Get More Value From Coinstar Machines

Maybe you’ve used one of these machines; I never have. However, I will be starting soon.

If you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about, the Coinstar machines can be found in several locations, usually grocery stores. You can take all that spare change you’ve been emptying out of your pockets and put it in the machine (you don’t have to count it beforehand, the machine does the counting for you).  You then trade your coins for dollars.

Here’s the kicker: when you put your change in and trade for dollars, there is a service charge of 8.9%. In other words, for every dollar in change you get back roughly 91 cents.

Here’s the anti-kicker – if instead of taking dollars for your change you elect to take a gift certificate, there is no deduction – you get the full value of your change! I was recently made aware of this by some discussion on a message board. My interest lies in the fact that one of the gift cards offered is from Amazon, but there are many different places from which to choose (just a few include Lowe’s, J C Penney, Starbucks, Borders).

If you go to the website coinstar.com, you can put in your zip code and find a list of all the locations in your area where there is a machine. Note that not all locations offer the gift cards, so be aware of that.  When the locations are listed, there will be symbols under the address that tells what’s available at that location.

So gather up all those coins that have been piling up and get some use out of them!

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Another Money Saving Site

I came across this site in one of my newsletters today, and it looks pretty interesting.

It’s onefrugalchick.com, “the site for all free things”. She lists other sites or locations where you can get free things. One thing that caught my eye, chocolate lover that I am, was this entry from the site:

Starting at 9:00 AM EST every Friday until September. Get a coupon redeemable for your choice of one (1) single-sized package of any M&M’S® Brand, MILKY WAY® Brand, SNICKERS® Brand, 3 MUSKETEERS® Brand, TWIX® Brand and DOVE® Brand product.

Note* you are allowed 4 COUPONS per household/address!!!

Click here: https://secure.realchocolate.com/

So now if I’ve piqued your interest, check out the site to see what might be waiting there for you!

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A New Find For You Cooks

OK, I admit – I’m not a cook, but I found this today and it looks pretty neat.

Advertised as “fun, easy and free“, (note my favorite word, free in there) – it’s a website called SuperCook.

The description on the web site says,

Supercook is a new recipe search engine that finds recipes you can make with only the ingredients you have at home. To begin, simply start adding ingredients you have in the green box on the top left. The more ingredients you add, the better the results will be.

You can watch an introductory video explaining how the site works. You don’t have to sign up for anything if you don’t want to, but if you do, the site will let you save your favorite recipes.

There’s also a grocery list you can print off, it will suggest other recipes you can use by just adding some other ingredients if you don’t mind a run to the store – I haven’t explored all the things it will do, but it looks interesting enough to give a try – what’s to lose??

Check it out at  www.supercook.com

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Save on Printing Costs

I make a point of not printing anything unless it’s really necessary – I don’t like using the paper, or the ink.

Today I needed to print out several pages for an online class I’m taking – and I was reminded again of the value of a software program I’ve been using for many years. It’s FinePrint, and if you do much printing at all this one can save money for you.

How many times have you printed something from the web, only to find that the last page has no information on it but maybe one line of print at the top with the web address, or something similar?

Or what about those times where you have several different things to print, each of which only takes up a few lines on a sheet?

How about when you’re web surfing, find something you want to print, then just a few mouse clicks later find something that suits what you were looking for better, so you want to print that too – now you’ve used several pages for nothing!

These instances and more are where FinePrint comes in handy. Now I just realized it sounds like I’m doing a commercial for this product, but really it’s a good product and it will save you money. The document I just printed this morning started out being 42 pages, and after I went through it and eliminated unnecessary pages with FinePrint, I wound up printing only 36 pages. Now I think that’s a pretty significant savings.

A license for FP is not cheap; it’s $49.95, but – there is a free trial version you can use as long as you want and it’s fully functional. The only drawback to the trial is that whenever you print something there is a line across the bottom of the page announcing that the page was printed with the trial version. If all you’re printing is something for your own personal use, who cares if it’s announced at the bottom?

