Since my financial armageddon, I’ve become very good at calculating the cost of various services, the time it would take me to do it myself, and using that data to determine if it is an efficient use of time. As we’re about to move, one of the big decisions for us was whether it was cost-effective to use a moving service or not.

The situation: We’re moving from a two bedroom apartment to a house that’s about twenty minutes (or so) away. My wife is several months pregnant and thus is restricted on the weight she can lift, for understandable reasons. We do have some volunteer help that’s willing to assist with the move at various times.

The moving service: We got several quotes and our best bet seems to be Two Men and a Truck, which quoted us that everything would be moved for about $350. Ouch. However, all items would be moved in four hours, which is a big benefit for us – we could be unpacking by 1 PM if the move began at 9 AM one day. In all, eight man-hours would be invested by the two of us.

The costs of doing it ourselves: My estimate is that it will take forty five minutes per pickup truck to load and unload by myself, plus forty minutes of commute time. This gives an hour and a half of unloading. Plus, each trip would put about thirty miles on my truck and cost about two and a half gallons of gas.

Given all of the stuff in our apartment and the stuff in a storage locker (similar trip, actually), I estimate that it would take fifteen trips for me to get everything. That means that I would spend about twenty two hours loading and unloading boxes and transporting them, plus thirty eight gallons of gas and about five hundred miles of wear on my truck.

What’s the cost of that? I’ll estimate $20 for the wear, plus $3 a gallon times 38 gallons, equals $134. There’s also a total of twenty two hours of time investment, which would be somewhat reduced with help from others with moving, down to as low as seventeen hours.

Putting things together: The moving service would cost $220 more than moving ourselves, but it would save us fourteen hours of labor (as little as nine if we called in help). With those restrictions, I’m essentially paying the movers $16 an hour (or $24 an hour if you figure in the potential extra help we could get if we did it ourselves) to move all of our stuff – they would obviously do it more efficiently than we would. I’m basically buying hours that would be spent moving back at a $16 an hour rate.

Is it worth it? There’s not really an easy yes or no answer here – it depends on personal values. Taking our whole situation into account (two big pieces were the pregnant wife factor and the under-foot child factor), we decided to hire the moving service then invite all of the people who would have helped us move over for a housewarming party that weekend, when most of our stuff will still be in boxes, and save those “favors” from friends for a time when it could be more valuable to us.

That’s not to say there isn’t a good argument for doing it yourself; there is. It saves a nice piece of money, obviously, and I could be loading and unloading with help while my wife is unpacking at the house with her sisters and friends. We mostly decided on the other way because of the time factor – our time, right now during this moving week, is more valuable to us than that.

I’m a big believer in the idea that buying a quality product (by quality, I don’t necessarily mean the most expensive – keep reading) is worth the extra money you put in versus finding the absolute cheapest deal.

A couple months ago, I discussed looking at the total cost of ownership when buying an appliance. While TCO is a great tool to use when figuring out a purchase, it is far from the only tool you should be using.

Take, for example, diapers. I’ve been criticized on here before for spending far too much on diapers because of our loyalty to Pampers Cruisers (and their infant version, Pampers Swaddlers). We often pay roughly a quarter per diaper for these, which really adds up over the two years your child is in diapers considering you can get many generic brand diapers for ten cents a pop (or occasionally less than that).

So why do we pay so much extra? The Cruisers simply do not fail, period. We’ve never had a single one break or bust open on us. With the exception of periods of heavy teeting, they have never caused our child to have any diaper rash at all. The only leakage we have ever seen was in cases of intense diarrhea when he was ill or when we were keeping him in a small size for too long and he would urinate in the night (our own fault for exceeding the weight on the box). They’re very easy to put on, the tape never fails, and the elastic works quite well for ensuring a snug fit. We tried other diapers (we actually asked for a wide variety of them as baby shower gifts) and they all had problems of various kinds except for the Swaddlers and Cruisers. Even with just that narrow price difference, it costs an extra $876 to use those diapers over a period of two years (8 diapers a day).

We pay the extra $0.15 per diaper to cover other costs. The cost of extra time invested when a diaper breaks open. The cost of frustration when these things happen just as you’re trying to get out the door to go on a trip or get to work. The cost of the occasional diaper that would be thrown away with a break on the tape. The cost of additional laundry and wipes when his diaper leaks all over the place.

