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.

The post Calculating The Cost Of A Moving Service Versus The Cost Of Doing It Ourselves appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post The Cost Of An Item Is More Than Just The Sticker Price appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post To Clean Or Not To Clean? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post The Four Web Sites That Directly Save Me The Most Money … And Some Thoughts On Other Online Shopping Sites appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Penny-Pinching In The Toiletries Aisle: The Simple Dollar Looks At Toilet Paper appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Leveraging The Borders Rewards Program For Solid Savings On Entertainment Purchases appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Photo Diary #1: A Trip To The Grocery Store appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Does eMusic Really Save Money? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

After using them for a while, we quickly found ourselves gravitating towards a small number of brands. Most of the other diapers leaked, broke with only minimal force applied to them, or (worst of all) had explosions up the back of them. This caused all sorts of problems, including having to toss out largely unused diapers, tons of extra costs for laundry and wipes, and extra time spent dealing with them as well.

In the end, it became clear that most of the “generic” brands (and a few of the “name” brands, too) were repeatedly failing us, causing great additional cost per diaper and time spent dealing with the poor diaper quality.

The problem is that most diaper buyers don’t consider total cost of ownership when purchasing diapers. They see the store brand on sale, think “a diaper is a diaper,” and toss it in their cart. It’s true that in many cases generics work just as well as name brands, but this is not true of diapers.

We eventually wound up exclusively using Pampers Swaddlers (and their “older baby” version, Pampers Cruisers), simply because we have never had a failure with them and coupons are extremely easy to obtain. Even with coupons, we paid (and still pay) a decent premium per diaper over the generics, but our total cost of ownership per diaper (adding in extra wipe costs and extra laundry costs) is only slightly more than generics, plus we have much more time to play with our child instead of cleaning up his disasters.

This philosophy holds true for most purchases: don’t just buy the cheapest version without thinking; step back and consider the total cost of ownership for a moment or two.

The post The True Cost of Generic Diapers appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Interestingly enough, this is an area where blogs shine for usefulness, because you can easily get a lead on some really interesting gift ideas that will leave your niece thinking that you’re a bit less of a loser than everyone else in the entire universe and, at the same time, put a big toothy grin on ol’ Uncle Ron’s face.

Here’s the exact process I used this year to find some smashing gifts for several picky family members using nothing more than blogs, a few price comparison sites, and a bit of time. To show you how it works, I’m going to walk through the procedure using three test cases:

Grandmother is an old-fashioned woman who believes that a woman’s place is in the kitchen serving her family – and that’s where you’ll often find her. If you ask her what she wants, she sighs and says, “Oh, nothing.” If you press her, she’ll look around the room and name something completely off the top of her head.

Uncle Ron is a retired farmer who sold his farm years ago and now lives in a beautiful house in the city. His tastes are upscale, but he has a bit of an old fashioned nature to him. He’s got a quick wit, is a bit sarcastic, and usually sees the utility in things. He almost always holds court at family events at the card table, talking politics and sipping on a drink of some sort. In other words, your favorite uncle.

Katie is a fifteen year old strong-willed young woman who is so firmly entrenched in Generation Z that you can scarcely make heads or tails out of her. She’s always listening to her iPod and seems to have a general disdain for the entire world. She’s your only niece, but she makes about as much sense to you as Fidel Castro riding down Wall Street on the back of a hippopotamus.

So, let’s begin.

Find out what their favorite things are.
Don’t worry at this stage about what they might want, just make a list of a few of their favorite things. Give a call to someone living with them if you have no idea, or maybe pay them a visit and see how they spend their time or what they show you that is interesting to them. Don’t ask for gift ideas, because you’ll make the experience of opening the gift much less of a surprise.

Grandmother spends all of her time in the kitchen, so you think that something convenient for her kitchen might enable her to sit down a bit more with the family. You stop by to pay her a visit and you see her mixing some cookie dough up with a fork. Of course, you eat a couple a half dozen a dozen of the cookies before you leave. A new cookbook might be okay, but something that can mix that cookie dough faster might be even better, so you don’t have to spend all of your time talking to her back while she’s busy at the counter. The spending cap on Grandmother is quite high; if you find a very expensive item, there are always plenty of others that are willing to go together with you to buy it.

