Last week, I tried a little experiment on Twitter: I asked all of the people following me on there a simple question:

What’s your best tip for saving money that can be expressed in a Twitter-length statement? I’ll use them in a TSD post & link back to you.

A “Twitter-length statement” means in 140 characters or less. I was overwhelmed by a flood of responses, so I just picked out twenty of my favorites, starting off with the best of the bunch (the other nineteen are in pseudo-random order):

+ Spend only on what you’re passionate about and save the rest for the day when your passions unexpectedly drop in to sweep you away (Chris_Tackett)
+ Make your savings automatic so that you don’t even have to think about it (glblguy)
+ Act immediately - when you don’t spend money you thought you would, move it to savings immediately. Don’t wait - snowflake! (paidtwice)
+ Improve your self-esteem & suddenly you can do without acrylic nails. (dedejustdede)
+ Learn and leverage your neighborhood. You can find a great little eatery, small grocery, etc. - save gas - plus support local biz. (etesla)
+ Be involved with your finances on a daily basis. It’s hard to save when you’re not firmly in control of your spending. (Lynnae)
+ Start each month with a real dollar budget, allocating all of your income to *something*, don’t let life just happen to your money (EdenJaeger)
+ Pay a little on debt or toward savings every week. Smaller amounts are less psychologically intimidating. (sarahintx)
+ Just say “NO” to buying crap. Say “NO” to eating crap packaged foods, buying crap products, and investing in financial crap. (squawkfox)
+ Use RetailMeNot http://www.retailmenot.com/ to find coupons for stores you already shop at. (ericabiz)
+ If you have a big annual/semi-annual bill, make “virtual payments” on it monthly to spread out the impact. (davidgeisberg)
+ for general saving, pay yourself first. for shopping, pay close attention to the cost per unit. (fcn)
+ Distinguish between your wants and needs. (mischyfishy)
+ Write down every expenditure -that’s worked wonders for me! (m_s)
+ Let your values, dreams, and purpose drive you finances. They provide more motivation and energy for saving than anything else. (TheHappyRock)
+ Savings should be included in your budget, and taken out of your paycheck first. That way you can’t spend too much to save. (jjeaton)
+ You don’t have to earn six figures to save money. Saving is a function of spending less than you earn, no matter what you earn. (FrugalDad)
+ Set a savings goal, set reminders of that goal, and then make it a competition against yourself to achieve it. People love games. (bargainr)
+ Debit instead of credit! I can only spend money not already allocated for bills/saving/investing-forcing me to limit my purchases (talialeone)
+ I manage to save & I am earning less than 15K/yr. My advice — Just do it! (CindyS531)

That’s a nice collection of tips there with a lot of different voices and perspectives. I may try this again sometime in the future for a weekly roundup.

Now, for some of my favorite posts from other blogs over the last week.

Don’t Want To Work Forever? Retire On Time With These 10 Tips For me, retirement is just the point in time where I can begin to live wholly off of the money I’ve saved and invested and thus I can make personal choices without worrying about income. That doesn’t mean sitting at home and reading all day - in fact, it probably means a lot more travel, if anything. (@ the digerati life)

New Car Every 10 Years or Used Car Every 5? It appears to actually depend on what kind of car you buy. If a car depreciates very quickly (like a GM), you’re better off in a cycle of used cars. If a car depreciates relatively slowly (like a Honda), you might be better off buying new and getting the extra years (the article’s numbers are pretty close on the matter, enough for me to call them inconclusive). (@ million dollar journey)

Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover The people who look rich aren’t always necessarily rich. (@ master your card)

Warren Buffett on Market Fluctuations: Investors Gain When the Market Falls Excellent excerpts from Warren Buffett’s letters to Berkshire Hathaway stockholders. (@ get rich slowly)

(Not) Keeping Up With Our Parents: Career Struggles I know that I often use my wife’s parents as a measuring stick for how we’re doing - and I feel frustrated when we’re not measuring up. (@ being frugal)

Do You Have An Opportunity Fund? We use our emergency fund for that because we keep a really large emergency fund and don’t sweat it when we have to yank cash out of it. (@ blueprint for financial prosperity)

Inexpensive Frugal Mother’s Day Gift Ideas A lot of good ideas here for celebrating the day without shelling out money to Hallmark. (@ cash money life)

Two things worth noting that are somewhat interconnected.

