Blockbuster Better Deal Than Netflix

I just got my first assignment as a member of the LinkyLoveArmy, and it's one I'm very happy to participate in.

We're promoting the Blockbuster Online Total Access Trial deal.

When you sign up for Blockbuster Online, you get the first month for $9.99, and then $17.99 each month after that. Your membership fee entitles you to have up to 3 DVDs at a time. That's similar to Netflix's most popular plan, with one added bonus -- with Blockbuster Online, instead of returning your DVDs through the mail, you can put the DVD in the postage-paid envelope and take it to your local Blockbuster store and exchange it for a free rental DVD.

How freaking cool is that?

Of course the trick to all these sorts of DVDs-through-the-mail things is to make sure you watch enough DVDs to get your money's worth. For me, that means watching and returning 7 or 8 movies a month. For families like Julie's, watching 10 to 20 movies a week, a Blockbuster DVD rental subscription is a no-brainer. We don't watch that many, but we watch enough that it makes sense for us to join a DVD service like that.

Another bonus with BlockBuster Online is that you get a printable coupon for 1 free in-store DVD rental every month. So if you work it right, you can get order 3 DVDs through the mail, watch them, then return them to your local Blockbuster store, where you get 3 free in-store DVDs. And as soon as the kid at the Blockbuster store punches your return into their computer, the next 3 DVDs in your queue go into the mail. If you do that once a week, that's 25 movies a month. For $17.99. If your turn-around time is faster, you can get even more DVDs for your dollar.

IF your family watches that many DVDs every month, then I think this Blockbuster thing is a hell of a good deal.

Tags: BlockBuster, Netflix, bargains, DVD, LinkyLoveArmy

Powered by ScribeFire.

Saving Money and Eating Healthy

A lot of the posts on this blog, especially lately, have been about making money, but I try not to forget that one of the reasons I started blogging was because I wanted to talk about saving money as well. Because when you think about it, saving money is the same as making money -- the end result is more money in your wallet.

When I was a kid, my family didn't have a lot of money, so the whole "frugal living" thing was pretty much just normal life for us. When I got older and started making money, it felt good to be able to spend freely, without having to worry about pinching every penny. Unfortunately, I started spending a little too freely, and ended up in debt. But that's another story.

Things changed when my wife and I found out we were going to be parents. Up until then, we'd been focusing a lot on creating the life we wanted as a couple. And since the life we wanted (or thought we wanted) cost a lot of money, we worked a lot to get the money to pay for it. And we were happy. But when we started thinking about what kinds of parents we wanted to be, we decided we wanted a more balanced lifestyle. We did NOT want to be workaholic parents who didn't know their own children. So we started making changes.

And we're still making changes. Over the past nine years, the way we think about money, success, and happiness have changed a lot. And so has the way we live. And one of the biggest changes we've made (and are still continuing to make) is the way we eat. Which is why I enjoyed reading Trent's post at The Simple Dollar called How The Farm Bill Affects Your Wallet And Your Health - And Ten Ways To Eat Healthy and Cheap Anyway.

Nine years ago, we weren't doing any of the things on Trent's list. We ate out a lot, and yet we were also spending a fortune on groceries -- mostly on junk food, instant this and microwave that. But not any more. Now we cook a lot of good, healthy, cheap meals from scratch.

We buy most of our fruits and vegetables from the farmer's market instead of the supermarket.

We're getting better about buying foods in season.

We've been cooking in bulk (including "instameals") and freezing for years, and now we're thinking about getting into canning and preserving as well.

We got a great deal on a crockpot in an after-Xmas sale last year, and we're discovering more great crockpot dishes all the time.

We "repurpose" a lot of our leftovers, and use them in soups, stews, wraps, pies and pastries so that very little food goes to waste.

I agree with Trent that one of the keys to making healthy foods taste good is to learn how to enhance the foods' flavours with the right herbs and spices. We've grown our own herbs in the past, but not for the last few years. That's something we'd like to start doing again. We'd also like to do a bit of microgardening (container gardening) and try producing some tomatoes, radishes, carrots, cucumbers, beans, bell peppers, etc.

I think the "food exchange" idea is a good one, and I'd be interested to find out if anybody is doing anything like that in our area.

It amazes me how many people devote so much time and energy to making money, but don't seem to think much about how they spend that money. I think that's a very dangerous way to live -- especially when it comes to things like health and nutrition.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Two New Sites for Bargain Hunters

A post at ShoeMoney led me to a new "deal site" called Dealighted. Dealighted pulls all the deals from Fatwallet, Slickdeals, Anandtech , and GottaDeal, and puts them all together on one site.

The deals are submitted by real people, and you can choose to see the most popular, or all the deals that have been submitted. And there's also a price comparison function that's very handy. But I have to say that I agree with Jeremy's criticism; it would be nice if users could vote on the deals, or set preferences to filter out the deals they see (I don't want or need to see a "deal" for a free sample of the latest tampon technology, especially if they'll only ship to a US mailing address).

And the other new site I discovered (thanks to ProBargainHunter) is CouponLooker, a search engine for coupon or promo codes. CouponLooker collects coupon code info from a bunch of different coupon sites and lets you find them easily through their search engine.

These sorts of aggregator sites could come in real handy for those of us who like a bit of online bargain hunting, since it could mean we need to visit a smaller number of sites to get the same information.