Uncle Ron is rarely seen without a glass of Johnnie Walker Black Label; he even brings a bottle to family events and tries to get everyone to drink a glass with him. Thankfully, he can hold his liquor well, except one should avoid talking politics with him in the late evening; last Christmas, he referred to your brother-in-law as a “rotten liberal hippie” and threatened to beat him to death with a golf club for stating that everyone in America should get top quality health care for free. You decide on something golf or scotch related for him. Uncle Ron is especially close to you and gives stellar gifts, so I often spend as much as $60 on his Christmas gift.

Katie basically doesn’t speak to anyone. You give your sister a call to see what’s going on with her and all you hear is that Katie spends all of her time listening to old ’70′s records in her room and playing her acoustic guitar. On the good side, she’s apparently paying much more attention to her appearance; on the bad side, she’s dressing like Woody Guthrie. You decide that a couple CDs of good modern folk-type music would be a good gift for her, as your spending limit is $20 for her.

Specifically search blogs for these topics.
You head over to Technorati and Icerocket to try to find some potential gift ideas. At this time of the year, people are beginning to post “best of” lists, so the goal is to find a few of those and compare them. The primary goal is to find many independent references to the quality of a particular item with the goal of figuring out the type of item and the make of the item. Another advantage of blog searching is that bloggers often make organic connections that comparison sites won’t necessarily make, plus a perfunctory look at a blog can quickly tell you whether or not it is written by a company, whereas product reviews are often impossible to truly read.
Grandmother‘s idea seemed clearest, so you search for “best mixer” dough at Technorati (to avoid music mixing devices) and find two distinct references on cooking blogs to KitchenAid making the best mixers, so you narrow her gift down to a KitchenAid mixer. Searching simply for KitchenAid confirms this. So, you’ve decided that this year, you’re going to get Grandmother a KitchenAid mixer that will tear through pretty much anything she might ever want to mix in the kitchen.

Uncle Ron would probably appreciate a good bottle of scotch, so you search for “best scotch” to see what you find. After reading a number of posts about different people’s concepts of best scotch, you find several references to Caol Ila as a great tasting and moderately expensive scotch. Following their recommendation, you decide to get Uncle Ron a bottle of Caol Ila scotch for Christmas.

Katie is apparently heavily into folk music, but you get a general sense that she might not be impressed with your collection of Peter, Paul, and Mary records, so you search Technorati for “best folk” 2006 and “best folk” 2005 to find some of the best new folk music releases. The names Laura Cantrell and Devendra Banhart come up over and over again as you read through the listings, so you decide to look for CDs by both of them.

Use product review sites to narrow this down to specific items.
Now that you’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’re buying for each person, use some product comparison sites to narrow it down to a specific item. I find that the old standby, amazon.com, works very well for most items. though many people swear by sites such as bizrate. At this stage, we’re mostly just concerned with finding the exact item for each person; later, we’ll worry about the best price for that item.

Grandmother deserves a high-end KitchenAid mixer for her kitchen. After reading tons of reviews of different KitchenAid mixers, you decide on the KitchenAid KSM150PSCR Artisan 5 Quart Mixer for Grandmother this Christmas, even though the first price you saw makes you quickly dial some other relatives and ask them to go in on it with you. It’s a gift that suits her passion; making wonderful soul food for the whole family.

Uncle Ron is getting some good Caol Ila scotch for Christmas. After reviewing several sites on scotch (like scotchwhisky.net) and looking for a variety of recommendations, you choose to get him a 12 year old bottle of single malt Caol Ila scotch, which will apparently fit within your price range and won the gold medal at the San Francisco Spirits competition. Sounds tasty; maybe Uncle Ron will pop open the bottle over a game of bridge and give everyone a taste.

Katie will be receiving a CD or two by Devendra Banhart and Laura Cantrell. You found several stunning reviews of Humming by the Flowered Vine and Cripple Crow, so these are your top two choices for her. If they’re relatively cheap, they might both fall within your budget. You’re kind of concerned that she may already have them, but if they’re good, she will appreciate the thought and be able to trade them for others.

