Money Saving Tips

Last Wednesday was a day of saving opportunities that easily could have been passed by. The day started with me working in my office (read that as laying in bed with the dogs) when the phone rang. It was the repairman from A&E about the dishwasher we had been having problems with. 

 When he arrived he asked how we were going to be paying for the service visit. When he said this, I worried a little as I was under the impression our landlord had taken care of payment when they made the reservation. I had tried making a reservation with A&E but gave up when I was told the machine was no longer under warranty. When he asked about the payment I told him that the landlord had told us it was under warranty which resulted in him calling his dispatch people. If you think it is bad when you have to call a call center, imagine how bad it would be if you needed to call a call center for your job and they hung up on you! After the dispatcher hung up on the repairman, I called the landlord. The landlord said that yes it was under warranty and gave me the confirmation number she was given as well as contract expiration date.

 This was the first saving opportunity for the day and had our landlord not written down the confirmation number, the $150 service fee would have come out of our pocket. Usually when I call and receive a confirmation number I either simply pretend to write it down or write it down and lose the number amongst my messes. Luckily my landlord did not behave the same way.

 The second saving opportunity arose when I was out running errands. Seeing how my wife has a full time job and I do not, I have become the errand-boy. One of the errands I needed to run was to get a new printer. While a quality printer-scanner-copier did come with the desktop computer we purchased two years ago, and it does still run, it will not recognize the refilled printer cartridges we would buy on eBay. 

 While printers are relatively cheap, the company makes their profit off the ink. I learned during my undergrad that companies that make printers (HP, Lexmark, etc.) are willing to actually lose money on making printers, but continue to make printers knowing they will make their money on cartridges. Because of this profit-making business, they sometimes set up their printers to not run if you try to replace the ink yourself rather than purchasing a new cartridge. Because our cartridges were not being read, things that would be automatically sent to print, such as coupons on coupons.com were not printing. We decided to get a new printer in order for these coupons to print so we could save money (paying for the printer with our savings in just a couple of months).

 I told my troubles to the customer service rep at Best Buy and he recommended a printer-scanner-copier by HP that ran on their new 560 series of cartridges and told me how many pages per cartridge it was able to print. He also was unsure which printers would read replacement cartridges and which ones would not. I started to think, while yes this printer-scanner-copier does look pretty interesting, I don’t think I need all of those functions. What I really need is a printer that will have give me a high volume of pages printed per cartridge. I then decided that since our primary printing duties are documents and things in gray-scale, it would be a good idea to get a laser printer. The price of the HP printer with the bells and whistles the sales associate was trying to get me to buy was $250, the Brother laser printer was priced at $150. Even better, the toner cartridges for the Brother were the same price as the HP ink jet cartridges with the added benefit of being able to print three times as many pages as the ink jet cartridges. 

 After I had decided on the laser printer I used my iPhone to see if I could get the laser printer online. I checked eBay and I was able to get the same printer that was in the store for $50 cheaper with free shipping. Besides that $50 savings, the printer online also did not require a sales tax. If you are not as fortunate to have an iPhone or a phone with internet capabilities, you can still compare prices with eBay by texting the product information you are interested in buying to either Cha Cha (242242) or KGB (542542). Depending on your phone carrier, both services are free (check with their websites before your first use).

 By simply writing down the confirmation number and passing up the bells and whistles we were able to save money that day as well as have the ability to save even more using a laser printer than if we were to stay with a ink jet printer that goes through cartridges like it were a kid with candy after Halloween! Keep in mind, you never know when you will need a confirmation number and you can always save money if you are willing to sacrifice.

Josh