And if you do care, you can get the license and remove the line; I think it would easily pay for itself with the savings you get. Take a look and give it a try. Find it at fineprint.com

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Options for Phone Service

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for some time; my intention was to research each of the things I’m going to mention and give you a rundown on the features and costs.

Well, I’ve still not found the time to do that, so I’m just going to tell you the services I’ve heard about, and give you links to see for yourselves.

Wherever you live, you likely don’t have more than one or two choices for who provides your landline service – in Tulsa, for instance, we have a choice of AT&T or Cox. In the southeast part of Tulsa and Broken Arrow, it’s Windstream or Cox.

Here’s the rest of that story – you do have other choices. The caveat is that all of the things I’m going to mention depend on having a high speed internet connection.

With these services there is lots of money to be saved. Here’s what I know about so far:

Vonage – this one has a monthly fee – 9.95/month for the first 3 months, then 24.99/month after that. Gives unlimited local & long distance calls. More info here: vonage.com

Skype – software installs on your computer, you plug in a headset to your PC, then calls to other skype accounts are free. You can make calls to folks who do not have Skype, these are low cost and you can use pay as you go, or sign up for a monthly fee. More in depth at skype.com

Magic Jack – now this one is interesting, and I believe the cheapest of all the options I’ve seen. You purchase a Magic Jack gizmo (technical term) for 39.95, plug it into a USB port on your computer, then plug your regular phone into it and calls are free then to anywhere in the US and Canada. More in depth at magicjack.com

Ooma – with this service, you buy a device for 249.95, your regular phone plugs into it and away you go – no further charges for local or long distance. Find out more at ooma.com

Clark Howard has talked about all these at one time or another, and the latest I heard from him was that he was really impressed with the Ooma service. He said it was the only one that passed the “Elaine test”, Elaine being his wife who isn’t always as thrilled with money saving things as Clark is. He says the sound quality is excellent.

Now one thing to be aware of if you’re thinking of kicking your regular landline to the curb and using one of your other options is to check whether they can handle 911 calls. I believe Ooma says it can, and some of the others have some tweaking you have to do before 911 gets handled, and some of them just don’t do 911. So don’t leave yourself without a way to get emergency calls through.

In some cases you can choose your phone number with any area code you want – this would be handy if, for instance, you had friends or family in another location that you wanted to be able to call you without it being a long distance call for them.

Think about your calling patterns and see if maybe there’s something here that could save you some buckaroos.

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Discount coupons for web sites

I take several different vitamins daily; one of them is vitamin E. I normally buy it at Sam’s, and I’m just about out, so when I went to Sam’s yesterday I went down the vitamin aisle.

The vitamin E they had in stock was not the kind I want (I want d-alpha tocopherol, and they had dl-alpha). So I went online this morning to see what kind of prices I could get from online retailers.

I found lots of places to buy, lots of different prices (big surprise, huh). I wound up placing an order from iherb.com. Not only did they have excellent prices, but their shipping charges were really good (shipping for my order was $1.52). During checkout, they had a little window with a message that said “if you have a referral code, enter it here” – hmmm, wonder what that might be??

Google to the rescue – when I entered a search for “iherb.com referral code” I was rewarded with a big bunch of them – there were several on retailmenot.com for $5 off on my first order, so I used one.

Then after I checked out, darned if I didn’t get my very own referral code to give to others for $5 off on their first order – so, the bottom line here is twofold:

First, when you’re shopping online before you pull the final trigger on whatever you’re buying, let Google find out if there might be a coupon for you.

Second, if you find anything you need that iherb.com might have for sale, use the code MES296 at checkout and save yourself $5 on the first order! This is not a solicitation, just for your information. I love saving money whenever I can.

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More interesting new things

I’ve been trying to catch up on some of my reading/listening and have come upon some good suggestions.

A web site I discovered is very interesting – maybe you’ve been hearing the term “cloud computing“. If not, I predict before too long you will be exposed to this. It seems to be the way things are headed.

