Frugal Framnett

Circuit City announced it is liquidating its inventory and shutting down its retail operations.

What should you do?
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One of the frustrations I have is the mail-in rebate, the worst part of it, I keep falling for it.

My problem is organization and my nature. I buy something, I then place the receipts in my wallet or in the bag, but before I am halfway home I have completely forgotten about the receipts & the rebate. Then a number of times in the near future I am bound to recall the rebates but then something else is going on and I forget it then too.

A couple of weeks go by and I am going through my wallet and I note some old receipts, I figure whatever it is I bought works so what do I do with the receipt? I throw it away, after all, I am not going to return it. Then a few days later I sit down to do the rebate & where is my receipt? If not that, then the rebate has expired.

The lesson is do not let mail in rebates influence you, instant rebates are okay, but I have never seen them outside of a grocery store.

Florence King writer for National Review Magazine wrote on this (and other things) see below the fold for her take on rebates!
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I have noticed something in about the last year or so. The rate at which we see going out of business sales seems to be higher. I guess some of you will say it is obvious, but is it? I think some of it has to do with the fact Lorie and I are looking for such buying opportunities.

Off of the top of my head in the last year our area has seen four home furnishing, one home-item store, and one clothing store. I can’t say much for the furnishing stores except they were horribly over-priced to be begin with only in their last days were their prices reasonable and we purchased a piece from one of them.

I would advise people not to snap at going out of business sales purchases unless you know what the item is worth and then you can do so intelligently. Another strategy that you may elect to employ is waiting, but of course the risk is others will buy up the remaining stock.

Watch your cell phone bills. I was about to say, know what your bill should be and if the bill is not close review your bill. However, that really is not good enough. as there may be ripoffs lurking in the statistical noise of your bill.

What I mean is if you expect your bill to be around (for instance) $80.00 per month is an $82.37 bill going to make you upset? Probably not, you will probably dismiss it and pay it. It is minor and since I get charged per international text message (which I do send and receive) I can easily explain any deviation from our base bill as arising from text messaging.

However, there are those out there who take advantage of you not getting upset when the cell phone bill is close to the base. I have seen this a number of times on our phone bills.

My wife somehow got on some text message list. Ever other week or so they would send a text message out and bill us $5.95 or something like that for the text message. The message would include instructions to get off the list (reply with “stop” in the subject) that never worked. This went on for a couple of months and I was reviewing my bill and I saw these charges and investigation showed this is a common practice. Somehow they get your number and start sending you text messages and bill you for each message sent. The charges are right at the level they figure many will disregard the minor increase in their bill.

I phoned our cell phone service to complain and not only did the make the text messages stop, they also credited us with the previous month’s charges. I did not ask for anything beyond the previous month charging the older charges to my experience account.

Moral of the story weed (yeah they are hard to piece together) through your cell phone bills and study the charges.

1. How much are they charging you for?
2. What are they charging you for?
3. Is it a charge for a service you request or agreed to?

Here I will post about rip offs & scams I have encountered or those things I think to be rip offs and scams.

I am thinking about dividing this category into rip offs and into scams. Rip offs being just this side of legal and scams being illegal (or should be illegal) ways people try to con you out of your money.