A path to instant gratification

Posted by Matt

Some of our more dedicated frugalizers are probably sticklers for buying on sale. But it's painful, isn't it? You do the research and then watch the ads every week. Wait......wait......waaaaaait.......

Frustrating, huh? Well, thanks to a website called Price Protectr, you may no longer need to torture yourself.

If you buy something and then it goes on sale, some stores will refund the difference for up to 30 days. You can register purchases with Price Protectr and the site will monitor price drops (free of charge) for items from Target, Costco, Amazon, and other selected stores. You'll receive emails each time the price goes down.

I should point out that you don't necessarily have to use this site to find sales AFTER the fact. The simple interface only asks for the product URL and your email address, so I punched in the URL for a book on my Amazon wish list. PriceProtectr correctly found today's price and sent me a confirmation email to let me know that they would let me know if the price went down anytime in the next 30 days.

As soon as I can think of something I want to buy, I'll try it out.

Inexpensive ink

Posted by Matt

I read this in our company newsletter today:

Next time you buy an ink cartridge, go with a refilled one. Recycled cartridges cost up to 75% less than new ones.

Sounds good to me; what do I have to do? I looked around and it turns out that, as usual, the more effort you are willing to put in yourself, the more cash you can save. When reading through this, don't forget to factor in the value of your time.

For this article, I chose to use our HP OfficeJet V40printer as an example. (Yes, it is painfully old and I will replace it as soon as it stops working.)

I first went directly to the HP website. The price for a replacement HP15 cartridge there is $29.99. This is where the printer companies make all their money these days and it's why printers are so inexpensive.

Next, I looked on Amazon and found remanufactured cartridges from Printworks for $19.99. That's only 33% off so far, but if you don't want to get your hands dirty, this is not a bad deal. I decided to keep looking.

Next I found http://www.cheap-printer-refills.com/. They had some really good prices:

• Remanufactured cartridge: $12.95 (about 57% off of the new cartridge price from HP)
• Refill kit with refill tools and enough ink for one refill : $10.95 (63% off)
• Ink only for one refill: $5.99

The ink-only price is great, but I'll probably need at least one of the kits to be able to use it. Quite a discount there, but I worried about whether I would be able to do the refill myself. Luckily, I found this video. (The site actually has refill videos for many different kinds of printers; not just mine.)

That led me to discover that the company that makes the video is (no surprise) an ink manufacturer. Their OfficeJet page lists the best deals yet.

• Remanufactured cartridge: $12.95
• Refill kit with TWO refills: $9.95
• Ink only: $2.95

The $2.95 price is for a single refill bottle, but if you really want to eke out the cheapest possible ink, you can buy the ink in a liter bottle for about 90 cents per refill. That should definitely push you past the 75% discount level!

If you don't want to get your hands messy, at least consider the remanufactured cartridges. These are almost exactly like what you are getting from HP, Epson and Canon, but much cheaper!

Sharing the savings

Posted by Matt

Have you ever been disappointed when you proceed to the checkout section of an online shopping site and are asked whether you have a coupon code? I always wonder "where can I get these codes"?

One answer is "RetailMeNot". This site claims to share more than 45,000 coupon codes from major online retailers. I heard about this site a few weeks ago, but haven't had a chance to use them yet. (That would require actually buying something.)

Rather than hold the info back, I thought I would post about it and see if any of our readers had experiences to share.

Update: 11/04/2007: I was contacted by a representative of RetailMeNot who saw this post and wanted to let everyone know that they have a new feature to make using their site easier: widgets. These are plug-in modules for Mac Desktop, Firefox and iGoogle that bring the latest savings to you so you don't have to remember to keep checking the site.