If you live in the Midwest, you probably already know about the home improvement store Menards and their fantastic 11% rebate sales. What you may not know, is that Home Depot has a double secret probation rebate match program.
https://www.homedepotrebates.com/11percentmatch/
Whenever Menards is running an 11% rebate sale, Home Depot also runs a corresponding “Rebate Match” sale. The only difference is that Home Depot does not advertise it in any way that I’ve seen.
This is the first time that I am trying to take advantage of the secret match program. Hopefully my submission results in success. I have read on various forums that Home Depot does limit this to areas where Menards exists, so if you aren’t in the Midwest you might still be screwed.
Shae and I hosted Thanksgiving this year and my parents handed me an envelope filled with banking receipts covering years of my childhood. It could have just as easily been shredded, but since I have it, I might as well delve in and examine some of the financial going ons of my childhood. I have vague recollections of particular financial events, such as diligently depositing birthday and Christmas gift money, but now I have the receipts to piece it all together.
Then
It all started when I was 3 months old. My parents opened up my first bank account. Gee, thanks Mom and Dad. Back in the olden days, there was no online banking. So I had a Savings Register to record transactions in.
Opening up the register, you can see the first deposit, and subsequently, how old I am.
That $310.00 adjusted for inflation would be equivalent to $660 in 2016. Thanks Grandparents, uncles, aunts, and family friends for pitching in for my financial future.
Over the years, the balance steadily grew. I particularly like the 4th or 5th grade me that deposited $25 of ‘prize money’ in 1998.
I have no memory of what contest I won back then, but an interesting thing begins to happen around that time period. The handwriting changes, and some of the entries are being made by a little boy.
Around junior high school, middle school, or whatever you call 6th, 7th, and 8th grades, I had saved up enough money, at my parents behest, to start meeting the minimum requirements of Certificates of Deposits, or CDs for short. I do remember my Dad always shopping around the 4 or 5 banks in town looking for the best CD rates. I also remember him on a trip up to Grandma Schenk’s house once bemoaning the fact that she did not shop around rates and was leaving money on the table by being loyal to the same bank forever.
Anyway, in ’00, there is a receipt of a CD being closed.
At age 13, the saver mentality had been thoroughly beaten into my head by my parents and I had approximately $3,000 to my name, the bulk of which was tied up in a CD.
Birthday’s and Christmas’s kept rolling by year after year, and year after year I would write a fistful of thank you notes to grandparents, uncles, and aunts before dutifully marching down to the local bank and depositing checks and cash. At some point my Dad made me go alone and stopped helping me fill out the deposit slips. Of course I was terrified, but it was a good sink or swim lesson.
My Dad kept optimizing the best savings rates for me and kept the bulk of my savings locked up in CDs.
This particular CD was kept open for 2 years before being closed. The grand total of interest earned over that two years was $231.47.
In 2004, I began working and earning money for myself. The pay was negligible, but the real payoff was learning the value of a dollar. Performing a mind numbingly boring task for hours on end to collect a small paycheck gives one plenty of time to think. Suddenly, that new flashy item being marketed to you seems a little less interesting when you replace the dollar cost with an hour cost. Something that costs $50, is the same as something that costs almost 10 hours of work for someone on Indiana’s minimum wage of $5.15/hr. Yes, that was what I started at. Spending several hundred of my own dollars to take a girl to high school prom did not seem like a balanced equation. A couple of hours of fun was not worth the 50 hours of work required.
Finally in ’06 as a senior in high school, I opened up my first solo bank account. I was now 100% in charge or my own finances. The rest as they say is history.
Now
Now the tables have turned. I am in the role of Dad, and Frugal Boy and Frugal Fetus are in the role of child. Just like my parents handled all the finances when I was born and slowly relegated duties to me over the years, Shae and I are doing the same with our children. Frugal Fetus doesn’t know it, but he/she already has a college savings plan opened up and partially funded. In fact, since it was opened in July, it has returned 6.83% APY. Frugal Boy’s 529 college savings plan has returned 8.95% APY for the year-to-date. On a more concrete level, any cash that Frugal Boy receives he diligently stores in his doggy bank at his parents behest. Any checks are invested into his college savings. Amusingly enough, Frugal Boy already recognizes and calls out the different bank branches as we travel through town. I think he is almost ready to graduate to his first real bank account. We will probably open a PNC ‘S’ is for Savings account for him. It has 0 fees for age 18 and under account holders and uses Sesame Street characters to encourage kids to save.
