Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Saving Money with PaperBackSwap

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I like to read.  A lot.  Not as much as some people, but I still manage to read somewhere between 30 and 40 books a year.  As you can imagine, that gets a little bit expensive if you’re paying full price for all of them.  Swapping and borrowing books only gets you so far if you limit it to the people you know directly.  But, that’s where a fun site called PaperBackSwap comes into play.

Here’s how it works.  You post the books that you want to trade away.  Other users request those books and you ship them off.  You can either print the postage directly through the site, or buy it anyway you like.  Personally, I use paypal shipping because it’s slightly cheaper, and, I already have the account at paypal to do that.  Once you’ve shipped the book, or books, off, you merely wait for them to be received.  Once received, the person you sent them to marks them as received and you get a credit.

Save Money with Paper Back SwapWith your credits, you can then request books from other members.  (note: the first person from your household to sign up for PaperBackSwap gets two free credits when they list 10 books) Then, it’s just the same process, but with you being the receiver rather than the sender.

I’ve been a member since 2009.  I’ve sent 71 books out, and I’ve received 59 books.  I’ve only had one of the books that I sent disappear in postage, and one other that was damaged in postage.  Every other book I’ve sent has safely gotten where it was going and was accepted by the receiver.  The same is true of receiving books.  I’ve never had one get lost, and only had one that was damaged.  It’s a great community of readers, and a great source of books.

The selection of books is usually pretty good.  As you would expect, most of the newer books are a bit hard to get, but you can throw them on your wish list and the system will email you when one becomes available.  If one on your wish list becomes available, you’ve got two options.  The default is that PBS will put it on a 48 hour hold while it waits for you to either request it or decline it, or you can put it on auto-request which will automatically request it from the other member as soon as they list it.

If you’re an avid reader (or, really, even a more casual reader) you really should check out PaperBackSwap.  It’s  great, frugal, way to get books to read, and a great way to share great books with others too!

Ask for the Special

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I’m not a very outgoing person.  I have a hard time going up to people I’ve never met.  I have a hard time even talking to people I’ve never met.  So, I have a very hard time following the old advice that you have to ask for the real discount.  Luckily, not everything has to be done in person, so I can send emails for some things.  Which is exactly how I proved that old adage true.

For Christmas, instead of receiving gifts from all of our relatives, we asked them to put in the money that they would normally have spent to a mini-vacation fund for us.  We all have set spending limits for our Christmas presents, so it was pretty easy for them to do that.  Then, we took a nice little weekend trip the day after Thanksgiving.

We wanted someplace nice that would be within the budget, but would still count as a vacation.  In other words, Super 8 just wasn’t going to cut it.  We had originally settled on one place, but, being the curious fella that I am, I kept looking for a better deal.  And, as luck would have it I found one.  In fact, for what it would have cost us for one night at the original place, we stayed for two at the next place.  And, if you want my honest opinion, I think the place I found was a lot nicer.  How did we get such a deal?  I asked for it.

Simple really.  I emailed the manager who was listed on the website.  He forwarded my email on to the guy in charge of reservations.  In my email, I simply told him what days we were planning on staying, and asked if there were any specials that would be active for that weekend.  At this point, he could have easily just said no.  But, he didn’t.  And he earned a customer.

IMG_2154The place was very nice. (Here’s a link and a picture of the living room area if you’re curious: Chase on the Lake, I highly recommend it.) They called the room we stayed in a “condotel”.  Basically, it was a two bedroom, two bathroom, suite with a full kitchen and living room.  Everything was way above the typical standards that we have for a hotel room.  Overall, it was incredible.  We spent the whole weekend relaxing (kid-free, thanks to Grandma) and came home refreshed.

We would have gone on the trip in any case.  But, because I asked for the special, it became a lot cheaper than we had planned on it being.  And, if we plan on doing it again (we will), I think we’ve found our place.  Next time you’re making plans for a trip, or just trying to buy something special, make sure you at least ask for a special.  You might just surprise yourself and get one!

The Cost of Not Doing it Yourself

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The Problem

Recently, I became aware of a slight water problem (as if the word slight has any business hanging out with the words water and problem) in our basement.  Somewhere between when our house was built and when we bought it, the bathroom had been rearranged.  The plumber (or DIY’er) who did the work, rather than move the lines and start fresh, merely just capped the old water supply lines off.  The standard caps worked (and work) just fine.  However, one of the caps wasn’t really a cap.  It was a shutoff valve.  Whoever it was merely capped the output of the valve and turned the valve to the shut position and left it at the end of the line.  Any engineer will tell you that the more moving parts and connections there are, the higher the liability of failure.  Eventually, the metal of the valve began to corrode.  It corroded until it began to leak.  Which is where I come in.