First, last Saturday I was on Darla Shine’s nationally syndicated Happy Housewives radio program - you can catch the old episode in podcast form Darla’s podcast feed, and I’m on the April 26, 2008 edition smack in the middle of the show. It was a lot of fun - well, more than anything, it helped me break through my radio nervousness - and I got to spread around some good money-saving advice to listeners on several hundred radio stations.

Second, and somewhat connected to this, I’ve begun to use Twitter to let people know about things like the radio appearance and also little random thoughts and interesting URLs I find throughout the day. If you’re interested, take a peek at my recent twitters and keep it bookmarked - I added a link to it on the main site’s sidebar so you can jump in on it in the future. If you’re a regular Twitter user, by all means follow me - I tend not to fill mine up with much blather.

Anyway, unless something truly big happens, I’ll announce any radio or television or public speaking engagements from now on via Twitter. That way, if you happen to be nearby or have a radio or television handy, you can tune in or even meet up with me.

Here are some articles of interest from the last week.

Series I Bonds Look Attractive Right Now Want to know how to get a 6% return on your cash right now? Buy some Series I savings bonds. If you buy right now, the fixed rate is 1.2% which, coupled with the upcoming increase in inflation numbers, will give Series I bonds an estimated return of 6.06% return annually. For a bond issued by the federal government, which is about as safe as can be, that’s a sweet return. (@ blueprint for financial prosperity)

How to Be a Good Partner to a Stay-At-Home Spouse Some of these apply to a spouse working from home as well, which is what our situation more or less is. For example, I usually stop working for about half an hour before my wife gets home so that when she comes in the door (often with kids in tow), I’m in “parenting” mode and she can go decompress for a while (usually in on the couch feeding our infant daughter). Find a routine that works for both of you and talk about anything that makes either one of you uncomfortable. (@ brip blap)

25 Great Coupon Tricks That Can Cut Your Grocery Bill By 80% This is a really strong collection of tips that add up to a huge amount of grocery savings. My favorite is matching the high-dollar coupon with the cheapest version of the item. For a long time, my wife and I were getting Luvs diapers almost for free by doing this - we found their smallest packs on sale for $4.39 and had a bunch of $3 off coupons, so we just kept hitting that sale day in and day out. (@ the digerati life)

Recycling Jeans: Things to Do with Denim When It’s Dead I tend to wear jeans into oblivion by yanking out really ratty pairs for yard work and such, but these are still good tips. (@ personal finance advice)

Allowance Versus Commissions for Kids My parents tried a commissions-based system for me for a while. I was smart when negotiating - I got them to list about fifty tasks that were optional that paid a specific commission. Then I went obsessive for a week, did a whole ton of stuff, and got my parents to keep initialing. At the end of the week, I was due $36 in commissions. I got the cash, but the commissions plan went out the window. (@ frugal dad)

Enabling the Perpetually Poor This is something of a follow-up to last week’s article about the language that some people use as an excuse to not become self-reliant. Often, they reach this point because they were enabled - people “helped” them along the way by giving them undue assistance, and when that crutch isn’t there, they blame “the man.” (@ gather little by little)

Maybe Higher Food Prices Are Actually Good For Us as a Society If the fear of financial meltdown pushes people towards this kind of behavior instead of fear-based food shopping, then it really can be helpful. (@ generation x finance)

Big news: I have a book deal.

I signed the papers last Friday and shipped them off to my publisher. The book project itself is just about perfect for what I want to do right now, particularly as a first book - very nice price point (it will have a price a bit lower than you might expect to make it accessible to all), a focus and a style that I’m very comfortable and happy with, and a publisher that’s really involved with the process and very interested in a follow-up book if this one gets finished well.

Right now, I have a chapter written and a very detailed (10-15 pages) outline of the remainder of the book, which is due in a strong first draft format on July 1. We’re both hoping to have the book on bookshelves well before Christmas, likely in October or November.

This means two things when it comes to The Simple Dollar. First, my cooking blog will have to be postponed a bit. I was basically ready to launch it on May 1, but this book deal (and another writing opportunity I hope to announce soon) means I have a pretty sharp deadline and I need to focus my writing energy on that.

