Month: May 2010

If you’ve been tracking Kita over at PF Journey, she’s asked her readers to help with her used car purchase and has been documenting the journey (ties nicely into the site name) along the way. Hopefully she’s been reading the material over at Car Negotiation Coach to help with tips & tricks.

My own car, the “Red Baron”, has been getting up in age – 10 years to be exact! So I’ve started the process of looking for replacement vehicles. There’s such a vast amount of information out there, you could spend hours filtering through sites. From everything I’ve seen so far, two in particular stand out.

TrueCar

Provides detailed trending information in a variety of formats. The basic report is a histogram of actual sales data for your area. The best feature has to be the seeing the price swings between the: sticker price, factory invoice, average paid, and dealer cost.

Understanding the true costs of a car purchase are critical to negotiating the best possible price. Referred to as the “Cash Flow Shell Game” (scroll to bottom of page), the site provides a graphic worth checking out explaining how dealer’s make their profits.

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Blogging about personal finances, I should be on top of my game and living by my mantras. Usually this is the case – but I was duped by clever marketing techniques ending up in a giant facepalm incident. Oh the embarrassment!

Yesterday the fiance and I had a full-day, assembly-line operation preparing the wedding invitations for the upcoming Big Day. If you’ve been through, or are going through, wedding planning then you know costs can add up quickly and unexpectedly.

We opted for doing our own invitations, because frankly, it’s sole purpose is informational. Simply could not justify the cost for something which would most likely be thrown away. Sorry friends, but I practice the 3 R’s of wedding invitations – Read, Retain, Recycle. Read the invite, retain the information until the event, then toss them afterward. I don’t have a memory box preserving all this paper I receive. *Can you tell I’m a practical engineer or what?

Another benefit of private school, I can pass my swooping cursive as handwriting from days of yore. While my dad did the calligraphy for his own wedding invitations and one of the bridesmaids also has the talent, I couldn’t subject either of them to my totalitarian management techniques. ;)

If you’re looking for more ways to reduce costs, Free From Broke had an interview with Anja Winikka from TheKnot on how to have an affordable wedding.

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Last time we covered how to Slash Your Travel Bill in Half, now we’ll look at another trick to trend-spotting hot spot destinations.

Now, this tip only really applies to tropical destinations since divers and surfers aren’t clamoring to see the interiors of mountainous countries. It’s also limited since there’s a finite amount of places to explore. But that doesn’t mean that new won’t become old and old can’t become new again.

So why did I suggest divers or surfers? Because these two are part of a small group of modern-day explorers. Did you know surfing was apparently imported to SoCal from Hawaii in the early 1900s? If you do either of these, and understand the culture, then you know the only travel concerns you have are:

• Priority #1: great dives/surfs
• Somewhere to repair gear
• Somewhere to sleep
• Somewhere to drink (beer)
• No gimmicky tourists

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The allure of travel appeals to so many people. Experiencing new cultures, places, & foods all lead to lasting memories. But traveling can be costly, even for the most frugal. Getting to where we want to go can require some creative budgeting, and there’s no shortage of travel tips out there. All will save you money, but how much?

Skip a meal – $10/day

Skip on souvenirs – $100/trip

How about saving $650 per person?

One of the most under-rate traveling techniques also returns the best savings.

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