I get a lot of ‘check this site out’ e-mails, but this one actually looks useful. As I’ve mentioned before, many sites like Fatwallet, Upromise, and eBates offer cashback on online purchases if you purchase through their portal. Usually I have to do a quick comparison on all three to see which one offers the best deal for the specific store I’m buying from. This new (beta) site, EvReward.com, does the comparisons for me and includes tons of cashback portals I’ve never even heard of. It even includes the frequent flyer miles-earning options, for you mileage junkies.

Of course, one issue is the reliability of the listed portals in giving your cashback, as you have to use their specific link, enable cookies, and then wait months to get your rebate. I’ve only used FatWallet and eBates with good success. Still, EvReward is my newest bookmark.

I was surfing Food Network last night and caught a show spotlighting a place called Dream Dinners. They provide you a kitchen, recipes, and pre-measured and chopped ingredients to prepare your own meals, which you then pack up, take home, and put in your freezer. When you’re hungry, you just stick it in the oven. Their menu changes monthly and looks pretty tasty and healthy.

I’ve been analyzing how much it actually costs to buy a meal from the grocery store and make it and it can get pretty expensive. 2 lbs. Chicken – $6. 4 tomatoes – $2. 2 green peppers – $1.25. 1 lemon – 50 cents. It all adds up! This place will sell you 12 dinners for about $200, with each dinner being 4-6 servings. They even let you split the meals in half, which works great for our two-person household. So that’s 24 dinners – about $8 for a meal for two. Not dirt cheap, but it’s better than McFastFood for sure. I’m intrigued – Anyone tried them?

Another good frugal living tip I hear is to get cheaper hobbies. I know a lot of people with very expensive hobbies – Golf, Boats, ATVs, Gadgets, Photography, and Mountain Biking come to mind. Each of these involves pressure to buy the latest and greatest widget to “take you to the next level”. Like getting the newest Super-Mega-Big-Bertha, or the latest Shimano XGVRSTQ++ titanium alloy components, is really going to help your game all that much.

My expensive hobby of choice? Snowboarding. I try to keep things under control; my equipment was bought off-season, and is now 6 years old. But it’s still expensive. Lift tickets now average $50 a day, gas for the 3 hour drive to get there, hotels for multi-day trips, food on the mountain…
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Just saw a trailer for Fun with Dick and Jane, a new Jim Carrey movie hitting on how we are too obsessed with owning Stuff and “Keeping up with the Jones'”. In this case the Jones’ have a new voice-activated Benz, while Dick looks sadly at his mere non-voice-commanded BMW. Awww, poor baby.

Dick gets fired, and since they’re mortgaged to the hilt and want to keep living in happy gated-community suburbia land, they have to share one huge single-trip salad bar plate, and start showering with the garden hose (how does that save water?). Dick even gets a job at KostMart (think Costco + Walmart). In the end, the only way to solve their money woes is of course…. spending less? Nah. Robbing people!!

I haven’t eaten out and shopped this much in a 4-day span in my life. Multiple Outlet Malls. Multiple fancy seafood restaurants. I don’t know the totals, but I’m sure it’s over $500. According to this IBD article ‘Thanksgiving take totals $28 billion’, we are above average (not sure about per-person though):

The average amount spent over the long weekend was $302.81, up from $265.15 last year, and accounted for almost 36% of buyers’ holiday shopping. In addition, one in 13 people already finished shopping for the holidays.

So, I made a little poll to see how you all compared:
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Oh, the smell of wallets opening is in the air. My parents have already directed me to find the most direct route to the nearest outlet malls. I’m so sad that I will be forced into the writhing frantic mass that is Black Friday shoppers. I like shopping online so much better.

If you’re gonna shop online, don’t forget to use Cash Back portals like Ebates and FatCash. If you carefully click through their link and then buy something, they’ll give you a percentage back as a rebate on your purchase somewhere down the line. This is in addition using a properly chosen cashback credit card. I always manage to forget to use them, so I’ve actually put a Post-it on my monitor with EBATES written on it. Check both to see which is offering the best cash back rate.
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Black Friday is only a week from today, so it’s just about time spend spend spend on gifts. And while some frugal sites may suggest things like making things like a gift basket of cookies or handmade candles, my friends already think I’m cheap enough. I give them cookies and I’ll get coal shoved up somewhere.

But that doesn’t mean you have to overspend. In fact, my observation is quite the opposite. Last Christmas, one of my friends got me a portable DVD player. It must have cost at least $100 bucks. I’ve used it… once. I always just travel with my laptop, I can watch DVDs on it too, and it has a 500% larger screen. And I don’t even collect DVDs. Obviously, very little thought went into it, and they compensated with an expensive gift.
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Many people want a cell phone for occasional use but most prepaid plans, although the per-minute charges are low, make you recharge every 30 or 60 days otherwise you lose your service and/or your phone number. In the end, this means you’re often paying at least $10/month even if you don’t use the phone.

I just ran across these guys – STi Mobile, who piggy-back onto Sprint PCS’s network, like Virgin Mobile. The offer a flat rate of 10-12 cents per minute, and you only need to make 1 call every 60 days to keep your service. That means you only need to spend 5 cents a month to have a cell phone around! My parent use Virgin Mobile right now and waste a lot of minutes, I’m definitely telling them about this. I mean, just keep one of these charged in the car, it’s that cheap.
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Before I switched to VoIP and cell phones, I used OneSuite.com exclusively for long distance calls. The charge a meager 2.5 cents/minutes for calls to the lower 48 if you live an urban area, 2.9 cents otherwise. Great international rates too. To top it off, they are currently having a November Promotion where you get a 15% bonus on recharges, and a 10% bonus on new sign-ups!

In my opinion, their greatest innovation was ZipDial. Instead of having to remember some long 800-number and a PIN number, you just register your home phone number and poof! no more PIN needed. So just put their number on speed-dial and you’re all set. You can even assign commonly called numbers to a two-digit ‘RapiDial’ number.
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Catching up on housekeeping this weekend, I ran across my stash of Bed, Bath, and Beyond coupons. For those that shop at BBB, if you sign up for their mailing list in-store, you regularly get coupons for ‘20% off any single item’, with some brand restrictions like Dyson vacuums. The great thing about these coupons is that they never expire. I’ve been to many BBB stores from many states, and there is an unstated policy that they accept any coupon, even though there is an expiration date clearly printed on each one!

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Not to be insensitive (I’m a native Texan), but if you’ve got a car with a big gas tank I’d fill it up now in case Hurricane Rita also makes a direct hit. $3 gas may sound like a good deal shortly. Various reports even mention the possiblity of $5 gas. Don’t forget to try GasBuddy.com too.

I hate carrying around spare change, I don’t know why. I put all mine into a jar by the front door the second I get home. I try to use credit cards exclusively, but somehow the spare change has filled two spaghetti sauce jars already. Coinstar machines are everywhere now, trying to cash in on people’s laziness and giving you bills after charging a surcharge of 8.9% (9.8% in Canada). For someone that is happy when my saving account rate bumps up 0.25%, that’s too much. But now, you can lug your change to the machine and get a gift certificate for the full amount to select Coinstar partner stores – including Amazon.com, Starbucks, Hollywood Video, Pier 1 Imports. [Coinstar Kiosk Locator]

According to this CNN Money article, they are doing this by buying discounted certificates and pocketing the difference. Very smart. But I’d note that I could buy gift cards for Starbucks and Hollywood Video at a Safeway grocery store using my Citibank Dividend Card and get 5% cash back, so that would be like paying a 5% fee on my spare change. The Amazon option sounds pretty neat though.
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