- The Festival of Frugality #278 The Pure Peer Pressure Edition is up. All of your friends are reading it. http://bit.ly/aqkn4K #
- RT @princewally: Happy StarWars Day!: princewally's world http://goo.gl/fb/rLWAA #
- Money Hacks Carnival #114 – Hollywood Edition http://bit.ly/dxU86w (via @nerdwallet) #
- I am the #1 google hit for "charisma weee". Awesome. #
Side Hustle: The Garage Sale Preparation
We had a garage sale last week, as a wrap-up to the April 30 Day Project. We got rained out halfway through the first day of our 3-day sale, but we still managed to clear $1500. We held the sale in our neighbor’s garage because it had more space and better visibility.
Wednesday night, while carrying boxes over, I missed the step to their property from our driveway and crashed while carrying three boxes. That’s a twisted ankle and a bleeding knee. Naturally, while I’m hopping and swearing, everyone is concerned that I’m okay. The worry-warts. Anyway, it hurt, so we stopped setting up while we still had a few boxes left in the basement.
[ad name=”inlineleft”]Thursday morning, I decided to show them all. At 5:30AM, before anybody else is strongly considering the possibility of maybe thinking about getting ready to hit the snooze button, I decided to get the rest of the boxes ready. They’d all wake up, worried about how I’m feeling, asking if I’m to stiff to carry boxes. The best way to show them they don’t need to worry would be to have all of the boxes dealt with before they woke up. So I started. Up and down the stairs, with a stiff, twisted ankle, gloating to myself about how tough I was…BOOM, down the stairs. I was on my back, sliding down the stairs. I caught a stair-tread in the small of my back and another on the point of my tailbone. Mommy?
After I stopped twitching on the floor at the base of the stairs, I managed to get the last of the boxes ready. Instead of sympathy, I spent the rest of the weekend getting asked if I needed an inflatable doughnut to sit on. There are places I’d prefer not to have bruised.
Unpacking the boxes made me glad that everything was priced. We spent 6 weeks going through our entire house–every room, every dresser, every drawer–to eliminate the clutter. As something went into a box, it got priced, so we didn’t have to do it all at the last minute. That is the most important time-saving step for a garage sale. Price it as you pack it. You don’t want to waste hours pricing stuff while tripping over potential customers.
Another preparation tip to do early: Find tables! Ask around. You’d be surprised at who has a dozen folding tables collecting dust in his basement. It’s better to borrow that to rent. The best price I found was $17.50 to rent an 8′ X 30″ table for a week. We didn’t have to do that, but we thought we would have to. I borrowed a few, found a few, and built a few out of sawhorses.
The week before the sale, we placed an ad in the paper. When I placed the ad, the paper called to suggest we change it from running the weekend before to running just the days of the sale. I agreed, to a point, but their Sunday circulation is miles ahead of the weekday circulation, so why pay to run an ad nobody will see on Thursday? I ran it Sunday through Tuesday, because I wanted the Sunday ad and we got 3 consecutive days in the price. Did I actually know better than the paper’s sales-weasel? Who knows? I think I made the right decision.
The Sunday before the sale, I posted an ad on Craigslist. Interesting fact: little old ladies use Craiglist to plan their garage-sale adventures.
Two days before the sale, we made signs. Bright pink signs with brighter yellow starbursts. They were all simple. “Mega Sale! 8-5” followed by an arrow and our address. Simple, easy-to-read, and bright. The morning of the sale, after the ibuprofen kicked in, I put the signs up. When you make signs out of paper, always include a crossbar. It rained a lot the first day of the sale, so the signs wilted. The second morning, I went out with some duct tape and crossbars and fixed them all.
The day before the sale, we got cash and change. We had $50 in 1s and 5s and $25 in silver change. No pennies. Nothing was priced to make us need them.
The morning of the sale, we set up two canopy tents in the driveway and pulled the prepared-and-filled table out under them. We finished stacking as much as we could on the tables and called it “open”. There were a few boxes we couldn’t put out due to the rain. We simply ran our of room. At noon, $65 into the sale, we decided enough was enough and shut down–cold, wet, and miserable. Lunch and a nap made the day better.
