If you shop at Wal-Mart, starting saving your receipts. Today marks the first day that Wal-Mart’s new holiday price match program, as reported by CNN Money last week. From November 1st through December 25th, they will give you a gift card for the difference between your price, from your receipt, and the competitor’s price as a gift card.

For the record, Wal-Mart has always price matched local competitors based on a series of specific criteria at the time of purchase:

• Buy one get one free ads with a specified price,
• A listed price that features a specified item,
• Preferred shopping card prices for specific items that are printed in an ad,
• Fresh produce and meat items when the price is offered in the same unit type (lb. for lb., each for each)

They will not match:

• Items that require a separate purchase to get the ad price,
• Items with no actual price that require a purchase to get free product,
• Items that require a purchase to get a competitor’s gift card,
• Buy one get one free with no price listed,
• Going out of business or closeout prices,
• Percentage off,
• Private label price promotions.

What separates this program is that you can now get a refund if you find the price listed cheaper elsewhere. I don’t know how much money people can expect to save but every little bit counts!

I have a confession to make. I buy my son’s Halloween costume each year (one of those costs of raising children that I choose to pay). In fact, we just found a $20 costume for him on eBay. However, I know it’s possible to create your own costumes on the cheap. In fact, my mom still has the costume box that contains all sorts of elements that can be used for creating great Halloween costumes. When you have a large family, like we did growing up, it can help to have a box that has all you need for putting together costumes.

You might be surprised at the way you can put together creative and fun Halloween costumes. Here are some ideas for inexpensive costumes, as part of your frugal Halloween:

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I haven’t mentioned this in quite a while but Bank of America has a great Museums on Us program in which account holders, credit or debit, can get free access to 150 museums on the first weekend of every month this year. It’s not just museums, it includes zoos, science centers, and gardens and you can find the full list on the Museums on Us program website.

If you’re in Maryland, there are only two participating museums and both are in Baltimore. Included are The American Visionary Art Museum (I’ve been there for a wedding, it has some trippy “modern” stuff) and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture.

Get yourself some of the free culture! (this weekend is one of the free weekends)

The easiest way to save a little money while getting almost the exact same thing is to buy a generic version of a brand name product. Whether it’s cereal or prescription drugs, the generic version is almost always cheaper and usually a close enough product that you wouldn’t be able to tell in a blind test. In the case of prescription drugs, the active ingredient is identical by law.

So why do we buy brand name goods? Sometimes we don’t think about it. Sometimes we just like it better. Those are mental hurdles we need to overcome before buying generic will be the first thought in your mind.

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Perhaps you’ve heard this adage: “Use it up, wear it out. Make it do, or do without.” One of the best ways to save money is to take good care of your appliances so that they last longer. The truth is that when one of your appliances fails spectacularly, there really isn’t much you can do to “make it do” — and many of us can’t “do without” the appliances we’ve come to depend on (although you might be surprised what you can live without when you have to). Your next best option is to make sure that your appliances last as long as possible.

The longer your appliances last, the more cost efficient your household is. If your appliances can last a while, and you can avoid costly repairs, you will save in the long run, since you won’t have to replace them.

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One of the ways that many of us waste money is paying for things that we could get at a much lower cost — or even for free. You might be surprised at the number of things that are available at little to no cost to you. If you have an Internet connection, or if you have some creativity, you can save a great deal of money on just about any product or service you can think of.

Before you buy another copy of MS Office, shell out for anti-virus protection, buy a book, or pay ATM fees, consider your options. There might be no need to pay at all.

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Here’s a scary statistic from 2008 – we waste about a pound of food per person per day. Certainly not all of that is traced back to a person actually tossing out a pound of food, much of it is attributed to grocery stores and restaurants, but we all know the feeling of discovering moldy food in the back corner of our refrigerators. It’s a classic case of a money leak… fortunately we discovered one solution that has worked for us.

The best thing we’ve done to combat spoiling food is using a leftover calendar. We write down what we put into our fridge on the calendar, then we use it to help us decide what we’re going to eat. As items are consumed, we cross them off the calendar. This leaves us with essentially a list of all the leftovers in our fridge, which means we don’t need to waste electricity rooting around in the back looking for something that might not even be there.

When we implemented the calendar, it drastically cut down how much food we were throwing out. While we do discover the occasional “bag of cheese” we forgot about (things like that don’t make the calendar), we haven’t discarded anything substantial in terms of food in a long time.

The trouble with magazines is that they aren’t expensive. If you are patient, you can usually find someone selling a subscription for just a few dollars. Even if you buy it direct, it often comes out to much less than a dollar an issue. Magazine publishers are struggling to get their readership numbers up and so many even offer them for free, in the hopes that you subscribe on the renewal date.

That said, spending $10 on something you don’t use is $10 not put towards an emergency fund, debt, savings, or something much more useful. So take a few moments to look around your house and check out the magazines you have. When was the last time you read it?

If it goes directly into the recycling bin, consider calling up the magazine and canceling your subscription. You will usually get a pro-rated refund. You can spend that on some coffee.

(Photo: i-rocksteady)

Over the weekend, I logged into my Verizon FiOS account online to review my service contract and make sure everything was in order. It’s setup on auto-pay, I get bills electronically sent to me, but I still like checking in every once in a while to make sure everything is in order. It’s not crucial that I check in every month, as I would with a bank account or credit card account, but I still like to pop my head in every quarter or so. This time, I did it in conjunction with a letter I received about the rates going up. I don’t remember the exact wording of the letter but the gist was that my internet service was going to be more expensive.

When I did log in, I found that there were completely new plans in place. My existing plan, some form of a “double play” of Internet and television, was still available but the individual “plays” were now different. My usual bill was always somewhere in the range of $160, which paid for internet, television, a DVR and a regular cable box. I opted for the higher level of internet service, 25/25, but otherwise I had the lowest level of cable television that offered High Definition. That, however, wasn’t the interesting part… I learned that my initial two year contract had now expired. I was, in a sense, a cable television and internet free agent.

I normally take this time to compare rates with other providers, which means Comcast, but after reviewing the offers, I found I could get more HD television stations, the same internet, and pay $30 less than what I was paying now. And there was no contract (they did say we could do a contract to lock in the pricing). Save $30 a month to do little more than click a few buttons? I think that’s a winning situation for us.

The lesson here is that whenever you exit a contract, spend a few moments to see what sort of offers are out there. In our case I went with the same provider, only because I knew the alternatives were comparable, and that means no wasting a day and waiting for an installation. With the economy in the shape it is now, you can usually get some great deals on almost anything.

I heard about Freeganism about a year ago. I will admit, the idea of dumpster diving for food and home items when you aren’t starving grossed me out. I just don’t think I will ever be comfortable rooting around trash to find treasures. But when I wrote about that on my own site, I was surprised by how many people have been able to find some awesome stuff in other people’s trash. Apparently, you may be surprised about the great things that you can find by dumpster diving. Here are some tips that have been suggested for finding the best stuff.

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