Cloud computing refers to computing “in the cloud”, which means that rather than having software reside on your computer it’s going to reside in the cloud, the “cloud” being the term used for the internet.

We’ve already been exposed to this quite a bit, but the term just hasn’t been used. Think about it – we have web based mail services that many of us use. I know I’ve been using Gmail as my primary e-mail client for a few years now, and I know of many others who are doing the same. Many use Hotmail, or Yahoo mail as well.  Cloud computing.

Google has Google Docs in addition to their Gmail service. This is an online service for word processing and spreadsheets. They also have the Google Calendar (others have online calendars too). Cloud computing. These are just a few examples that come to mind right away, and now I’ve heard of another site that has a large collection of apps for use online – zoho.com . Check this one out; if you have a Yahoo account or a Gmail account, you can sign in with those usernames, otherwise you sign up for a Zoho account and start using whichever of the services you want.

Another thing that is kind of a hybrid of cloud computing and computer based computing is something I’ve been using for a few months now. This one is called Dropbox, and I’m really liking it. This is a service that is used to store your documents online as well as on your computer.

You sign up for an account, download the Dropbox app and install it, then you have a listing in your My Documents folder called My Dropbox. Save whatever documents you want to store in your My Dropbox folder, and now wherever you are, as long as you have internet access, you are able to log in to your Dropbox account and see your own documents.

In my case, since I work with multiple computers, the beauty of this is that whichever computer I’m working from, I am able to access the documents in my Dropbox folder whenever I want. If I’m away from my own computer and need to access the files, all I have to do is go to the Dropbox site, enter my username and password, and use my files.

Dropbox has a free account that gives up to 2GB of storage space, or if you need more, you can pay for a larger amount of storage. For my needs, the 2GB has been plenty. If you wanted to store photos in this account, I could see the 2GB perhaps being insufficient.  Go here to check it out: getdropbox.com

Now just start listening and watching for the term cloud computing.

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New additions at the library

I’ve said before what a fan I am of the library, and I visit their site frequently. I spend most of my time looking through what they have to offer in the way of audiobooks to download, and yesterday I was looking through the catalog and noticed lots of new offerings.

They are constantly adding to the selection of audiobooks, but now I see they have also added videos and music to the downloadable section. I took a brief look through the music selection, and quickly found enough to hit my limit of things checked out for today (5).  The selection looks great! I also noticed that all the things I checked out are able to be burned to CD (that’s not always the case, at least with the books).

The lending period on books has apparently been adjusted down from the previous 10 days to 7; this may be just for some selected high demand books, but all the ones I checked had a lending period of 7 days. This is really OK with me, as once I download a book and transfer it to my mp3 player it’s ready to be released for the next person in line as far as I’m concerned.

There is a lending period of 3 days for the videos and music.  Check it out, you may well find something there that excites you.

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A Travel Info Site to add to your list

I was catching up on listening to some Clark Howard (clarkhoward.com) radio shows, and he mentioned a new travel information site. It’s still a beta, but looks like it’s a good one to add to your sites to check when you’re thinking of taking a trip. It’s insidetrip.com

It will allow you to narrow your searches for the things that matter to you most (legroom, on time record, security wait, etc). Give it a look and see what you think.

If you don’t know Clark Howard, he can now be seen on Headline News on Saturday and Sunday (it’s the same show both days, and airs at several different times). The shows are short, and only really give snippets of all the information he gives out during the week, but you can still get some really good tips.

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Coupon sites

Here’s a link to an article on Cnet about coupon sites – links to 18 different sites for coupons.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10203126-2.html

Suggestion: if you’re thinking of buying something, check to see if there’s a coupon available before pulling the trigger. You could be pleasantly surprised.

Another money saving site that’s one of my personal favorites is dealnews.com I think I may have mentioned them before, but another mention won’t hurt. They scour the web looking for good deals on all sorts of things, and you can sometimes come upon some really good bargains through this site. You don’t buy from the site; they simply give you “heads up” on where to go to get good deals.

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