These are costs, too, and to us, they’re an important part of being frugal. When you include all of the costs, buying these diapers makes our lives simpler. Diaper disasters simply do not happen, and that has saved us countless incidents of frustration and cleaning.

The same principle applies to any consumer purchase. As I mentioned in the earlier article about total cost of ownership, even though I was spending much more up front on a more expensive washing machine, over a long period, it became much cheaper. This only discusses money – by buying a known reliable washing machine, we incur many fewer incidents where the washing machine is on the fritz or it needs replacing, which means less frustration, fewer repair calls, and fewer trips to the appliance store to pick out a new one. These are real costs, too – they may be harder to quantify, but they have an effect on your life.

How do you know what to buy? I turn to a well-known consumer publication – they may not be perfect, but they are impartial and their resources for investigation far exceed mine. I trust their word for consumer goods and appliances and I fanatically use their online archives that are available to subscribers.

This doesn’t mean I don’t look for great, cheap solutions. I’m a big believer in my homemade laundry detergent, for example; I tried it side-by-side with some of the Consumer Reports choices and mine did just as well, even with highly stained clothes. For me, looking at all of the costs (and not just the money ones), making my own batch of detergent in a five gallon bucket is the best option.

Typically, I’m a “do it myself and save money” type of person, but I think I may have just run into a situation where I may actually hire someone to complete a task that I could do myself instead.

Here’s the deal: when we move out of our apartment, we’ll have about a week during which the apartment needs to be cleaned up for inspection, at which point we hand over our keys and walk out the door. No problem, right? Well, if you’ve ever moved, you often discover that when you’ve emptied things out, there’s a pretty sizeable mess left behind. The carpet needs shampooed, the shower needs very carefully scrubbed, the baseboards need cleaned, the closets need cleaned, and so on – just little things that you don’t notice living in a place.

Since my wife, who will be well into her eighth month of pregnancy at the time, will be basically unable to help with many pieces of it due to the work and the cleaning chemical fumes, this becomes a task primarily for me to accomplish. I estimated that it would take me about six to eight hours to get everything in tip-top shape (I’m not particularly efficient at tasks like this).

At the same time, I have a friend who actually cleans houses as an individual maid service. I asked her about her rates and she said that she could get that done for $60 while providing her own chemicals and cleaning supplies. Given that doing it myself would incur some cost in this department, this reduces the overall expense for her down to $55 or so.

So, let’s say it would take seven hours for me to clean the apartment and I would effectively be paying her $56 for the service. This would mean that effectively my time was worth $8 an hour during the cleaning time. Another thing to note is that we will receive our deposit back after the inspection, equal to a month’s rent, that could be used in part to pay the cleaning service.

I’ve decided to go for the service, and here’s why. First of all, my time is simply worth more than $8 an hour, particularly when that $8 is not directly part of my budget at the moment (it will come from the refunded deposit that we paid several years ago). Second, I work full time and also devote a few hours a day to this site, which means that my remaining time is precious – I can think of many better uses for that time than scrubbing the floor of an apartment that I’ll never set foot in again.

Is this the most cost-efficient option? Clearly it isn’t. But given that we’re also settling into a new house, my wife will be near her due date, and I’m working full time and also focusing on this project, my time is much more valuable than the time spent cleaning out the shower.

Who says web surfing can’t directly save you money? First of all, here are five websites I use on a very frequent basis that have directly saved me significant money.

Remember The Milk
http://www.rememberthemilk.com

I wrote ecstatically about this site before, but the same still holds true: I use it to manage my grocery list, among other things. I just add items to Remember the Milk whenever I think of it, then when I’m out at the store, I fire up the mobile version of the site and there’s my shopping list right on my cell phone. This makes it incredibly easy to just follow the grocery list and get out of the store without spending extra money.

Coupons.com
http://www.coupons.com

This is basically the equivalent of printing money. When you have your shopping list ready, just visit this site and scroll through the pile of available coupons. Print the ones that match what’s on your list – most of them won’t, but I usually find one or two that do. I also like to visit the website of the grocery store I’m about to visit to pick up even more coupons. Quite often, five minutes of web surfing in this fashion can save me another $5 on a grocery store visit. No need to worry about clipping coupons at all; just print the ones you actually can use out before you go to the store.