There are a number of savings programs available for kids. Here is a roundup of some of the more popular ones.
You may have heard of Moore’s law, in simple terms it was an observation made 50 years ago that computers would become twice as fast every two years. For the most part, this ‘law’ held true for the past fifty years thanks to scientific and manufacturing advances in semiconductor technology. Companies such as IBM and Intel were able to cram more transistors onto a silicon wafer by shrinking down the transistor size.
Over the past few years, Moore’s Law has been proclaimed dead or failed a dozen times by pundits. The real laws of physics seem to have caught up with transistors and they simply cannot be shrunk down any further before the electrons traveling inside start to do funny things, like teleporting. The result is a stagnation in computer CPU performance.
For example, consider the 2010 Macbook and its 2016 descendent. According to benchmark tests, the 2010 laptop scores 1536. By Moore’s Law, every two years, that score should double. You’d expect the 2016 to score 12,288, but it actually only scores 3221. So a six year difference only amounts to a doubling in CPU performance.
So why would you bother buying a brand new laptop if it is not leaps and bounds faster than a six year old machine? Well, typically because other components are leaps and bounds better. The two biggest areas are in Random Access Memory, RAM, and storage space, i.e. hard drives. Usually, both of these items are user upgradeable, so you can take that six year old machine and make it very competitive with a brand new machine.
The 2010 Macbook comes with 2 GB (gigabytes) of RAM, and a 250 GB spinning disk hard drive. For $100, you can upgrade that to 8 GB of RAM and a 250 GB solid state hard drive (SSD). A solid state hard drive is faster, lighter, and more robust than the traditional spinning platter hard drives of old. The computer will boot up faster, apps will start quicker, and the whole feel of the computer will be ‘snappier’.
Doing these upgrades on a 2010 Macbook is extremely simple. Use a philips screwdriver to undo the bottom cover screws.
You can see the blue RAM chips in the right side of the picture. The silver hard drive is in the bottom right corner.
The two RAM chips will pop right out from the motherboard. The hard drive has a couple additional screws holding it in place. Installation is the reverse.
After replacing RAM, it is generally a good idea to run a test. MemTest86 is a free piece of software that will do an exhaustive battery of tests. The setup instructions are a little technical, but once you have made up the flash drive or CD, the test itself is incredibly easy to run.
TADA! You now have a cheap laptop that is almost as good as a brand new expensive one. What a great deal for an ‘obsolete‘ machine.
If you work on your own car and don’t know about RockAuto.com shame on you! RockAuto has an amazing selection of car parts at rock bottom prices. Geez, with all this talking up, I should be getting paid by them. Alas, today I’m going to share a secret about how to hack the RockAuto.com wholesale clearance sale.
I received an email from RockAuto.com informing me about their wholesale closeout parts sale. The email contained two links, one for each car that I have ordered for in the past. If you just open a browser and go to RockAuto.com, there is no mention of the sale. So how do you get in on this super secret savings?
You’re going to need to roll up your hacker sleeves and construct a special URL.
Did you see the part {ENTER_CAR_CODE_HERE}? You’ll need to figure out your car’s code. To do so, you can follow the instructions listed here. Paraphrasing,
Go to rock auto home page, click view catalog, and browse all the way to your car year, make and model and engine. Notice a small icon that says RSS next to the engine size. click that AS IF YOU were wanting to subscribe for updates for that particular model. the pop up window that results will have a url with your car code in it. replace the link above with the desired car code, and voila!! a list of wholesale closeout parts for the car you are working on.
for instance, a 70 monte carlo with 350 is car code 1055584
So why go to the bother of all that work? I scored:
3 sets of premium windshield wipers
2 air filters
3 high mileage oil filters
for $36 with tax and shipping. If I bought all of that at our local brick and mortar auto parts store it would have cost $146. We saved $110 by stocking up on clearance parts and consolidating the shipping charges.
Shae, Frugal Boy, and I have been working tirelessly on redefining half of the basement into a second living room. When Shae and I toured the house almost four years ago, the space was for lack of a better word, gross.
