Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Take Advantage of Super Bowl Sales to Save Money

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Super Bowl 2013 is on February 3, only a week away.  If you’re a football fan, you’re probably counting down the days and planning your Super Bowl party.  Your whole day, indeed your whole weekend, may revolve around the Super Bowl.

However, if you’re like me, you aren’t a big football fan.  In fact, I have no idea which teams are even heading to the Super Bowl this year. (Ed. note: 49ers vs. Ravens)

Still, fan or not, the week before Super Bowl is the perfect time to save some money, and lots of it.  The Super Bowl is a national, cultural event, and many sales revolve around Super Bowl viewing “necessities.”

 

 

 

 

 

Here are some things you may want to buy and stock up on while they’re cheap during the week before Super Bowl:

Super Bowl SavingsTelevisions – If you’re in need of a new television, you’re likely to see the lowest prices now, the week before the Super Bowl.  The prices now are often even better than those on Black Friday.  Of course, if you don’t need a tv, this isn’t a good deal, but if you’ve been thinking about replacing yours, now is the time to do it.

Cable/satellite packages – If you don’t yet have cable or you want to switch providers, now is the time.  Cable and satellite companies hope to snag new sports enthusiasts during the big game, and some cultural Super Bowl events, such as the notorious Lingerie Bowl, can only be seen on cable (as well as the much more benign Puppy Bowl).

NFL apparel – Get your favorite team’s jersey at a significant discount this week.  Even Victoria’s Secret gets in on this by offering discounted pink NFL gear.

Beverages – If you’re a family of soda drinkers, don’t buy your pop at full price.  Stock up during Super Bowl and buy enough to last you through the next big soda sale, which usually happens around Memorial Day.  Bottled water is also often on sale.  We only buy bottled water for our car trips when driving to conferences, but it’s nice to buy it when it’s at rock bottom price.

Snack foods – If you have a teenage boy or another member of the family who can’t get enough of snacks like nachos, chips, and cheese curls, now is the time to buy them while they are cheap.  True, you may need to hide them from your snack monster so they’re not devoured in a few days, but again, you can stock up and save for the next several months until they go on sale again around Memorial Day.

Don’t forget that other condiments like ketchup, mustard, and salsa may also be on sale now.

Foods you can freeze – You’ll also likely find chicken and ground beef on sale, as well as cheese.  Don’t forget that you can freeze these items, so stock up and feed your family for the rest of the winter with meat that you got on sale.

Whether you’re a Super Bowl fan or not, this week is the perfect week to stock up on some basics and buy some luxuries at a steep discount.

What is your favorite item to buy during Super Bowl sales?

Why I Don’t Use an Online Financial Tool

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I don’t use any online financial tools.  And it’s not for the reason you’re probably thinking of.  It isn’t because I’m afraid that my information is going to get stolen and some hacker is going to run off and steal all my money to buy the country of Dubai.  It’s not that I don’t find them to be useful.  In fact, I find them to be quite useful.  For most people who aren’t me.

Actually, the reason that I don’t use any online financial tools is that very few (read: none) of them seem to connect to all of my accounts.  I’m not a person who likes having only half the picture.  I like to see everything all at once.  Not half here, and half there, or one account here, and the rest over there.  Everything.  Part of this is my fault.  I use all kinds of accounts.  Most of them are online accounts and usually show up in any of the tools that I try and connect them to.  But, I also use some local accounts.  Those local accounts are usually the problem.

Ready For Zero

I tried using this not that long ago.  They’re a sponsor of the Debt Movement, and have glowing reviews around the web for their tool.  And, from what I’ve seen of the Ready for Zero tool, it does look like a pretty cool tool.  It allows you to set up your accounts, get them set up into a payment plan similar to a debt snowball and then helps you optimize that plan for the best bang for your buck.  Only one problem.  My local Credit Union accounts aren’t linkable.  If I can’t include a good portion of my debt accounts in the plan, it throws off the entire plan.  How can I expect the tool to give me accurate information if it doesn’t have accurate account information to go off of?

Adaptu

Adaptu is a little bit like Mint.  They both allow for linking all of your accounts (deposit and loan) and then their tool gives you a full overview of your finances.  There’s more to both, of course, but I stopped investigating when I couldn’t link up all of my accounts.  The culprit in both cases was, again, my local Credit Union account.

There are other tools, but every one of them I’ve tried has had a similar problem.  In most cases, it’s the local CU that is causing the hiccup.  Is that fair to the tools?  Probably not.  Really, it’s more of a poor reflection on the local institution than it is on the tools.