FatWallet
http://www.fatwallet.com/

If you’re about to make a larger purchase, stop by FatWallet before dropping the cash. The site is basically a collection of deals on all kinds of products from various vendors, from computers to housewares. I looked at FatWallet just before buying my laptop and after about three minutes of looking around, I found a Dell code that knocked $300 off of the price. I’ve found other deals there, too, just by looking around a bit before making a planned larger purchase.

PaperBackSwap
http://www.paperbackswap.com/

PaperBackSwap is another site I’ve waxed ecstatic about in the past, but it still holds true: it’s an incredibly cheap way to get books in the mail at home. Basically, for every book you don’t want any more that you’re willing to ship via media mail to someone else who wants it (you’re matched up at the site), you can request any of the million-plus books there to be shipped to you for free.

What about other online sites?
Many people use such sites as Priceline.com and Shopping.com for online comparison shopping, and I agree that you can sometimes find deals by using them. However, I almost always find that the prices are slightly inflated at these types of sites. For example, I was recently able to find a very nice price for an airline ticket online, and it would have been quite easy to just click and order it. However, I just directly called the airline, told them the price that I could get online, and asked them if they could directly beat it. They did almost immediately by about $20.

In short, don’t believe in online comparison shoppers as the be-all-end-all of saving money. Although the prices are better than what you might find off the shelf, quite often a little more legwork can save you a little bit more than that. If you’re going to book a flight, get a hotel room, or other such things online, take an extra minute to call up the airline or hotel. Tell them the price you can get online and ask if they can directly beat it. Quite often, they will; by cutting out the middleman, you save and the airline or hotel might be making an extra dollar or two as well.

The same is true for comparison shopping. I’ve often found that once I locate the best price on a comparison shopping site, if I go to that specific site and enter directly, I can find the same item for the same price – or often cheaper.

Remember, comparison shopping sites are a tool to help you save money; they are rarely the ultimate answer themselves.

For those of you unaware, I am a big fan of buying in bulk, even though I live in a relatively small space (hint: don’t look in my closet). Why? If I buy in bulk, the cost per unit is often so much cheaper than buying “normal” packages that I end up saving a boatload.

However, the makers of many consumer products have begun to use a number of tricks to make bulk buying more difficult, trying to trick you into spending more for less product even if you buy the mega-bulk size at your local warehouse club. No product is more vicious than the toilet paper manufacturers, who must be an army of clever capitalists.

They do this by overloading you with options to the point that you’re dazed and confused and just grab something – anything – to get the confusion over with. So that we don’t go into complete overload here, let’s look at just one brand, Charmin. I choose this brand because their products have served me well over the years, but they are terribly guilty of brand extension.

If you look at the Charmin product page, you’ll see quickly that they sell a bunch of different varieties: Charmin, Charmin Basic, Charmin Plus, Charmin Scents, Charmin Mega Roll (which is in fact regular Charmin, just in a bigger roll), and Charmin Ultra. What are the differences here? Well, you can probably realize that Charmin Scents is a perfumed variety and a bit of package analysis tells you that Charmin Plus has a lotion in it, but Charmin and Charmin Mega Roll are the same product in different packaging, and the differences between Charmin, Charmin Basic, and Charmin Ultra are pretty hard to discern (Ultra is a slight bit softer, I guess).

It gets worse, far worse.

Let’s say you decide on Charmin Ultra, because you want the softest experience possible. Not only are these rolls sold in packages with different roll counts, some of the rolls contain significantly different amounts of toilet paper. A “big roll” equals two regular rolls, a “giant roll” equals two and a half regular rolls, and a “mega roll” equals four regular rolls. Converting toilet paper amounts between a “big roll” and a “giant roll”? Five rolls of “big” equals four rolls of “giant.” You can derive this in the grocery store, but Charmin is intelligent enough to realize that most people aren’t going to bother and are simply going to just grab a package that they “think” is a good deal.

So how does a frugal consumer escape this trap? Here’s a quick procedure to break through all of the nonsense and quickly find which one you need. Be sure to bring along a pocket calculator, though, or use the one on your cell phone.

First, determine the brand you want. Before you even think about size, determine the brands you’re willing to buy. If you don’t care too much, that basically makes everything available, but if you’re picky, you can quickly eliminate most of the brands in the aisle.