70’s wood paneling covered the walls. Some sort of black mildew or mold was growing on the walls along the floors and corners. A finished ceiling had been half ripped out, but the furring strips remained. The singular window had bars over it. Our house isn’t in a rough neighborhood, so it seemed very out of place. The remaining windows, while visible from the outside had been covered up from the inside. There was only one electrical outlet for the entire room and that room was labeled “Play Room” on the electrical panel. Maybe at one time it was a fun play room, but it had certainly degraded past that point years ago.
Fast forward almost four years and below is a picture of the space now.
It is not finished, but it looks so much better. The best part, by combining a barge full of sweat equity and a penchant for using other people’s rejects, we didn’t break the bank doing this renovation.
In previous years we tore down paneling, repaired/replaced windows, and repointed the brick mortar. That gave us a clean slate to start rebuilding the room. The first item of business was insulation.
We used reclaimed polyiso rigid board insulation sheets that had been removed from a commercial building roof.
2″ thick 4×8 polyiso boards such as these normally retail for around $30 a sheet. I was able to pick them up second hand for $14/ea. That is a $16/sheet difference. Multiply $16 by the 12 sheets that we used to insulate and you end up with a cost savings of $192.
The next big cost savings we scored was by using factory seconds porcelain tile. One of the big current trends/fads in floor tile right now is large format, wood-like, porcelain tile. This tile often comes in 8×36″ or 8×48″ and features an ink jet printed surface that looks like real wood grain because it comes from pictures of real wood grain.
This type of tile normally runs around $4/sqft at big box stores. You may be able to find a sale and get it for less. We bought 336 square feet of factory seconds tile at $1.30/sqft for a total of $437. Buying the same thing from a big box store would have cost us $1344. By taking factory rejects, we saved a whopping $907.
While laying the tile floor was hard work, it only took about a week to get it all done working nights and weekends. Looking around the internet, pegs porcelain tile labor costs at around $5/sqft. That is another $1680 saved by rolling up our sleeves and taking a couple of ibuprofen before bed.
Sometimes the savings are smaller. For instance, I bought a snap tile cutter for $20 at Lowes to install this floor. Our neighbor was throwing out an old cutter and offered it to us for free. It worked ‘well enough’ to get our job done. We saved $20 by using an older, less-than-perfect tool.
I rejected the notion of buying a projector mount and opted to make my own instead. $10 in hardware was adequate to mount our slickdeals.net projector deal to the ceiling.
We saved $5 on the DIY mount and $80 on the projector.
Getting furniture into the room is very difficult because of the narrow stairwell. We barely fit the water heater down four years ago.
We finally found an interesting deal on a futon through Craigslist.
For $180 we picked up a brand new, in the box futon that normally retails for $290 + $24 in tax. The craigslist seller was running an interesting side business of buying RETURN lots at auctions and then reselling them.
The general gist of the business is that people buy furniture at Walmart or other retailers, get it home, open it up, and realize that it is broken, the wrong color, or just not what they wanted. They return it to the store where they bought it from, but the store doesn’t want it. The instruction booklet even has a big STOP printed on the front telling customers NOT to return it to the store. Instead, unhappy customers should call the manufacturer, often DHP or Ameriwood. So the store is left with a box that they cannot readily resell. They load it up on the next outgoing truck and it ends up at a processing center. All these rejected returns are then bundled up into a lot and sold off at pennies for the dollar at auction.
A middle man can then buy these rejects and sell them in their own store or eBay or craigslist. A thrifty shopper like myself would buy it, realize that a part is damaged and then get a replacement part for free from the manufacturer.
The craigslist reseller gave us two options. She could request the replacement part, or we could do it ourselves and she’d knock off $20 from the price. We chose to do it ourselves. The process could not have been simpler, and it was FREE.
Not only is our new sofa well traveled like us, but we also saved $134 by following simple replacement instructions.
We bought a media cabinet as well from the same craigslist reseller. It had no damage.
We paid $50 for it when it retails for $74+tax. $30 saved.
You think that would be the end of the post, but wait, there’s more!
We saved $20 by buying a refurbished 4th generation Apple Tv.
It streams content just as well as a brand new one.
For those of you keeping score at home, the total savings of buying rejected second hand material for this project and doing the tough tiling work ourselves comes out to a humongous savings of $3068. That doesn’t even take into account all of the other sweat equity that we put into the room including, demolition, framing, electrical, drywall, painting, and trim. Taking some time to shop around and look at alternative sources can really pay off. You don’t always have to buy things brand new or from traditional retailers. There are a lot of little resellers that can often cut you a much better deal on the same material.