While downstairs, I noticed that one of our kids’ buckets that was being stored for the winter was full of water.  There weren’t any obvious leaks, and the concrete floor around it was dry.  I couldn’t find a good reason why someone would have filled it with water and then taken it down to the basement, so I took a bit closer look.  Turns out, that valve was leaking.  Slowly enough, thankfully, that it wasn’t causing any problems.  According to my wife, who noticed the leak months ago (BAD wife!!!), it’s been leaking for a while.

November 2, 2010

The Fix

As with any issue like this, I’ve got two choices.  I can call a plumber and get it fixed, or I can attempt to fix it myself.  I’m pretty comfortable with building things and fixing most things.  Electrical and plumbing are probably the two things that I don’t like to mess with.  When we replaced the sink in our kitchen, it took 3 attempts and several months of trying before I had a working sink without any leaking.  I did manage to remodel the bathroom recently though, and replaced the toilet without any major issues.  So, going off of that, I decided to see what was involved by doing a few searches online.

After my research, I found that there are essentially only one or two ways to go about fixing the issue.  All involve cutting the pipe off, and re-capping it.  Or, properly capping it, as the case may be.  The 100% best way would be to cut the pipe, and then flux and solder on a new cap.  Done right, it’s almost impossible to break and a pretty good guarantee to never leak.  The problem here is that I’ve never done any of that and don’t own a torch, so would have to buy one of those.  They’re not expensive, but would certainly add to the cost for a tool that I have infrequent enough use for that I don’t already own one.  The second way would be to put what is called a compression fitting over the end of the cut off pipe.  The idea there is that there’s a compression ring in the fitting that, as the nuts are tightened, compresses the pipe into the fitting and creates a watertight seal.  No special tools necessary.

I hadn’t done either before, so it was still up in the air.  Add to that the fact that there is no water cutoff to that part of the house and the water to the entire house would have to be shut off once the project started and remain off until the project finished.

In the end, I did decide to give it a go myself.  My reasoning was that the worst case scenario wasn’t all that bad.  Worst case, I can’t get it fixed and have to call a plumber.  I’m out the money for the parts (~$10) and the water in the house would be off until the plumber came.  Even if the plumber is super busy, I doubt it would be more than a day of waterless-ness.  Inconvenient?  Sure. But, it could be a lot worse, so not horribly worrisome.  Worst case, it costs me some money and some water free time in the house.  We’ve got friends who live close enough that we could use their house for water activities like showering.  And a couple of gallons of filled water jugs would be enough for emergency flushing of the toilet.

How it went down.

I’ve never had the pleasure of a DIY plumbing project going right the first time.  Until now.  The procedure was certainly not an overly complicated one.

  • I turned the water off to the house.
  • I cut the old fitting off, making sure to get the cut as square as possible.  As a note, I tried to drain the pipes before cutting the old fitting, but very little water came out.  I left the drain hose open while I was cutting.  Once I had the old fitting off, the rest of the water drained from the drain hose.  I believe this was because it had created a vacuum of sorts and it was only released when I opened up the other end to vent.
  • I then took a bit of sandpaper (160 grit, I believe) and sanded all the old grime and corrosion off of the end of the pipe.  Not sure that this was really necessary for the compression fitting that I decided on, but better safe than sorry.
  • As soon as that was done, it was as simple as putting the fitting on the pipe and tightening it down.

Not only was it pretty simple and easy, but it didn’t leak when I turned the water back on.  Awesome!

The Cost of Not Doing it Yourself

There’s one other cost involved that I didn’t mention, and, it may be the most important.  It’s the cost of not doing it yourself.  Sure, it would have cost me the cost of the plumber to fix it.  But, it would have also cost me in experience.  I learned a new skill.  Granted, capping a household supply line isn’t necessarily high up there on a list of desired skills, but I won’t hesitate to do it again.  Plus, I’m now able to assist others who have a similar task and save them money too.  To me, that adds value to having done it myself.  It’s like getting paid to do it.  When you add all that up, the cost of not doing it yourself is almost always too much.

photo credit: silkolive