Use price comparison sites to find the best price.
Now that you have very specific items in mind to buy people, it’s time to use price comparison sites to find the absolute best deal you can. I recommend using Froogle for this purpose, as it is very good at narrowing things down quickly.

Grandmother‘s KitchenAid KSM150PSCR Artisan 5 Quart Mixer costs $329.99 at the local kitchen supply store, but can be had from iKitchen for $239.99, according to Froogle’s results. You could find even lower prices, but iKitchen seems to have a solid reputation as a seller of kitchen implements. Just that quickly, you’ve saved at least $90 on an amazing gift for Grandmother – and softened the blow on the wallets of a few grandchildren, too.

Uncle Ron‘s 12 year old bottle of single malt Caol Ila scotch can be had from the local liquor store at $74.99, but can be obtained from Premium Home and Garden for $44.99 according to Froogle, a savings of $30. Many other retailers also offer it below the $50 mark, so a bit of research into shipping might uncover a better deal. Ol’ Uncle Ron will be goofy again this Christmas, it seems.

Katie‘s CDs are also cheaper than the local music shops. Humming by the Flowered Vine and Cripple Crow can both be had new in the shrink wrap for about $20 total (after shipping) on eBay, as discovered by Froogle. A few bids now will mean that your Christmas gift for Katie will be ready well in advance of the big day.

In short, careful use of different avenues of research on the internet, when combined, can isolate stellar gifts for family and friends while also finding stellar prices. In short, follow these four steps to excavate great gifts this Christmas:
1. Figure out what they like (but don’t ask directly what they want) by calling or visiting them
2. Determine a great idea for them by using blogs and blog search engines like Technorati.
3. Break it down to the exact item via product comparison sites, such as amazon.com.
4. Get a great deal on the item using comparison shopping sites like Froogle.

The post Using Blogs (and Other Internet Resources) to Buy Cool Christmas Gifts and Save Money appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

I wanted to calculate this out to see whether or not this is true and to determine whether or not you’re saving money by using ING versus HSBC over a period of one year. Obviously, for longer term investments than this, you should be considering a certificate of deposit; if you’re moving funds pretty regularly, then service becomes a bigger factor and the balance shifts more toward ING.

First of all, I need to convert the stated APY on each account into the actual earned interest rate. ING’s APY of 4.4% becomes an interest rate of 4.314% when compounded monthly, while HSBC’s APY of 5.05% actually amounts to an interest rate of 4.937% when compounded monthly.

So, how much would you have to deposit in HSBC for the superior interest rate to overcome ING’s $25 “signing bonus”? To calculate this, I set up an Excel spreadsheet with ING’s interest rate and HSBC’s interest rate as static values and a cell in which I could enter different initial deposits. The spreadsheet would then take this initial deposit, calculate the interest each month, and then produce a difference between the totals at the end of the year.

At first, I entered $250, the minimum amount needed to get the ING signing bonus. At this level, at the end of the year, the ING account held $24.38 more than the HSBC account. Not bad.

Next, I tried an initial deposit of $10,000. At this level, the HSBC account held $38.99 more at the end of the year. A win for HSBC.

So, the correct number had to be somewhere between these two amounts. After entering many different values, I found the sweet spot: in order to overcome the ING “signing bonus” in a single year, a person would have to make an initial deposit of $4,002 in an HSBC Direct savings account.

What does this mean? If you discard all other factors, the ING signing bonus means that ING is the best solution for beginning savers, whereas if you have a large principal, you’ll make more at HSBC. The cutoff number for one year’s worth of saving is $4,002; for longer periods, other investment options are likely to beat either bank.

In my opinion, ING is much stronger than HSBC on service-related issues, which is clearly a factor to take into account when selecting your savings account. I stand by my recommendation that ING is the best choice for beginning savers; for those with large balances, other options besides online savings might be better yet.

The post Return to Thunderdome: Calculating the Value of the ING “Signing Bonus” Versus HSBC’s Higher Interest Rate appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

First things first: download Firefox. If you look over on the right hand side of this post, you’ll see a button that will take you straight to the Firefox download page (you might have to scroll down a bit to see it). Download the program, install it, and give it a whirl.