Next, take a particular package and figure out how many sheets are inside. This usually means multiplying the number of actual rolls in the package by the number of sheets per roll.

Now, divide the price of the package (including any coupon deductions) by the number of sheets. This is your price per sheet, and this is the number you should use to compare packages. Do this a few times with various packages (it takes a few seconds on a cell phone calculator) and you’ll pretty quickly see that there are some surprising variations in the costs of toilet papers, even if the packaging indicates that some buys are better than others.

Please note that the Borders Rewards program has changed significantly since this was written. I leave this post up as a primer to demonstrate that customer rewards programs can be quite financially lucrative.

It has been repeatedly shown that purchasing books online is substantially cheaper than buying books in brick and mortar bookstores, and for obvious reasons: online supply chains and number of customer service workers per shopper are much smaller than brick and mortar stores. Yet, as an avid book buyer, I still enjoy the aesthetics of a bookstore quite a lot, even as I realize that I’m far better off financially at the library.

My personal favorite bookstore in northern Iowa is Borders. Their stores are clean, crisp, and have a lot of chairs for sitting while browsing through books. I thoroughly enjoy stopping at Borders for my book buying purposes, even though a simple comparison of book prices demonstrate it to be quite expensive.

Or is it? I spent some time on Friday doing a three way comparison of costs at amazon.com, Borders without leveraging their Rewards Program, and Borders with the Rewards Program, and I walked away quite impressed with their Rewards Program. If you’re a frugal book buyer, you should definitely consider joining the program.

How does the Borders Rewards Program work? The Borders Rewards Program costs nothing to join. Whenever you make a purchase, it does not directly give you a discount; instead, you earn points equal to 5% of your purchase. Each December, you can use your points to buy books at Borders. So, if you bought $250 worth of books, DVDs, and CDs at borders in a given year, you would have $12.50 in store credit at Borders to use in December.

There’s another feature of note as well. If you spend $50 in a calendar month at Borders, you are qualified for a “Personal Shopping Day,” during which you can take 10% off all of your purchases at Borders during that day.

Beyond this, the service regularly emails coupons for strong discounts on books (20% off any title, and so forth), but I won’t include these in this comparison.

What are we looking at? For the purposes of this comparison, I’m going to use the first twelve personal finance books I’ve reviewed in my 52 Personal Finance Books in 52 Weeks series:

The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley and William Danko
The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom by Suze Orman
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Make Your Kid A Millionaire by Kevin McKinley
The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey
Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason
Rule #1 by Phil Town
Smart Couples Finish Rich by David Bach
The Number by Lee Eisenberg
The Wealthy Barber by David Chilton
Real Money by Jim Cramer

Prices at amazon.com: I looked up the prices of each book at amazon.com, going always with the cheapest new version available.

The Millionaire Next Door – $10.20
The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom – $10.61
Nickel and Dimed – $7.80
Make Your Kid A Millionaire – $11.05
The Total Money Makeover – $16.49
Your Money or Your Life – $10.20
The Richest Man in Babylon – $6.99
Rule #1 – $16.50
Smart Couples Finish Rich – $10.17
The Number – $17.16
The Wealthy Barber – $11.20
Real Money – $15.60
Total: $143.97

What about Borders? I used a kiosk at Borders to price these same books out, again using the cheapest price they had for a new copy:

The Millionaire Next Door – $15.00
The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom – $14.95
Nickel and Dimed – $13.00
Make Your Kid A Millionaire – $13.00
The Total Money Makeover – $24.99
Your Money or Your Life – $15.00
The Richest Man in Babylon – $6.99
Rule #1 – $25.00
Smart Couples Finish Rich – $15.00
The Number – $15.00
The Wealthy Barber – $14.00
Real Money – $26.00
Total: $197.93 (plus sales tax)

You also earn $9.90 in store credit redeemable at the end of the year.

Obviously, amazon beats this total, though Borders does equal it on one title and beat it on another. How much are we helped, though, if we leverage the “Personal Buying Day” a bit?

