Including links to more than 80 unusual and unusually thrifty gift ideas, along with money lessons from “The Simpsons” and money lessons for irresponsible 20-somethings, smart financial moves to make for the holidays and dumb financial moves that’ll make you fat.
electronics
One Week After Black Friday, More Black Friday
It’s the shopping event that never seems to end, and that you just can’t get away from—even though it’s already over. It’s Black Friday, the day that celebrates unadulterated consumerism, fittingly with a name straight from a slasher horror film. This weekend at the stores, you can expect plenty of Black Friday-type door busters and …
Black Friday by the Numbers
Here’s a roundup of resources for the best deals, along with some perspective, related to the monster shopping day that is Black Friday.
Beware Bad Return Polices: Which Vendors Don’t Allow Returns on Big TVs? Or Only Allow Returns Within 14 Days?
And which store charges a restocking fee of up to 25% of the item’s purchase price if you decide to return it?
20 Best Black Friday Deals: Why You Might Want to Get Up Early and Fight the Crowds
With one week before Black Friday, and with the Black Friday ads from most retailers leaked to the media, the time seems ripe to put together your list of must-gets, sharpen your elbows to fight off other shoppers, and plot your trip to the mall.
Cheapskate Wisdom … About Gadgets Bought for Bragging Rights
“The bizarre obsession with moderately priced vanity gadgets is part of a living-standard masquerade at the twilight of middle-class prosperity. It doesn’t matter if the electronic bling works well or lasts long. Its value is not utility — it is the ability to feign class equality in a country of crushing stratification and rising poverty.”
Watch the New ‘Story of Stuff’: ‘The Story of Electronics’
Today’s electronics are cheap to buy, relatively speaking. But they break quickly. They’re expensive if not impossible to fix. Even when they don’t break, they seem outdated soon after they’re out of that annoying, clamshell, sealed-tight packaging. The result is that consumers often feel like they need a new laptop, TV, or digital …
223 Tips: Snag Freebies, Save Money, Salvage Food About to Spoil, Get Your Adult Kid Out of the House, and More
This week’s links cover topics ranging from school fundraisers that aren’t worth your time (and don’t raise much money), to resources for finding the best Black Friday deals, to effective, low-effort, low-cost ways to clean the bathroom.
It’s a Deal: Free Phones on Fridays at Best Buy
Every Friday in October (starting today), Best Buy hosts Free Phones Fridays, when the retailer offers four different phones at no upfront cost. The catch? You have to sign a two-year service contract, but that’s a fairly typical requirement when you get a subsidized phone.
Broadband: The Exception to the Rule that Technology Gets Cheaper the Longer It’s Around
Call it the early adopter penalty: New technology is introduced at high prices, which drop rapidly as the goods spread from an exclusive to mass audience, become cheaper to produce, and eventually go completely mainstream. This price drop has reliably occurred to everything from portable DVD players to hi-def TVs, from iPods to iPhones …
Portrait of Today’s Schizophrenic Consumer
The Great Recession has made consumers reconsider purchases that were once made without much thought. Perhaps, the new thinking goes, you don’t need a new wardrobe every season or a new refrigerator every two years. Perhaps you should only make these sorts of purchases when they are truly necessary. But, speaking of necessities, don’t …
Discount Merchandise Only: 32 Websites and Stores Where You’ll Never Pay Full Price
Why pay retail when you don’t have to? Whenever I’m shopping for something I need—and that’s pretty much the only time I go shopping, which is really more like hunting—I’ll swing by a store’s clearance section to see if something there will do the trick. Utilizing the resources listed below is the equivalent of taking a quick look in …