Got Firefox installed? Good. Firefox is an extensible browser, meaning that with just a click you can download additional pieces that will allow your browser to do all sorts of interesting things. As for me, I like browser options that make it easy for me to save money. Here are ten Firefox extensions that will make it easier for you to save money while using the web.

Book Burro BookBurro may be my favorite FireFox plugin of all. You don’t ever notice it except when you visit a bookseller site, and then it pops up quietly on the upper left of the page. When you visit a book, it drops down, showing you prices for that same book at other booksellers. Not only has this saved me money on several book purchases, it also saves me the time of jumping from site to site. If you read much at all, this is the most important download on this list.

Pronto Pronto provides a tool similar to BookBurro, but not quite as elegantly. Pronto provides price comparisons on a wide variety of products with a floating button in the lower right of the screen. I’ve found this to be useful (interestingly enough) when shopping for kitchen products; Pronto helped me find a much better price on a great mixer.

Skype Sidebar This plugin integrates Skype with Firefox, making it very easy to call people and manage your contacts while surfing the web. For those unfamiliar, Skype is a program that allows you to make free person-to-person telephone calls via the internet, and extremely low cost calls to any telephone number. I find this particularly useful when discussing web materials with people; not only is the call free, but it is much easier for both parties to understand what is going on.

Gmail Space Rather than using a memory stick to transfer files, I often just use Gmail Space on the various machines I work on. This FireFox plugin lets me use my Gmail account as a tool for transferring files from place to place, provided I have an internet connection. This plugin is installed on every machine that I access with any regularity.

FareFirst FareFirst integrates with FireFox to enable you to quickly compare travel costs from location to location. If you’re planning a trip, you can just enter the information here and FareFirst will keep an eye on the trip for you. Each time you run FireFox, it will let you know what the best deal for the trip is.

Sage Sage is a site feed reader that integrates itself into Firefox, enabling you to add feeds to it with just a click. This extension saves me both time and money; I monitor a lot of blogs that update to mention good deals and other financial information and this tool enables me to keep tabs on all of them in reasonable time, thus saving both time and money.

Package Mapping As a frequent eBay seller, it’s financially important to me to keep track of packages as they’re shipped around the country. Package Mapping makes this very easy; I can keep tabs on where each package is and it alerts me when packages are delivered. It makes the process of tracking shipped items very easy, and that makes my work selling items on eBay that much easier and financially secure.

Minute Minder for Cingular This plug-in alerts you to the minutes you have remaining on your current cellular plan, which can be invaluable at helping you avoid overage fees. It quietly inserts itself into your browser window, so you can keep an eye on it without wasting valuable screen space. The only disadvantage is that this plugin currently only works with Cingular; I’m hoping to see it expand to other carriers soon.

Grocery List Generator I often see tasty and inexpensive recipes on the internet, but then I forget to buy the items for those recipes at the grocery store. Grocery List Generator incorporates itself into Firefox and makes it easy to add ingredients to a shopping list, whether you are finishing with a cupboard inventory or you want to make sure to buy some tarragon for that egg recipe.

Quitomzilla Although I’m not a smoker, several members of my family are, and I’m keenly aware how expensive the habit is. Quitomzilla is a plug-in that provides record-keeping and constant motivation to help people to quit smoking. If you’re a smoker, you’re burning up a lot of money; Quitomzilla can be priceless in helping you to kick the habit.

The post 10 Firefox Plugins That Save You Money appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

1. Switch your phone to VoIP. VoIP refers to the use of your home computer’s broadband connection as a telephone service. There are different programs that have various features and benefits, but they are almost universally less expensive than traditional land lines and cellular phones. Two of the most popular options are Skype (free to other Skype users, but fees for calls to non-Skype phones) and Vonage (flat monthly rate for unlimited calls in the United States and very cheap per minute internationally).

2. Utilize online-only savings accounts. In the past few years, a number of branchless, online-only, FDIC insured banks have cropped up that provide astoundingly high interest rates on a normal no minimum balance savings account. These rates tend to be eight or nine times as high as typical banks (which offer a 0.5% rate of return on average). Two of the most popular include ING Direct (currently offering 4.4% APY and very easy to sign up) and HSBC Direct (currently offering 5.05% APY). This means that investing $100 in an ING Savings account would return $4.40 in a year, or $5.05 at HSBC Direct, versus $0.50 at your typical bank. Plus, you can fully manage your account on your computer, transferring money to and from your checking account as you wish.