Borders with leverage One day, we go in and buy the following books:

Rule #1 – $25.00
Real Money – $26.00
Total: $51.00 (plus sales tax)

This qualifies us for a “Personal Shopping Day,” where we earn 10% off on all titles. So we buy the following books on that day:

The Millionaire Next Door – $15.00
The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom – $14.95
Nickel and Dimed – $13.00
Make Your Kid A Millionaire – $13.00
The Total Money Makeover – $24.99
Your Money or Your Life – $15.00
The Richest Man in Babylon – $6.99
Smart Couples Finish Rich – $15.00
The Number – $15.00
The Wealthy Barber – $14.00
Total w/ discount: $132.24 (plus sales tax)

Thus, the overall total is $183.24, and you earn $9.16 in store credit. The Rewards Card, which is free, saves you $14.70.

Great, but why not just buy everything at amazon? There are often titles at Amazon that are equal to or higher than Borders, and in those cases, if you’re in the Rewards Club, you’re better off buying at the brick and mortar store. Their email coupon bonuses are also worth receiving, because quite often they amount to an extra amount off of any title.

So my strategy boils down to this: I often shop at Borders for new releases (they usually have a 30% off by default, which I can make lower with a coupon, making their price very similar to amazon) and also regular paperbacks of older releases (which both stores sell at list), and take most of my other purchases to amazon. I do this by usually making a list of books I’ll get (plotted out via amazon), stop at Borders for some price comparisons, buy what makes sense at Borders using my Rewards Card, then buy the rest at amazon.

This morning, I went grocery shopping with my son and took my digital camera along to record the experience of grocery shopping with a penny-pincher. Let’s see how it went – maybe we’ll both learn something.

Welcome to Hy Vee! I went shopping at the Hy-Vee grocery store in Ankeny, Iowa, a northern suburb of Des Moines. Hy-Vee is a midwestern grocery chain that is almost ubiquitous in Iowa. There are many, many Hy-Vees in the greater Des Moines area; I like this one because it’s fairly new, very clean, and the prices are competitive right now due to a new Fareway that opened up about two blocks away. Generally, stores where a new competitor is opening nearby are a good place to shop because they trim their prices quite a bit so that when people inevitably try the new place, they’ll remember the lower prices at the other, more familiar store.

On grocery lists I prepare a grocery list before I leave the house. In this case, the list roughly matches the route I’ll take through the store, except for two items that I’m unsure about (I guessed where they were on the list). I usually head to the farthest point from the checkouts immediately and then work towards the checkout. Since the milk is in the back of the store, I head there first.

On comparing generics to name brands The first purchase I want to look at is Crystal Light, which is what my wife and I used to replace soda in our diet. It’s healthier and cheaper for us. I need to buy a variety of flavors, though, so we have enough to last a while and don’t get sick of the same flavor. Quite often, we will buy the store brand of Crystal Light, Hy-Vee Thirst Splashers, because most of the time it’s a lot cheaper per quart. Today, however, the eight quart containers of Crystal Light are on sale! The Crystal Light containers are $2 a pop, while the Thirst Splashers are $2.33 a pop. Clearly, the eight quart Crystal Light is a better deal here (and the flavors are better, too). But what about a size comparison?

The larger twelve quart size of Crystal Light is almost double the price of the eight ounce size. Clearly the eight ounce name brand is the best choice here, so I stock up on them, particularly on the flavors that we don’t usually buy because they’re not available in the generic brand.

On size comparisons I used to be of the belief that the larger size was always cheaper per ounce, but in fact this is not true on a pretty regular basis. Here, I’m shopping for Life cereal (my favorite cereal which I eat for breakfast multiple times a week). Here, you can clearly see that the 21 ounce box of Life cereal costs $3.88. I happen to have a coupon for fifty cents off, but I’ve bought Life pretty often, and I know even without calculating that it’s pretty high per ounce, even with the coupon, so I keep walking.

Not much further down, things get better for me and my Life cereal. Here is a 15 ounce box for $2.00. With my coupon, that makes it only $1.50 for a box. I pounce and toss a box in my cart, even though I find the child on the box somehow vaguely disconcerting.

My wife, on the other hand, insists on Special K cereal. Here, I have a 12 ounce box of Special K for $3.66. That comes out to $0.305 per ounce. However, I also have a coupon for 50 cents off a box of Special K. With that coupon, it’s $0.263 per ounce. Is that better than the larger size?

Right next to the first Special K box, we have a 16.7 ounce box of Special K for $4.98. That makes it $0.2982 per ounce, cheaper than the smaller box. With the coupon, though, it’s $0.2683 per ounce, which is more expensive per ounce than the smaller box. So which do I choose? I go with the absolute cheapest rate I can get per ounce, which happens to be the smaller box with the coupon. If I didn’t have the coupon with me, it would have been the larger box.