Technorati Tags: bargains, bargain hunting, CouponLooker, Dealighted, shopping, price comparison, free stuff, coupons, coupon codes

A Great Price Comparison Shopping Site

Another cool bargain-hunting site I've come across recently is Mpire. It's a shopping search engine, a price-comparison site, and coupon/rebate/prmotion code site all rolled into one. Oh, and they even track price trends, so they can tell you the average sale price, and auction price, of the item your looking for, as well as whether or not the price has been going up or down. Sweet!

Their big partners include eBay, Amazon.com, Yahoo, Overstock.com, and Shopping.com and others. So how does it work?

First, you type in the product you're looking for. For my example, I'll use a couple of the books I recommended in an earlier post.

First I type in keywords for the first book, CSS: The Definitive Guide. That link (yes, it's an affiliate link) takes you to Amazon.com, where the book is selling for $28.34 (and from $23.99 + shipping in the Amazon Marketplace).

Mpire returns 7 stores selling that book, with Amazon's price getting beaten by 2 cents at Overstock.com. But it's still well below Mpire's average store price for the book -- $30.14. The average auction price is just $9.50, though, so I click on the auction tab to see what's available.

I get two eBay results -- one listed at US$7.00 with a Buy It Now price of US$9.00, and the other from eBay UK listed at £31.67 (over US$60). The UK price is way too steep for me, but the US$7.00 looks pretty reasonable, although it's for the older, first edition of the book. The seller says he'll send it to Australia via Airmail for US$9.00, and for that price I can get a second book shipped for free. At that price, I can get the CSS book and eBay Hacks for less than the cost of the CSS book at either Amazon or Overstock. Looks like a pretty good deal to me!

The other book I'll search for at Mpire is HTML, XHTML, and CSS by Elizabeth Castro. Amazon sells it for $19.79 (from $18.20 + shipping from sellers in the Amazon Marketplace), and according to Mpire, that's the best price going. I also saw that they also had results for the old 4th edition like mine, and it's selling for only $6.44 (incl. shipping) at Alibris.

The Mpire site looks great and is very easy to use, and definitely worth checking out if you're interested in finding bargains when you shop online.

eBay Dealfinder

On the off-chance that I'm not the last person on the planet to have discovered this, I thought I'd share. I just came across the eBay Dealfinder. Actually, I came across the Australian eBay Dealfinder, and then checked to make sure there was a US version before I blogged about it. Apparently this was announced back in November 2006, but I must've missed it.

So what is the eBay Dealfinder? It's a way to search or browse for items that meet the following requirements:

• less than 4 hours left to sell
• no bids
• no reserve price
• free or fixed rate shipping so you know the total cost

You browse the popular searches they feature on the page, or do your own search, including limiting the results by category and/or max price. And the results aren't like normal eBay search results, but like this:


The timer counts down until the item has ended, and all-in-all, I think the whole thing is awesome. You can select whether it shows you 16 or 32 items per page, and the only thing I don't like is that there's apparently no requirement that the item listing includes an image, which kinda screws up the whole visual results idea. But then again, you might find some really good bargains on items that don't have an image.

In any case, I think it's a cool new way to look for eBay bargains.

Popular Bargain Hunting Sites

Yan has posted his newest list of popular bargain hunting sites (based on Alexa ratings and Google PageRank) over at his ProBargainHunter blog. Click on over there if you want to see the whole list of 46 sites for serious online bargain hunters, but here are the top five:

1. slickdeals.net
2. fatwallet.com
3. anandtech.com
4. dealnews.com
5. techbargains.com

I visit all these sites on a fairly regular basis, and they are all great for finding online bargains.

At SlickDeals, I like the "Hot Deals" forum, and the SlickFillers (cheap items you can add to your order at Amazon to qualify for free shipping).

At FatWallet, I love browsing through the forums because there are just sooooo many bargains. I also like the fact that they offer cash-back on your purchases.

Anandtech is great if you're looking for bargains on computer bits -- RAM, video cards, etc.

I often check DealNews if I'm looking for bargains at a particular online store. For example, when I get an Amazon or other online gift certificate.

I don't visit TechBargains as often as some of the others, but have found some good tech-related bargains there from time to time.

Some of the other sites on the list that I like are AbleShoppers and Judy's Book, and I don't like is DealofDay (too much Adsense, especially the deceptive Adsense links in the sidebar.

Online Price Comparison Services

After reading Sean O'Rourke's review of the new MSN Shopping (beta) site at Organized Shopping Blog, I thought I'd mention a few other comparison shopping services that are available. There are literally hundreds of them, including some for very specific product niches. But for general shopping, try these:

• Froogle - owned by Google (still in beta)
• InStore - owned by AOL
• Shopping.com - DealTime + Epinions = Shopping.com
• PriceGrabber - shopping services for US, Canada, UK, Mexico, and Brazil
• MySimon - part of the CNet Network

The primary feature of these services is to compare prices at different online stores. They also often provide product reviews and reviews and ratings of the different merchants. Using one or more of these services can help you find the product you're looking for at the best price, available from trustworthy online shops.

I put several of the comparison shopper services to the test today, and was quite happy with the results. A CD that I could've easily paid $18-20 for, I found for $13.50. A book that would've cost me over $20 at Amazon.com was available for $17.40 elsewhere. And a possible $100 savings on an 40Gb iPod was enough to convince me that comparison shopping is absolutely essential if you want a good deal.

I'll try to put together some reviews, and maybe talk about some of the more specialized shopping services some time soon.

Categories: shopping