3. Combine your entertainment needs. A modern personal computer can replace your stereo, your television, and your video game consoles. You can move all of your music on CD to your computer using programs such as iTunes, then use your computer speakers to play back music when you want it. If you have a large monitor and a TV tuner card, you can use your monitor as a television by playing your television feed through your computer. You can also sign up for services such as GameTap to utilize your home computer as a video game console.

4. Keep an eye on your finances. I use online banking and credit card accounts to keep a daily tab on what’s in my accounts and what I’m spending my money on. This way, I know what I can afford to spend and what I can’t. Many banks and virtually all major credit card providers allow online account access, which gives you very easy control over your money. Beyond that, there are a number of excellent packages out there that enable you to manage your finances as a whole and do your own taxes, though they can be complex to set up. I use Microsoft Money, which can be downloaded for a 90 day free trial.

5. Sell your hobby. Whatever your hobby is, you can probably find a place to sell the products of that hobby. eBay is a great place to get started, though there may be better places for your specific hobby. Here’s an example: a friend of mine likes to fold simple origami pieces while doing other things, such as watching television; it’s a nervous tic for her. So she started folding lots of paper cranes. She was aware that a thousand paper cranes are often given as a gift among the Japanese, so she decided to start selling thousand crane lots on eBay. Thanks to her computer, she can sit at her rural home, watch television in the evening, and sell the numerous cranes she makes with her own hands.

6. Write about your random thoughts and interests. It is incredibly easy to get a simple blog at Blogger and put a Google AdSense bar on the side of it; Blogger walks you through the process very gently. With this, you can write anonymous random thoughts on whatever you want: your personal life, your favorite television show, whatever. You can just channel some of your own thoughts into a written form and post them. Not only does it provide an outlet for you to express yourself, it also enables you to improve your writing skill over time as painlessly as possible and you can earn a few dollars from the AdSense bar.

7. Do some comparison shopping. There are a multitude of places to shop online, and there are often many places selling the same item. For example, just for books alone, I used to check amazon, Barnes & Noble, and a few others. It’s easy to find a better price for an item than you might find in your own town. Even better, people are beginning to create software tools to make comparison shopping even easier. My favorite is Book Burro: when you view a book on a site like amazon.com using FireFox, it will pop up a little window immediately informing you of the cost of that book at various other online sites, helping you to quickly find the lowest price.

8. Throw out your reference texts. With an internet-accessible computer, there’s little need for such reference texts as a dictionary or a thesaurus or an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is a suitable replacement for an encyclopedia for general usage. Dictionary.com provides the same usage as a dictionary, and thesaurus.com is a functional thesaurus. In the modern world, there’s little need to invest in such reference texts.

9. Find a better credit card. We’ve all signed up for some pretty terrible credit card deals in the past, but the internet enables you to find a credit card offer that matches your needs much better. You can easily return 2% of your spending to yourself if you can locate a strong credit card offer. Even better, you can easily find balance transfer offers that will eliminate the interest you’re paying on a card. Obviously, a credit card is a tool that you need to be careful with, but I use one for my primary spending (groceries, etc.), keep the balance paid each month, and they literally pay me to use it. I would have never found this offer without the internet.

10. Use a computer as your cooking aid. Many people eat out because of the hassle of preparing food at home. It might not be tasty, you think, or you might mess it up. Plus, many people don’t want to invest in cookbooks or other methods of teaching themselves how to cook. Wikipedia offers extensive explanations of culinary techniques, even if you’re scared of boiling water. Plus, there are countless recipes available on the internet for dishes of all levels of complexity: RecipeZaar, for example, has thousands of recipes for beginning cooks. Not only will you learn a new skill, but you’ll quickly see how much cheaper it is to cook at home, a process aided by your computer.

11. Make your own calendars and other documents. Many people buy wall calendars for their home when a few printed pages will suffice. “But I don’t have a program that will make a calendar!” you say. Open Office is a free software suite that includes a word processing program, a spreadsheet program, and much more; even more important, it includes templates for making calendars, newsletters, and so forth. We use an old wall calendar for its pretty pictures and just tape printed pages over each month.

