Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Stacking Discounts for the Win

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I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to shopping for stuff.  I like to get the best price (don’t we all?), so I often find myself shopping around a lot when it comes to buying anything that’s higher priced.  And, so long as my patience holds out, I usually do end up getting a good price on whatever it is that I’m shopping for.

Most recently, I needed to buy a new set of tires for our Suburban.  Now, if you’ve bought tires for anything recently, you know that they aren’t very cheap.  In fact, they can be downright expensive.  The bigger they are, the bigger the price tag too.  Winter is almost upon us, though, so it was time to bite the bullet and get shopping.  I looked around locally first, wanting to keep money local if possible.  That was silly.  $150 a tire?  That’s crazy.

So, geek that I am, I went looking online.  There’s several online tire dealers and they usually have decent prices.  I found one that had a good price on a good tire.  Closer to $120 a tire.  That’s better, but still not great.  I noticed that a different model of tire had a nice rebate attached to them.  $75 off a set of 4.  Getting better.  Closer to $100 a tire. The rebate didn’t expire until November 6th, so I had some time to shop around.

Then I got an email from eBay.  eBay has a program called eBay Bucks where you get a certain % of your purchase back as an eBay certificate to use on your next purchase.  In the email, they told me that there was a 48 hour special.  Buy from a list of select shops and earn 20% back in eBay Bucks.  The tire shop that I had been looking at was featured right on the front page of that special list.  Rock on!

After a bit of searching through their store, I managed to find the exact same tire I had been looking at, for the exact same price that they had it for on their website.  Except, now I get 20% back from eBay too.  The deal just got a whole lot sweeter!

Not to be outdone, and wanting to save as much as I possibly could on the tires, I went looking for extra deals that I could stack to save even more money.  Which is where Discover comes in.  Each quarter, Discover runs a bonus program for their cashback program.  Instead of the normal 2% cash back on purchases, they bump it up to 5% on certain categories.  In the third quarter, the category was hotels and travel.  I used that when I went to Denver.  In the fourth quarter, the category is online shopping.  I’m assuming that’s a clever ploy to get people to pay for their online holiday shopping with their Discover card.  Well played, Discover, well played. But, I’m just buying some tires today. 😉

Discover card in hand, I went on over to the eBay store, and bought some tires!

  • 4 Tires: $472  (with free shipping)
  • Rebate: -$75
  • eBay Bucks: -~$94
  • Discover Cash Back: -~$24
  • Total: $279 (or about $70 a tire.)
  • Stacking discounts, cash back, and rebates for the win: Priceless

Taking my time, making sure I checked for all the possible discounts and rebates I could, then stacking them all where possible saved me a ton of money!  Granted, most of that is in the form of cash back.  The eBay Bucks must be used on eBay but we actually buy a fair amount of stuff on eBay because it’s generally far cheaper than anywhere else.  We haven’t bought hardly any Christmas presents yet, so I’m sure we’ll find a good use for it, and we’ll save on that stuff too.  The Discover cashback can be redeemed for gift cards and such, but I prefer to build it up over $50 and then use it as a credit on my account.  And, the rebate, when it comes (why does it take forever to get those?), will likely be used to buy some groceries or something that we would have already been buying anyways! Plus, we needed the tires, so we were going to be buying tires anyways.  (I don’t suggest you do this for frivolous things you don’t need!)

One other note, that’s probably specific to this purchase and not, necessarily, others is that some tire places will charge you a bit extra to mount the tires if you buy them elsewhere.  I’m aware of that, and will probably try and bargain that down a bit, but it makes some sense.  There’s a new local (not a chain) tire shop in town, anyways, so I’ll likely take it up there and pay the small premium to give the local guy some business.  Even if they charge me $25 a tire to mount them (I think it’s closer to $12), the total cost per tire will still be well below what the original price would have been.  And, if I had paid that original price, I still would have had to pay to have them mounted, so I still win!

Do you try and stack discounts?  When was the last time you had a win in discount stacking?  What was it for?

How I Saved Money on iPad Repairs (Twice)

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In late 2011, I won a new iPad 2.  By March of 2012, it needed new glass.  My son, who was 5 at the time, managed to drop it off of the couch while playing with it, and put a big crack in the digitizer (that’s what the glass is called).  The iPad still worked, most of the time.  I contacted Apple, in an attempt to get the iPad repaired through an Apple service call, but, what Apple does with that situation is sell you a refurbished ipad of the same model for a reduced price and then take the old one off your hands.  By the time Apple would have been done with me, the “repair” would have cost me about $400.  Yes, the iPad is cool, but it isn’t $400 cool.  (My wife and kids would argue that point though.)

Cracked iPadBeing the frugal shopper that I am, I did a little looking around.  Turns out, you can purchase the repair service on eBay.  Ship off your iPad with the broken digitizer, and the seller replaces the digitizer for you and then sends it back.  The service that I ended up purchasing was a $79.99 service with a $10.98 shipping charge.  Once it was all paid for and the iPad was back in my possession, it ended up costing me right at $100.  If you’re doing the math right now, the $79.99 and $10.98 don’t really add up to $100.  What I had failed to add in was that I would have to pay to have it shipped to the seller as well.