Second, and perhaps more interesting, is that I’m seeding this site with “supplemental” articles that relate to the book itself (I’ve actually been doing this for a while). Basically, they’re expansions on particular ideas from the book - sort of like sidebars for specific ideas that deserve more depth but would derail the rather tight focus of the book. When the book nears publication, I’ll collect all of these into one giant collection of links so that readers can visit one URL and see all of the supplemental material.

Intrigued? I hope so. My plan is to announce the book in great detail at about the time it pops up for preorder on Amazon, and I’ll make a fairly big splash with it - it’ll be in conjunction with a slight redesign so that the book will be noticed by anyone who visits The Simple Dollar. I’ll also be making available some opportunities for signed copies, though I’ve not figured out quite how I’ll do that yet - I may work out an arrangement with a local bookstore to handle that mess.

If you’re curious… just be patient. The book, by all accounts, should be out by the end of the year.

Now, for some personal finance articles.

Is It Smart to Trade Time for Money? Only when you’re certain about the value of your time. Most people have little grasp on what the true value of their time is, something I talk about regularly on The Simple Dollar. (@ dumb little man)

Money Lessons Learned Through Square Foot Gardening We have a large garden ourselves and I often find myself deep in introspection while out in the garden. (@ frugal dad)

Teenager on a Budget This is a really interesting series about a mother attempting to teach her teenage son about budgeting, particularly food budgeting. The entry I’ve linked to is rather amusing. (@ debt free revolution)

You Paid $9.60 a Gallon for What? The embedded video is a bit over the top, but the point is right - bottled water is drastically overpriced for what you get compared to what you get out of the tap. (@ poorer than you)

Recession and the State of Our Economy: A Visual Primer This is an excellent visual guide on basic economics and the meaning of a recession. (@ the digerati life)

50 Tips to Help Establish Your Emergency Fund Excellent tips all around. (@ consumerism commentary)

Yesterday, I mentioned a bit about my challenges with splurging on certain items, which led a few readers to email me and ask for more information. I thought about this for a while and was able to come up with a short list of things I still splurge on.

Food I mentioned yesterday that I tend to splurge on food, and it’s definitely true. If I find a dish I want to try - like my recent experiments with croque-madames - I’m quite willing to spend to make sure I get the correct ingredients, and ingredients that are top notch. In this case, I got some top-shelf gruyère cheese, which isn’t particularly easy to find in Iowa, and I even attempted some Mornay sauce to go along with it.

Kitchen tools Similarly, I’m often willing to splurge on kitchen tools - things like a KitchenAid Pro 6 stand mixer, a magnetic knife rack, and so on. I don’t buy a lot of tools, but the ones I do have are either of very top quality or will eventually be upgraded to top quality ones.

Frugal “investments” Whenever I determine that I can easily be money ahead over the long haul by buying a fairly expensive item now, I’ll go for it. This includes all sorts of things - CFL and LED light bulbs, a programmable thermostat, cloth diapers, even an old-fashioned safety razor. I usually research these like crazy and try to make sure that I would actually use the item, but if it is so, I’ll splurge and get the item. The interesting part is that most of these have actually paid off for me and thus subtly reduced our living expenses over time.

Video games This is probably the least of my “splurges,” but it is out there. I own a Wii and a Nintendo DS and a few games for each of them, but these are generally games with a very long shelf life and a lot of replay value.

And that’s pretty much it. Outside of those things, I basically don’t splurge at this point on anything. I read a lot, but I get my books from the library almost exclusively… and that’s pretty much all of my free time.

Anyway, here are some personal finance links of interest.

The Language of the Perpetual Poor He’s right - the people I hear using these phrases are the same people that seem to always be in financial trouble. (@ frugal dad)

15 Tips to Avoid Overspending for First-Time College Students This is a pretty good set of tips - I wish I had done half of these in my college days. (@ moolanomy)

Cooking at Home with Basic Kitchen Staples Saves You Money This is an excellent article that really nails what you ought to have on hand to be able to just cook at home at your convenience. (@ girls just wanna have funds)

Learning to Love the Emergency Fund I remember the exact moment I loved my emergency fund. It was late last year when the brakes went out in my truck. Rather than going “OH MY GOD!” and panicking and running in circles, I just took the truck to the shop, paid for it on my credit card, went home, and paid the whole credit card balance from my emergency fund. Done. No fuss, no muss. And all I had to do to build that up was to cut down a little bit on my silly spending and instead sock that money away. (@ get rich slowly)