Yes, I could move my finances to another institution and probably start using some of these tools.  But, I’m lazy.  For a long time, I was forced to have an account there, so it made sense to just use it for all of my banking.  Now that I’m not required, I find that I just don’t want to tackle having everything changed to a new institution.  What a hassle to change automatic transactions, re-enter all my bill pay stuff, and then link a new account to the myriad of other places that I have accounts.  It’s just easier to not do it.

Except when I want to use an online tool.

Do you use any online tools?  Have you ever had problems with getting your accounts linked up in them?  What did you do about it?

Are You a Patient Purchaser?

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Conventional wisdom, at least in frugal personal finance circles says you should wait several days (or even weeks) before making most purchases.  Especially large purchases.

Personally, I’m usually a pretty patient purchaser.  I hate paying retail for most things. When I decide I need something (or even want it), I usually start my search on eBay.  Only when the price on eBay is pretty close to retail, or when I just can’t get something at a discount will I purchase it through a retail outlet.  And even then, I generally wait for a sale.

Patience is a Virtue

The main reason that experts suggest that you wait on a purchase is that, after thinking about it for a few days, most people will decide that they don’t need the item, or that they don’t want to spend the money on it right then. It also prevents spontaneous purchases.  I seldom find that to be true.  Well, not entirely, anyways. There have been a few cases where I’ve decided that I really didn’t want the item.  I’m also frugal to a fault, and rarely make a spur-of-the-moment purchase.  If I see something that I want, I’m off to research it and find the best price for it.

Limited Time Offers

LTOs are my downfall.  Because of their limited timeline, I don’t have the luxury of waiting until I can do the same amount of research that I normally do.  I still have a hard time purchasing the item, but have been known to buckle under the pressure and pull out my card.  (That’s a debit card, thank you.)  And, that’s the reason that retailers will have LTOs.  Put under the pressure of a deadline, people will often put off doing the research they should and purchase on the spot to take advantage of a great deal.

How I Practice Patient Purchasing

Patient purchasing has probably saved me thousands of dollars over the years.  Here’s the method that I generally use.

  • Decide on the brand and model that you want.  This can be the super heavy duty research part of the purchase.  I’ll spend time shopping for the item, and then looking online at retailers to find a brand and model that I like as well as get an idea of the average price of the item.  e.g. when I last bought a pair of shoes, I first decided on the brand that I wanted to buy (New Balance) and then on the model.  Deciding on the model took the most time as they have many models that are built for different strides, pronations, etc.  I also found that the full retail for a pair was about $125, but that there were discount retail outlets that regularly sold them for about $100.
  • Set up a search on eBay.  I like eBay.  It gives me the ability to fine tune a search and then save it.  I also very rarely find that the price that I can get something for on eBay is more than what I can get it for at a retailer.  Most of the time it’s quite a bit less.  I usually start with a pretty generic search for the brand and model of the item I’m looking for and then fine tune it based on the other qualifications I’m looking for.  e.g. in the case of the shoes, I started with a search for “New Balance 757” and then refined the search with the shoe size, width, and maximum price I was willing to pay.
  • Exhibit Patience.  This is the part that some people find to be really hard, but that I find comes pretty easily.  I wait.  I check the saved search every two or three days (auctions can be run in 1,3,7, or 10 day lengths, but I’m willing to miss a few of the 1 day auctions) and add items that look like good possibilities to my watch list.  I then sort my watch list by the auctions that are ending soonest, and will place a bid on the first one for the maximum that I am willing to pay.  That usually involves figuring out how much shipping will be, subtracting it from the max I’m willing to pay and then bidding the remainder.

Using that method, I can usually get an item that I want at a price that I want.  Being patient is key though.  Sometimes it can take me weeks to finally win an auction.  In the example I used above (shoes), I think it took me about 3 weeks to get a pair of shoes that I wanted at the price I wanted.  In the end, I paid just under $60 (including shipping) for a pair of shoes that I would have paid about $125 for at a retail shoe store.

Is the savings I got worth the time I put into it?  If you break down the savings and figure out an hourly savings based on the amount of hours I put into getting the shoes, it would probably not be a very good rate.  Below minimum wage for sure.  But, for the most part, the time I spent on it is time that I likely would have wasted on watching TV or something anyways.  In other words, it was non-productive time and therefore had little monetary value associated to it in the first place.  I got a new pair of shoes, and saved money doing.

Are you a patient purchaser?  What are your methods for buying bigger ticket items?

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