Later, I’ll discuss the other parts of our successful sale.
Note: The entire series is contained in the Garage Sale Manual on the sidebar.
Update: This post has been included in the Money Hacks Carnival.
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-17
- RT @mymoneyshrugged: The government breaks your leg, and hands you a crutch saying "see without me, you couldn't walk." #
- @bargainr What weeks do you need a FoF host for? in reply to bargainr #
- Awesome tagline: The coolest you'll look pooping your pants. Yay, @Huggies! #
- A textbook is not the real world. Not all business management professors understand marketing. #
- RT @thegoodhuman: Walden on work "spending best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy (cont) http://tl.gd/2gugo6 #
Work at Home Scams
The idea of working from home is certainly appealing. You get to set your own hours, sleep in some days, and be there when the kids get home from school. You can be there when the packages get delivered and let the dog out before it’s too late. Who doesn’t see the attraction?
Unfortunately, when something is so enticing, there will always be predators looking to take advantage of the dreams of others. They dangle the “be your own boss” bait and reel in the people who their wishes overrule their judgment.
The ads are hard to resist. “Make $2800 per month without leaving your home!” or “Stuff envelopes in your home for $1 per envelopes.” I cases like these, the old saw tends to hold true: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Common work-at-home scams include:
Medical Billing
For only $499.99, you can purchase a “business opportunity”. A lot of medical bill is actually done on paper so there is very real market for medical billing and processing. Unfortunately for the respondents to these ads, the vast majority of this market is already taken by large companies with huge marketing budgets. Finding enough customer to generate enough revenue to recover your investment is almost impossible, but you’ll never see that in an ad.
Envelope Stuffing
You answer an ad in the paper, sending $29.95 for a packet that will instruct you in the fine art of stuffing envelopes for $1 each. When you get the information, you find out it is a letter instructing you to place an ad in the papers stating “Stuff Envelopes for $1 Each. $29.95 for Information.” This forces you to become the scammer, just to recover your costs. Bad you.
Assembly or Craft Work
This one actually sounds like a business. You invest in–for example–a sign-making machine for $1500. The selling company promises to buy a quota of signs from you each month. After you buy the equipment and materials you spend countless hours making the product only to find out that either a) the company has disappeared or b) their undefined “Quality Standards” has rejected the work. Nothing is ever up to standards.
That’s not to say there aren’t legitimate opportunities to make money at home. Bob at Christian Personal Finance recently listed 24 legitimate home-based businesses, including blogging, eBay selling, wedding planning, car mechanic, and mobile oil changes.
Are you exploring any home-based business opportunities?
Cheap Drugs – How I Saved $25 in 3 Minutes
- 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?
Answer: How Much Term Life Insurance Do I Need to Buy?
From a question posted here:
Thank you for all your help in my previous question. After meeting with the agent, I’ve decided on term life insurance over whole life. But I am still not sure how much term life I should buy. Should I buy as much as I could afford or some specific amount?
My answer(edited a bit):
That question is far too open-ended.
Are you married? If yes, are you the primary breadwinner? Do you have children? Investments? Savings?
Here’s my situation:
I am married, with three children. I have the primary income.
We have a mortgage, a car payment, and some consumer debt.
I added up all of the debt as my base level of term life insurance. My family will not be burdened with debt if anything happens to me.
To the base level, I added 5 years of my net income. Without changing a thing, my family will be supported exactly as is for 5 years if I die. They won’t, however, have the same level of expenses, due to the base level of insurance paying off all debt. All of my living expenses also evaporate. For example, there will be one car sold, one less mouth to feed and body to dress, etc.
I figure with the lower expenses and no debt, my insurance will support my family for 10 to 15 years if my wife manages the money right. If she continues to work, it should last almost forever.
How do you figure the “right” amount of life insurance?[ad name=”inlineright”]