Want to know how long the repaired digitizer lasted?  If you guessed “less than 30 days”, you’re right!  Yep.  Sad isn’t it?  After it got back from the first repair, I even put a fancy case on it from OtterBox, in hopes that it would keep it from having the same fate should it fall from the couch again.  But, even that fancy case couldn’t save it from a trip down the hardwood stairs of our house.  There’s something chilling about hearing the thuds of an iPad as it bounces down the stairs.  I suppose that could be attributed to the three year old at the top of the stairs that could have just as easily been what was making the thud sounds.  Luckily, it was just the iPad.

I certainly didn’t want to pay another $100 a month later to have it repaired, so I did what any self respecting techie would do.  I started doing research on repairing it myself.  I could buy a replacement digitizer for about $50, and if I could figure out how to do it myself, I’d save 50% on the second screen repair.  I watched a few youtube videos of repairs being done, and decided that it was worth a try.  Worst case scenario, I failed and had to send it off, losing the $50 in parts and some time.

We actually left the iPad with the second set of cracks for a while.  In fact, it lasted until just last week when it cracked a little bit more and actually became hazardous.  So, parts in hand, I set to replacing my own iPad digitizer screen.  While not terribly complicated, the iPad is full of little parts.  Little parts scare me. 🙂

Two hours of work later, and the iPad is good as new.  Well, close anyways.  The digitizer is replaced, the iPad is all put back together, and, miracle of miracles, it all works!

I spent $100 to have someone else do the first repair.  The second time, I spend $49 on the parts and did it myself.  My savings on the repair were $51!  It took me a bit under 2 hours, so I effectively “made” about $25 an hour.  Not bad.  Wages like that make me wonder if there isn’t money to be made in performing the service as a side hustle!  Or, maybe buying busted iPads and replacing the parts and reselling them once they are fixed.

Obviously, I have a technical background.  I’ve been tinkering with computers for just about as long as I can remember, and spend most of last summer working part time at a computer repair store.  I have the skills to do the repair myself.  Which made it pretty easy to make the decision to do the repair myself.  Someone without that background might want to think twice before attempting it.  But, with the abundance of how-to videos on youtube, and all the information on the web, maybe it’s worth a try anyways.  You can save some money on the repair, and learn a new skill!

Have you ever done your own DIY repairs on something as costly as an iPad?  How did it turn out?

img credit: shannonrosa, on Flickr

My Container Garden: The Season is Over

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This spring, frustrated by the lack of any good growing space in our yard, we decided to give a container garden a try.  We bought up a whole bunch of pots to put everything in, got some good potting soil, and planted away.  Once we were done, we planted a couple pots of tomatoes, a couple pots of cucumbers, a longish pot of green beans, a pot of green peppers, a longish pot of carrots, two pots of onions, and two large pots of potatoes.

Last weekend, with the low temperatures in the forecast dipping below the 32 degree mark, we decided it was a good time to pull up the root vegetables, and pick anything that was ripe.  Considering the few silly things we did, and the terribly hot summer we had, I think we did O.K.

Container Garden Harvest

In the picture, you can see some of what we pulled up last weekend. I wasn’t quick enough on the camera trigger to get pictures of the carrots or peppers before they got taken into the house. Also not pictured are any of the cucumbers, beans, or tomatoes we’ve harvested throughout the summer, or any of 10 or so potatoes that we pulled out from the bottom of the potato bag in August.

Overall, I’d have to say that I was slightly disappointed with the harvest.  None of the onions grew to very good size.  What cucumbers we did harvest were all seeds and no flesh.  The heat really played havoc on most of the plants in the containers.  There were several weeks where the plants really needed to be watered every night, but we were either gone, or didn’t get home in time to do it.  I also made the mistake of planting a few too many plants in some of the containers, and I think they got crowded which stunted their growth.

The quality of what we got, however, was pretty good.  Fresh potatoes taste nothing like what you get from the store, they’re so buttery and sweet.  The onions, while small, were very good as well.  My wife made a salsa with some of the tomatoes and onions, and it was very, very good.

I’ve already got a pretty good mental list of the things that I’ll be changing next year.

  • We get such a short growing season here, that I either need to start the seeds much earlier in the house, or just spend the money and buy greenhouse plants when it’s time to plant.
  • I’ll have to be careful to reduce the number of plants in the pots as well, to cut back on the crowding issue we had.
  • I’m also thinking about building a few planters attached to the deck so I don’t have to buy any more pots.  Of course, I could try and find some second hand pots as well.
  • The soil we use may have to change a bit as well.  The stuff we bought this year, while good potting soil, just didn’t seem to keep it’s consistency very well.  Part of that may have been the need for more watering.
  • I’ll be changing the mix of plants that I plant as well.  The cucumbers didn’t seem to take to containers all that well, so I might cut those in half.  I’d also like to add a few more tomato plants, and a few more varieties of peppers.  We only planted green peppers this year, but I’d like to try some jalapeno, and maybe another variety of hot pepper.

How did your garden turn out this year?  Do you plant in a garden or in containers?