Curb Spending by Writing Goals on Credit Cards I usually keep my card wrapped in a picture of my children to remind me of why I shouldn’t spend - incidentally, this reminds me I need to make a new sleeve, as my old one is just about in tatters. (@ blueprint for financial prosperity via gather little by little)

Sometimes It Is the Amount of Money You Make The “spend less than you earn” mantra has two parts to it - spend less and earn more. (@ paid twice)

Money, Currency, and Wealth Here are some compelling thoughts on where our money really comes from. (@ free money finance)

When I sit here writing, I usually have music cranked up pretty loud (often it’s Aimee Mann, as I’ve mentioned before). I have a big pile of notes around me and I collect them into an article, usually rocking gently back in forth in time to the music.

Every once in a while, I’ll just spontaneously start singing along to a song, writing while I sing. Right now, I’m doing this very thing, singing along to How Am I Different.

I can’t sing worth a lick, but the exuberance and positive feeling I get from doing so gives me the positive mood and drive to keep writing, no matter what. It moves me, inspires me, pushes me to stretch who I am and what I write.

Sing out loud when the inspiration strikes you, even if you can’t sing a bit. It really can help.

CPU will make your wallet fatter. and it’s got nothing to do with computers CPU refers to cost per use - in other words, if you focus entirely on minimizing the cost per use of your item, you’ll save money on the long run. I myself like the idea of using “cost per hour of use” for some items, like books and video games. (@ richard yong)

8 Frugal and Cost Cutting Tips for the Newly Independent A ninth tip goes along well here: swallow your pride a little. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that you need to have the best of everything. You don’t. (@ girls just wanna have funds)

How to Store Your Tax Returns I store mine electronically, but I keep all associated paper documentation (receipts, etc.) in a box in the closet. Erin has another idea (probably one more sensible to many people). (@ unclutterer)

What’s Wrong With Being in the Middle Class? There’s not necessarily anything wrong with the middle class. My lifelong financial dream is simply to have enough money in the bank so that I no longer have any worry about living expenses. Anything beyond that is just silly talk. (@ mrs. micah)

What Will You Do When Gas Hits $4 Per Gallon? I don’t think much will change in our life if gas prices continue to go up. My wife might search harder for a job closer to our home, but that’d be about it. (@ wise bread)

The Poor Man’s Credit Monitoring Solution This is some seriously excellent advice if you want to keep track of your credit but don’t really want to pay for the service to do it automatically. (@ the honest dollar)

What would you do? The house is a little rougher than we expected This is a great example of the challenges of homebuying. You almost always have to compromise in some fashion and you have to ask yourself how much premium you’re willing to pay for a house that’s completely repair-free. (@ gather little by little)

How Misguided Motivation Can Prevent You from Achieving Excellence This ties in well with my skill-building article from a few days ago. What’s your motivation for developing that skill? Some motivations are far better than others. (@ dumb little man)

Usually, I focus in on personal finance and personal development bloggers in my roundups, but today I wanted to highlight a blog that has consistently been among my favorites for many years. It’s a blog primarily focusing on marketing written by Seth Godin.

You’re probably wondering why I would want to bring up a marketing blog here. It’s because Godin’s blog is, week in and week out, the best blog I’ve ever read. I walk away on a regular basis loaded down with interesting new thoughts to ruminate on, and more than a few times this thinking has resulted in a new post on The Simple Dollar.

While writing this, I spent a few moments reading through just the last few days of posts from Seth and found three (right on his front page) that were compelling enough that I want to write a response here to that post, expanding on my thoughts. Enjoy these gems.

Where Do We Begin? One of the biggest challenges I have when writing The Simple Dollar is to try to continue the conversation I have with my longtime readers while still making things inviting to new people, too. (@ seth godin)

Getting Versus Taking The dichotomy between getting an education and taking one is really thought provoking and it illustrates why a lot of people really do waste their educational opportunities. There’s more to college than a degree. (@ seth godin)

Why Bother Having A Resume? I think this is the type of thinking that distinguishes the exceptional. An exceptional person doesn’t need the resume. However, most organizations aren’t capable of hiring the truly exceptional - the truly exceptional seek out their own place. (@ seth godin)

And now some other stuff.

