote that she shops for her grandkids long before holiday hysteria sets in. This allows her to look around "without pressure and at my own leisure and make a rational decision."
The most rational decision of all? Once she finds the perfect gift, she waits for it to go on sale. "I never ever pay retail for any toy."
Clearly, Beebegurl rocks.
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Posted
Oct 31 2007, 06:43 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
"Sale" is an abused word, Golbguru rants at Money, Matter, and More Musings , and with good reason . Advertised sales often are "useless" gimmicks intended to make us think we're getting a bargain when we're not , says Golb (that's "blog" spelled backwards). There's the "perpetual" sale ("it ends on Monday night and starts again on Tuesday morning"), the "urgency" or limited-time-offer sale, the "useless" sale ("the 80% off is only on 5XL-size fluorescent yellow T-shirts with fluorescent pink sleeves"), and the "mass-hysteria" sale. We think this post will strike a chord with many. Do you really think those operators are anxiously looking at the wall clock every time the TV ad screams, "Call in the next five minutes and get a 25% discount"?
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Posted
Nov 07 2007, 04:20 PM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Want to see how the other half lives and have fun while you're doing it? We stumbled upon Curbed 's PriceSpotter, an asking-price guessing game about real estate in New York City. Here's how it works: You look at photos and the floor plan of an apartment/condo, and guess how much the seller wants for it. Today's entry is a two-bedroom, 2,200-square-foot condo in the West Village. Readers' guesses are part of the fun, including this one: "Has anyone ever heard of Feng Shui?!!? Don't EVER place your bed on an angle out from a corner! I would say...$3,235,000." (Folks, that is not a typo.)
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Posted
Nov 20 2007, 06:45 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar.
Let’s face it: Most items at garage sales and yard sales are junk. It's stuff the family conducting the sale wants to get rid of, hoping to make $100 on a good weekend.
With that in mind, I often visit yard sales to look for specific items. Here are six things I usually look for:
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Posted
Nov 21 2007, 11:07 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
If you're not among those frugal folks who've sworn off gift giving , you can save some hard-earned dollars by doing comparison shopping online . One Frugal Girl explains her step-by-step process . She checks comparison sites to find the best price for the item she wants. Then she searches online rewards sites like Ebates , FatWallet and UPromise for additional discounts. Third, she looks for coupon codes to further reduce the price, starting at RetailMeNot . (You also can find online coupons at MSN Shopping .) She recommends that you pay attention to detail: "Shipping alone, even on a small item, is usually in the range of $6 to $8. So, when comparing items, don't forget to take shipping and other discounts into consideration." Finally, she goes back to the rewards site that offered the best cash-back deal and makes the purchase. She does all of this in 10 minutes. That doesn't include brick-and-mortar comparison shopping, which can end up being a good use of time . One Frugal Girl reports
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Posted
Dec 04 2007, 05:46 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Leave it to Dong at AskDong to break down future lifetime savings from switching to the cheapest toilet paper. In a hilarious post that errs a bit on the side of too much information, Dong does the math -- "20 sheets X 5 visits X 60 years X 52.15 weeks = 312,900 sheets of toilet paper for the rest of my life" -- and concludes he'd save only $1,000 over 60 years if he always bought generic one-ply instead of Charmin Ultra. You'll be happy to know he gives the figures for Scott one-ply, if that's your favorite brand. Dong concludes, "I certainly rather make my sacrifices elsewhere in life."
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Posted
Dec 05 2007, 07:15 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Partner blogger J.D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly alerts us to a Web site that reduces one of the pains of shopping. PriceProtectr will alert you if the cost of an item you've purchased drops, so you can pocket the difference if the store has a price-protection policy. PriceProtectr monitors prices at 70 different stores. J.D. says he hasn't paid much attention to price-protection guarantees -- up until now. "I don’t pay close attention to ads, and I’m certainly not going to keep going into a store for 30 days after I buy something just to save a few bucks. But PriceProtectr sounds like a great way to make this process painless," he writes. He notes that yapta provides a similar service for airline tickets.
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