Diaper prices, going up?
When Rena was born, I came up with a three-point financial plan: beg, borrow and steal.
My revulsion for larceny led me to interpret point #3 as "get everything you absolutely must buy for a steal."
Especially diapers. Really. The baby wears it for 5 minutes (if we're not lucky) or 10 hours (if we are) and then we just toss it in the trash. I'm not paying full price!
At first, a great Groupon made me think, diapers.com is the place to be. Then that great Groupon disqualified us from any discount ever again, and we said sayonara. For a while, we were using the Amazon Mom discounts on Amazon to score super-cheap diapers, discounted 30% and paid for with gift cards I got for free with Swagbucks and credit card points.
Have I mentioned I'm nuts?
All the while, my obsession with finding the best coupon codes was fueled by my favorite frugal mommy bloggers,
Kosher on a Budget and
Chief Family Officer. Unfortunately, a lot of the good couponing principles (like "stock up when there is a good price" and "wait for sales") don't work when there is only 1 diaper between the baby being adorable and the baby peeing on the bed on Shabbat morning.
I'm a bit annoyed because Amazon Mom is now only offering discounts of 20% on new subscriptions, meaning that I need to find a new "cheapest place to get wipes". I had lately been cheating on Amazon with CVS for diapers, since I can get the same gift cards with credit card points, and the Extra Bucks and stacked coupons often make a lackluster sale really cheap. However, the wipes deals have not been as easy to find. I expect that Ari will mutiny if I announce that we'll resume wiping the baby's adorable derriere with paper towels, like the doctor made us do for the first 12 weeks of her life.
We all have our own points of view, the things we don't care about and the things we can't let go. The thrill I get from a good deal combined with my feeling that I should not pay good money for anything I use to wipe my baby's butt keeps me reading circulars and pining for specials. Until the day I'm the lunatic driving a tractor trailer away from a store with $1000 worth of goods I paid $12 for in an episode of Extreme Couponing (which I'm convinced cannot be real), I'll be reading my circulars, searching for the best price and running to two CVS stores at 10pm on a Saturday night to get the best deal before it expires. In my own bizarre way, I'll consider it worth it.
Seriously, have you seen what they are charging for diapers these days?
Labels: couponing, family, finance
Corporate Rewards Programs: Not All Created Equal
My husband came home with a code for
Hood cottage cheese rewards after a trip to Stop and Shop last week, which is right about when I discovered that the corporate rewards world had hit oversaturation.
When I first began to collect airline points, shortly after moving to Cambridge in 2005, I set a goal for myself: I would know I was doing a savvy job juggling points programs if I could fly for free once a year. Alternating
Aeroplan miles,
Aadvantage points and Bank of America rewards points, I have basically made that goal and flown for free or almost free four times. We also now have enough points for at least one free flight in the winter or spring.
Once upon a time, the rewards program world was a small one: airlines, credit cards, and that was about it. In Toronto, my father would make sure to pay Canadian Tire (like a smaller Home Depot) in cash so he could get his Canadian Tire money - literally, fake money that you could use at the store. These programs were particularly valuable to us, and I learned from him that it made sense to consider where you were buying, how you were paying, etc. so you could work all the angles and get the most rewards. If only all rewards programs that later sprang up were that straightforward and easy to use.
I got into survey-based incentive programs early (I've been doing
e-Rewards for almost five years). When I joined, it was sponsored by Aadvantage, and I once got 1000 Aadvantage miles from them for the many surveys I had taken. A year or so later, a $50 gift card to Starbucks showed up in the mail. I was following, of course, the cardinal rule of rewards programs: they are only really valuable if you can use them to get things for free that you would have paid money for otherwise. Since I make it my goal to underspend my coffee budget and put the excess right into savings, and since I was never intending to miss my grandmother's 75th birthday, both rewards directly saved me money. There are many other programs whose email updates I've received, or who I've tried out, and none have delivered the way e-Rewards has.
Not everyone is such a fan, though, including me two years later. They only gave out Starbucks gift cards for a really short time and they discontinued their partnership with American Airlines a while back. I now get rewards and don't know what to use them for. I've got too much credit to allow to expire, so I get magazine subscriptions, fill out the occasional survey and hope for better rewards in the future. But the time I spend on a site like theirs is directly proportional to the value I expect to get out of it going forward; in the case of e-Rewards these days, I'd say that both of those are "almost none."
You can't always tell at first if a rewards program will be good for you. I was passing along Coke points for
My Coke Rewards to my brother-in-law for the longest time before we decided we could probably use it to our advantage. I admit, I have never been an early adopter, so though my sister-in-law sent me an invitation to
Swagbucks in November '08, I didn't sign up until January 2010. Swagbucks seems to me to be in the same category as MyPoints, where the best benefits come to those who buy things and "participate" in "special offers" - read: buy things - but I regret not signing up 14 months earlier for Swagbucks. One of my favorite mommy bloggers,
Chief Family Officer, calls it her favorite way to make free money, and I have come to agree since it only takes me 2ish months of >1 minute a day of investment and I get a $5 Amazon gift card effectively for free. Since the advent of Amazon's "Subscribe and Save," I've been buying certain groceries online, and this knocks down the price. (In one memorable transaction, I got 48 Timothy's K-cups for $2.21.) But I have no use for MyPoints. I am pretty sure I've been a member for longer, but I have never received a tangible benefit.
We all have a calculus of how much finagling and tracking is worth our time. I am of the mindset that if you wait to buy something until you absolutely need it, you'll probably pay too much. This has its reasonable limits - such as non-pregnant people buying maternity clothes - but is certainly true for things that one will use eventually, like toothpaste and toilet paper. If you're careful with coupons and savvy about ExtraBucks, you can get these items for a fraction of their original price (and sometimes even "make money" in the form of ExtraBucks) when you buy these things at CVS. I avoid making myself crazy, though, by sticking to one store, so I ignore Walgreens' parallel Register Rewards program. There are normal human limits.
It's a lot easier in this day and age to stretch a buck. Coming from Canada, where there are fewer consumers and less attractive programs, I am always appreciative of the ease of finding good sales, cheap shipping, coupons and coupon codes, and online shopping portals. (I use
Ebates and Bank of America's Add it Up, though I prefer
Ebates.) I like feeling like my loyalty and patronage are rewarded, that I am saving money I might otherwise have spent, and that I am doing my utmost to keep spending down so I can build a nest egg for the future. The road to financial security seems to sometimes be filled with useless rewards programs, and I occasionally think that the energy I put into something (like the Tropicana rewards program) has been completely wasted.
The fundamental theorem of corporate rewards programs seems to be simple: Their goal is to get you to spend more money than you initially intended, a larger fraction of your shopping budget there than elsewhere, and to get you to "come in" (in-store or online) for something cheap and wind up buying something expensive as well.
But who is to say that any of this is not to your advantage?
The math is simple. If:
Benefit to you > cost to you (especially if you would have spent the money anyways,)
Then:
It is worth your time.
That being said, there is some saying about needing to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince, so I recently signed up for Hood Cottage Cheese rewards and Pampers Gift to Grow (since I'm hoping to have a lot of points before the baby is born so that we can reduce our inevitable spending by using rewards.) Though I ought to spend the rest of the evening doing work, my husband just walked into the apartment with my new issue of Conde Nast Traveler, to which I got a free subscription through e-Rewards. On the cover? A text box advertising "How to Save a Bundle: 15 Magic Web Sites."
I suppose I'll kiss a few more frogs.
Labels: finance, travel