The Real Cost of Financial Clutter on the Road to a Remarkable Life This one’s actually written by me as a guest post over at the great Unclutterer blog - Erin (the writer at Unclutterer) guest-posted here on The Simple Dollar last Friday. (@ unclutterer)

The Last Lecture and Brick Walls If you haven’t seen it, it’s really worth your time to watch Randy Pausch’s last lecture. It’s one of my favorite inspirational and motivational speeches I’ve ever heard, right up there with Jim Valvano’s “don’t give up” speech. (@ gather little by little)

Making Money from Your Old Hobbies It’s rare that an old hobby can actually turn a profit for you, but you can recover at least some of the sunk money if you do it carefully. (@ queercents)

The Beauty of Occasional Abundance While reading this, I imagined several hundred sheets of typewriter paper with the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” all over it. (@ pick the brain)

How Money Challenges Prevent You From Building The Life You Love The best thing I’ve ever done (aside from marriage and children) was fight hard to get out of this trap. (@ the digerati life)

Good News if You’re in the Market for Buying a House House prices are cheaper most everywhere. The only exceptions seem to be (relatively) smaller metro areas with a growing industry, like the Des Moines, IA metro area (which I’m familiar with). I don’t have the exact number, but I’d be willing to bet that Des Moines prices have at the very least stayed even over the last few years - of course, they weren’t that high to begin with. (@ consumerism commentary)

Economic Stimulus Rebate Check Frequently Asked Questions I’ve been asked about this several times recently, so I thought it’d be worthwhile to link to a resource that already answers most of the common questions. (@ money smart life)

10 Ways History’s Finest Kept Their Focus at Work Winston Churchill anecdotes are the best kind of anecdotes. (@ lifedev)

Announcement #1 I’ve decided to give the “book club” another whirl with a book that I think could provoke a ton of discussion: Born to Buy. If you’re unfamiliar with it, read my review of it from a while back. The book is basically a deep look at the effects of marketing and consumerism on the developing consumer instincts of children - how they spend money and why.

I want to do this detailed reading of Born to Buy because I’m currently witnessing some early consumer behavior in my two and a half year old son. For example, he’s obsessed with the movie Cars and thus is highly partial to any product with a Cars tie-in. Is that a healthy thing? Should we let him pick these items (so he can enjoy his ‘Mater-themed training pants), or should we steer him away? Will either direction encourage him to be a rampant consumer later on in life? I really want to dig into this stuff, and that’s what Born to Buy is about.

Having learned lessons from both the very successful book club of Your Money or Your Life and the utterly disastrous attempt at a book club for What Color is Your Parachute?, I’ve figured out several things. First, the book needs to have a lot of meat for discussion. If it’s introspective, like What Color is Your Parachute?, it doesn’t go anywhere. Second, an entry every day is too much - and an entry once a week is too little. So the best amount is somewhere in the middle. Third, my entries should be a mix of a summary of the section and my thoughts on it - particularly the provocative ones.

So here’s the plan. I’m going to do three entries a week on Born to Buy, each entry covering about ten pages of the book. Each entry will have a summary of that part, some of my thoughts on it and the questions it made me think about, and notes on what will be covered next. These entries will appear on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday for about six weeks. The first entry, covering the ten page “Introduction” chapter, will show up on Tuesday, April 1.

If you’re interested in reading along, pick up Born to Buy at your local library or from Amazon. If you don’t have it right when we start, don’t worry - you can catch up on old entries. If you don’t want to read along, that’s fine, too - each entry will have something of a summary of the section.

Note about the “regular” book reviews: They’re going on hiatus for the length of the book club - if I retained those, too, it would reach a point of “book overload” pretty quickly. I’m doing this switch to try something different and insightful - to get more intimate with a single book than to just briefly summarize several of them. The normal reviews will still appear this weekend, but will go on hiatus for several weeks during the book club. After that, they will return.

Announcement #2 For the next several weeks, I’m going to do a series of post exchanges with a small handful of very carefully selected great blogs on similar topics to The Simple Dollar - they’ll do an entry here and I’ll do an entry on their site. This allows me to seek out new readers while also exposing you to some great writers from other sites.

