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How to make room for a paying lodger

Finance

A car boot sale gets its name from the way goo...
Image via Wikipedia

A spare room in your home is an opportunity to boost your income. Imagine how much extra cash you could make by offering that space to a rent-paying tenant.  You can start getting things ready by creating the necessary space right now. Our guest blogger, Big Yellow Self Storage, shows you how in these five simple steps.

1.   What needs to go? Take a good look around your spare room (and the rest of your home, while you’re at it). Decide what you’re happy to part company with and what you want to find a storage solution for.

2.   Sell, donate or trash. For anything with a monetary value, get selling. Try online auctions, your local classified ads, boot sales(ed. That’s a flea market or swap meet for those in the U.S.) – anything that offers a cheap and quick way to raise cash. Alternatively, give your unwanted but perfectly serviceable items to charity. As a last resort, put them out with the trash or take them to a recycling centre.

3.   Decide what sort of storage solution you need. For those items that you’re not getting rid of, you’ll need some form of storage facility. And, depending on what those items are, this could be a garden shed, a loft, a garage or a unit at a secure, temperature-controlled storage site.

4.   Prepare your items to go into storage. Flat pack self assembly furniture and keep the fixings close by in a small bag. Coat wood and metal with varnish and rust protector respectively. Keep mattresses in bags available at DIY stores. (Change the bag every year). Use a wardrobe to store clothes, shoes, bags and bed linen – its small footprint will give you loads of hanging, stacking and shelving space. Be aware that books can get really heavy. Use lots of small boxes instead of fewer large ones and list their contents on the visible sides.

5.   Get ready to welcome your lodger! All that remains now is to prepare and advertise your spare room – and start earning money!

For further information about storing just about anything and to find out more about storage options, visit Big Yellow for Self Storage.

Cheap Drugs – How I Saved $25 in 3 Minutes

Finance

Drugs are bad, mmmkay?
Image by cackhanded via Flickr

Today, I stopped by the grocery store to pick up a couple of prescriptions.  I always get the generics, because they are less than half the price of the name-brands, while still being chemically identical. That’s not what I’m talking about, although it did save me about $75 today.

When the pharmacist rang up my medications, the total came up to $35.   That just wasn’t right.

Many chain pharmacies have gone to a cheap pricing model for generic drugs.  That usually means $4-6 per monthly prescription.  Cub Foods doesn’t have that.

So I asked for the price match.

Cub Foods matches prices on generics with whatever large pharmacy is nearby.  In this case, they matched Target’s prices, bringing the price from $35 to $10.   Instant $25 savings. I just had to wait for them to look up my prescriptions in their match-book.

Pharmacies with cheap generics:

K-Mart offers a 3 month supply for $15.

Target and Wal-Mart both have a 30-day supply for $4.

Publix offers a 14-day prescription for some antibiotics for free.  That’s insane! It’s also a heckuva way to get people in the door.  “Why don’t you shop for half an hour while I fill your scrip?”

If your pharmacy is anywhere near any of these stores, call and ask if they’ll match the price for generic drugs.

A few tips:

Before you go get your cheap drugs, call ahead and make sure what you need is on the cheap list.   Don’t assume.

You won’t be able to use your insurance to buy the cheap generics.   The overhead in insurance processing would mean that the pharmacies would be operating at a loss for each prescription.  You can’t make that up in volume.    Between our copays and deductibles, it’s far cheaper to just pay the generic price without involving the insurance company.

Don’t be afraid of generics.  It’s not like Nike.  Generics are chemically identical to the name brands. There are two differences: the price and the letter stamped on the side of the pill.

The stores offering cheap drugs are generally bigger stores hoping to use the drugs as a loss leader.    Places like Walgreens or CVS make up to 70% of their profits from the pharmacy.  They can’t stay open treating that as a loss leader.

How do you save money on prescriptions?