In short, a pocket calculator can be really really useful at the grocery store. I usually make several such calculations on a shopping trip, ones that are close enough that I can’t quickly determine with just a glance which is the best deal.

On shopping with children Near the end of the trip, I was walking down an aisle toward the checkout when my son spotted his favorite snack in the whole world: goldfish crackers. He nearly dove out of the cart reaching for them. He doesn’t eat them at a very high rate, though, so the big packages get stale before he gets through them. Thus, we buy small packages of them. We also buy him the whole grain kind because it’s better for his digestive system.

Of course, the problem is that he wants something that’s not necessarily a need. Although he’s young enough now that he doesn’t realize that there is a cost for these items, I do want to teach him that just because he wants something, he doesn’t always get it, either. This happens to be about the twentieth thing he’s almost dove out of the cart for, though, and when I’ve walked away from other things, he has been perfectly fine with it. He also happens to be nearly out of goldfish crackers; we have a plastic goldfish container in his diaper bag, which I checked and saw that it was empty.

After picking up the goldfish, he’s distracted for the rest of the shopping trip just by playing with the bag. Was it a good choice? He was out of crackers, after all, but I still felt like I bought him something he didn’t need. I suppose, though, if my biggest guilt during a shopping trip is buying a bag of whole grain goldfish crackers that cost less than two dollars for my son when he’s out of crackers … well, I must be doing something right.

Hopefully, you learned something from this trip. Let me know if you enjoyed it, or if you have any ideas for future photo diaries.

I enjoy listening to music as I write (especially this album, the greatest thing I’ve ever heard). I love listening to complete albums, cohesive pieces by artists that can go on for an hour or more. I’ll listen to pretty much everything, too, from electronic to pop to jazz to rock.

For a long time, I subscribed to the eMusic service, which has been advertised pretty heavily lately. For a fee each month, you can download legal mp3s of music by many different artists. The music comes to you in a format that can be played on pretty much any media player imaginable, and you can copy it and pretty much do whatever you want with it. There are three plans available:

eMusic Basic: $9.99 per month/30 downloads – that’s $.33 a song
eMusic Plus: $14.99 per month/50 downloads – that’s $.30 a song
eMusic Premium: $19.99 per month/75 downloads – that’s $.27 a song

Compare this to the iTunes Music Store, which costs $0.99 per song download and can only be played in iTunes and only on a certain number of computers and can only be burned to CD a certain number of times, and eMusic seems like a great deal.

Their prices compared to CDs are really amazing, since you can download a 15 song album for between $4 and $5, and it’s completely legal, with the artist getting his share of the proceeds.

Plus, you own the music, even if you stop the service. Other music services are essentially rentals, requiring you to use their music player to listen and when you stop subscribing, it’s over. If you download something great with eMusic, it’s yours. It’s not a music rental service.

There are a few problems with eMusic, however.

The first problem (and it’s a biggie) is the selection. The music you’ll find at eMusic is almost entirely from independent music labels or from archival recordings from major labels. What this basically means is that the site has many amazing albums by critical darlings (like the amazing album Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens, for just one example), you basically aren’t going to have access to the songs that are currently in the top 40. If you want the latest song from Kelly Clarkson, for example, eMusic will not help you. If you’re thinking of signing up, sign up for the free trial first and do some thorough searches of what music they have available.

The second problem is the lack of support for non-Windows systems. I am required to download these items on the one machine I own that is running Windows. I am not free to use a Linux machine or a Mac to get songs off of eMusic. This is disappointing.

Update! It turns out that I’ve overlooked some downloading options for EMusic, esp. if you’re a Mac fan. There’s also apparently an unsupported Linux downloader as well! Check out the comments for some great links from astute Simple Dollar readers!
If these two factors don’t discourage you from using eMusic, their service is definitely a big savings over other (legal) methods of acquiring music. I used their service for almost a year and downloaded tons of albums, and I’ve considered joining again now that their service has many, many interesting new albums to download.

I will say one big thing in eMusic’s favor, though. One of their downloadable albums is my favorite album of all time. If you sign up for their 25 song free trial, you can download it for free and it’s yours to keep.