This won’t overflow the site with entries from random people. I’m going to have one guest entry a week for several weeks, and these will appear on Friday afternoon. Once these are done, I’ll go back to the normal schedule, replacing that guest writer slot with my own stuff. I’ll also include any entries of mine that appear on other sites in my weekly roundup.

The first entry, appearing this Friday, comes from Erin at Unclutterer.

Announcement #3 My long-asked-about cooking blog is set to launch on May 1. I’ll tell you all about it shortly after that (when there are some articles up for you to read). Expect to hear about it near Cinco de Mayo.

Whew! Let’s read some articles!

How not to get super-rich: the passive income scam Some harsh words for the idea of passive income. I think part of the challenge is how to define passive income. One of the commenters offered a pretty good insight, too: “I think passive income, like most financial information on the internet, is aimed at keeping middle class people more comfortably middle class.” I could write a whole post on that idea alone… in fact… be patient! (@ jonathan fields / awake at the wheel)

An Interesting Piece on Target Target versus Wal-Mart is perception versus reality. For example, in one of the cities near where I live, the Wal-Mart is FAR nicer than the Target - both stores are pretty new, but the Wal-Mart there is one of the nicest large department stores I’ve ever set foot in, with a ton of aisle space, a very open layout, and amazing cleanliness. (@ all financial matters)

Funds to Form a Family: Adoption process begins. And so does the check writing. The adoption process bothers me on a deep level. It basically discourages families from trying to adopt because the costs are prohibitive. My wife and I considered adopting a child in the past from a disadvantaged nation, but the costs were outrageous (and that doesn’t even include the bribing). Why is this? So that only rich families can adopt? Why doesn’t an international agency set up an adoption clearinghouse so that families can easily adopt and that outlay of money can go to building a great life for the child instead of lining some bureaucrat’s wallet? (@ queercents)

Should I Buy Flood Insurance? My hometown was washed away in the Mississippi River flooding in 1993. Some people had flood insurance - others did not. Amazingly, you can still tell which group was which based on the situation they’re in now. If you’re in a flood plain, get flood insurance, period. (@ my money blog)

When the Going Gets Tough, Get Back to the Basics Repeat it with me: spend less than you earn. Spend less than you earn. Do that over and over again and you’ll be okay. (@ get rich slowly)

A lot of people out there are busily filling out NCAA tournament brackets for their (friendly) office pools. I’m pretty obsessive about college basketball and thus I have my own secret industrial-strength methodology for my own bracket, but I usually offer some good advice to anyone who doesn’t know the first thing about the NCAA tournament and is trying to fill out a bracket to fit in. Here’s the game plan:

For the first two rounds, pick the higher seed every time. This will leave you with a Sweet Sixteen of nothing but 1, 2, 3, and 4 seeds.

For the rest of the tournament, pick the team with the most wins, regardless of seed.

For this year’s tournament, that would give you a title game of North Carolina versus Memphis, with Memphis winning it all.

While this probably won’t give you the winning bracket, it will give you a bracket that will do respectably well in any competition.

Another option, if you want to really research things, is to go through the bracket and write down how many of the team’s last fifteen games they won. You can get that easily at ESPN.com or another sports site. Then, pick your winner of every game based on that number, with the team with more wins in the last fifteen always coming out on top. If they have the same number, pick them based on overall wins. In fact, this is actually not too far off my own personal strategy.

Good luck! Here are some interesting articles worth reading!

Snowflaking: A Primer This is an excellent post (that I missed when it first came out but stumbled upon later) that combines debt reduction and frugality in a very clear way - it directly translates frugality into better debt reduction success. (@ paid twice)

How to Recover From a (Big) Mistake at Work Excellent career advice. Every one of us will eventually make some sort of large mistake in the workplace. (@ dumb little man)

Excited and Scared: One Week as a Full Time Blogger J.D. and I made the leap to writing full time at almost exactly the same moment. Here are his reflections after week one of doing this full time. (@ get rich slowly)

How to Motivate Yourself Without Hard Deadlines My technique is to create artificial hard deadlines for myself and enforce them strictly. (@ pick the brain)

90% Off Is Not A Deal If You Don’t Need It Quite often, a reader will send me a note about some unbelievably great deal that they found on some tchotchke online somewhere, and then get offended when I don’t post about it. Here’s the scoop: it’s still stuff you don’t need to be spending your money on, even if it’s stuff with a big discount. (@ wise bread)