12. Save money when you travel. I am consistently surprised at the number of people who still choose to pay high prices by booking flights directly from the airline or through a travel agent when there are numerous easy tools online that will save you tons of money on your travel costs. Priceline, Travelocity, and Expedia all are amazingly easy to search and find the cheapest prices from your location to your destination and back – and they can sometimes save hundreds of dollars on your travel over calling a travel agent or directly calling an airline.

13. Print coupons before you shop. The internet provides unbelievably good access to coupons that you can use at your local grocery store, and a little bit of effort can transform coupons directly into cash. I check sites such as coupons.com before each shopping trip, checking to see if there are any manufacturer coupons available for items I’m going to buy, then just take them to the store with me and convert them to cash at the register.

14. Learn marketable skills. Your computer can teach you a lot, too. When I first purchased my computer, I was an atrocious touch typer, but I utilized sites like Learn2Type and TyperShark to teach myself how to type 80 words per minute. Want to know the intricacies of Word and Excel to better market yourself for a job? Microsoft offers extensive training on how to perform those tasks. You can also learn how to create web pages from scratch. Each of these skills will give you a leg up in the workplace.

The computer can be a very valuable tool – you just have to know how to use it.

The post 14 Ways Your Computer Can Put Money In Your Pocket appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

I took the information off of GE Soft White A19 bulbs in both their regular and CFL form and wrote down some basic information. The bulbs are nearly identical when in the socket (very very close in initial lumens), so what we’re interested in is the cost, the wattage, and the life of the bulb.

GE Soft White A19 (regular)
840 initial lumens
60 watts
1000 hours
$2.99 a four pack (at Target)
$0.75 per bulb

GE Soft White A19 (CFL)
825 initial lumens
15 watts
10000 hours
$18.73 a ten pack (at Lowe’s)
$1.87 per bulb

Let’s start out with the bad news. Let’s say your residence has 15 light sockets. To fill each light socket with a non-CFL bulb, you’ll spend $11.25, but to fill each light socket with a CFL bulb, you’ll spend $28.07. This means that the cost of converting all the bulbs in your home from regular to CFL is about $16.82.

Now we turn to the many financial benefits of CFLs. Over 10,000 hours of use, you’ll use 15 CFL bulbs (on average), but you’ll use 150 non CFL bulbs (they’re rated for 1000 hours of use, so you’ll blow ten of them on average over 10,000 hours). So, with the CFLs, you’ll spend that same $28.07, but with regular bulbs, you’ll spend $112.50, a savings of $84.43. The average bulb is on for four hours a day, so you’ll need several years to see this savings, but if you figure it down to the month, you’ll save about a dollar a month on the bulbs alone, or about twelve dollars a year.

Given the information on the bulbs themselves, a non-CFL bulb uses 60 watts, while a CFL bulb uses only 15 watts. Converted to kilowatts, that’s 0.06 kilowatts for the non-CFL bulb and 0.015 kilowatts for the CFL bulb. For calculation’s sake, I pay about $0.08 per kilowatt hour for our electricity (on average), and we have all of our bulbs on an average of four hours a day.

Let’s see how much we save in a day in our home with fifteen bulbs. We use fifteen bulbs for four hours each, so that means we use 60 hours worth of bulbs each day. The non-CFL bulbs use 0.06 kilowatts, so we multiply 60 hours by 0.06 kilowatts to get 3.6 kWh for the normal bulbs. The CFL bulbs, though, use 0.015 kilowatts, so we multiply 60 hours by 0.015 kilowatts to get 0.9 kWh.

So, each day, the savings in kWh usage by using CFL bulbs in our example is 2.7 kWh. If we pay $0.08 per kWh, simply by having the CFLs in our light sockets, we save about $0.22. Every day. Automatically, without thinking about it a bit.

Over a month, the CFL savings is a dollar (the savings you make because CFLs are durable) plus 30 days at $0.22 a day (the savings each day because of less energy use), which comes out to be about $7.50 a month. And the best part is that because CFLs last so long, you’ll spend a lot less time changing bulbs!

The post CFLs Can Save $100 A Year? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.