As a fairly frugal person, it wasn’t until recently that I opened an account at Netflix. Maybe it was the monthly fees or the fact that I saw stacks of the same movies week after week on my friends’ coffeetables, but I never really got why people loved Netflix so much.
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BATNA is a well known negotiation acronym that stands for “best alternative to the negotiated agreement.”
If you’re familiar with the concept of opportunity cost, then BATNA will sound very familiar. The idea behind opportunity cost is that the price of something isn’t just the number listed on the tag. There’s an opportunity cost involved and that cost is the price of the next best alternative. Let’s say you have two potential events you can attend this weekend. You can either go to a movie or go to a concert. The opportunity cost of going to the movie is the enjoyment you would’ve experienced if you went to the concert instead. The opportunity cost of going to the concert is the enjoyment you would’ve experienced if you went to the movie instead. So the cost of the movie is not only the ticket but concert enjoyment. Got it?
BATNA is a similar idea. When you’re negotiating anything, it’s important to know the other side’s BATNA. You’re trying to create a win win situation, so you have to create wins for the other side. If you know their next best offer is worth $10, you can offer a $9 solution. They would simply say no and go to their BATNA. You want to know how much their next offer is worth and offer something better.
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There you are, minding your own business watching TV, when there’s a knock at the door. You open the door and discover it’s some kid selling magazine subscriptions, or a person selling the latest product fad (Sham Wow? Snuggies?), and they go into the hard sell pitch trying to get you to buy one. You tell them no but they are persistent and eventually, either because you’re sick of dealing with them or something about the Snuggie intrigues you, you buy it. When the door closes and the salesperson is gone, you’re angry because you just spent money on something you didn’t really want.
Fortunately the FTC has your back with the Cooling Off Rule.
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Each season we are bombarded with advertisements that tell us we need the latest look with all the bells and whistles (i.e. bags and shoes) to go with them. On a recession budget, or any budget for that matter, it’s not always an option to saunter into the mall and pick up the trendy sweater and kitten heels. Yet we all want to look out best and look as fabulous on the outside as we feel on the inside.
Solution? Good old fashioned swapping.
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Two weekends ago, my wife and I took advantage of the warmer temperatures and a break in the clouds to visit a local Maryland winery, Boordy Vineyards. They’re about a forty five minute drive away just north of the Baltimore Beltway and we were looking forward to their March weekend event, “Stew in your Juices,” which was a medley of music, stews, and wine sampling. Each year there’s a “Wine in the Woods” event about a mile down the road and each year we walk out with a case of their wines so we though we’d go to them for a change.
As we were drinking wine and chatting, our minds got onto the topic of how easily one could enjoy wine without spending a bundle. These were some of the ideas we came up with:
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For the longest time, I thought that $25 spent on an Entertainment Book was wasted… until last night. Last night we went to Nichi Bei Kai, a Japanese steakhouse and sushi joint, with friends of ours and enjoyed a little Teppanyaki/hibachi dinner. Teppanyaki, also called hibachi (that’s what we call it), is where they cook the dish at your table and give you a little demonstration of knife skills, flames, and cooking. If you’ve never done the hibachi thing, you should give it a try because it’s a lot of fun and the food isn’t bad either. At the end of the meal, my friends pulled out a coupon they pulled from an Entertainment Book that scored us $18 off our meal!
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I find it awesome how many Internet tools we have nowadays at our disposal. You can do whatever you want online: meet friends, do business, learn, shop, and much more! I will never grow tired of discovering and exploring new opportunities Web 2.0 (and soon-to-be Web 3.0) offers to us. So in this post I am looking at social budget shopping and how we can save money with social media.
Some most useful Web 2.0 features mentioned below include:
As you may or may not know, I’m not a big fan of gift cards but many people are and many people enjoy both giving and receiving gift cards. However, sometimes you get a card that you don’t really shop at often or a card to a store that simply isn’t in your area, what can you do? There are only two options – sell it or trade it. Fortunately there are websites for both!
I’ll first profile some options if you want to sell your gift cards, then some options if you are willing to trade for another gift card. I’ll also give a brief fee breakdown across the various sites to give you a better sense of how much a transaction would cost. Finally, I put in an order of how I would go about cashing out a gift card in order to maximize return and minimize expenses.
To get the most out of your gift cards, other than by using them, I recommend selling them. The two best options for this are to sell them on eBay or sell them on Craigslist because both marketplaces are very big and the demand is very high.
With eBay, you’ll have to contend with seller related fees such as a list fee and a final value fee, but you have access to eBay’s marketplace and you’ll get the highest percentage return for your card. If you don’t have a seller account or you’re unfamiliar with setting up eBay auctions, this is probably not a good option for you because setting up an auction on eBay won’t be easy and buyers may not trust you because you have little feedback.
With Craigslist, listing a card is simple and costs absolutely nothing. The downside is that you likely will want to conduct the transaction in person and for cash. This is because the person buying will want to confirm the value of the card and if you’re in the area, they’ll probably want to meet. Doing the transaction in cash protects both parties.
I didn’t get to check this site out much myself but Gift Card Rescue is another place you can try selling your gifts card to. The difference between card value and sale price doesn’t seem to be as large as some other sites. I haven’t investigated this company so please, seller/buyer beware.
Another option worth pursuing is to ask your friends if they plan on buying something at those stores. If so, you might be able to avoid all these headaches and sell the card directly to them.
If you don’t want to deal with the hassle of selling your cards, you can always trade them on websites that specialize in trading gift cards. They almost always have options for you to directly sell them the card but they take a percentage off the value as a service fee. The two most well known structured gift card trading sites are Card Avenue and Plastic Jungle, I’ve used neither.
Card Avenue is like an eBay for gift card and a swap site all rolled into one. You can list a card for auction or you can trade with other members. Some of the benefits of the site are that you can buy insurance for your gift cards and there is a validation system (Cardassure) to confirm the other trader has the amount they say they do. For auctions or trades, Cardavenue charges a 3.95% on the card value plus a $0.50 closing fee. On auctions, the fee is charged only to the seller. On trades, both sides pay that fee. Payment is through Paypal.
Plastic Jungle is just like Card Avenue except it’s more expensive (10% fee on sales and trades!) but they do offer an option where you can sell your card directly to Plastic Jungle if it’s on their list of QuikCash merchants, which is why I list it. The list isn’t very extensive and the payout is 55-65% of face value but it covers many major brands.
Much like how you can try to sell your cards to your friends, try trading them. You can trade on sites like Craigslist or even try your favorite online bulletin boards. When the minimum cut is around 4.5%, it’s often worth it to do a little leg work to see if you can swap with people you already know.
To give you an idea of how much you’d pay to sell a $100 gift card (assuming it sold for $100), I calculated all the transaction fees by vendor:
Of those sites, which gives you the best ROI for your card? It’s really difficult to say but in general trading will give you the best value because you’re trading gift card value for gift card value. You get less whenever you convert the gift card to cash because you’re going from a more restrictive currency (Home Depot dollars) to a less restrictive currency (anything dollars), so keep that in mind. This is the order I would pursue my options:
Do you have any advice for trading in or selling gift cards? Is there a site you use that is better the ones I listed? If so, please let me know as I think many people are hungry for this type of information right now!
Meg Marco of The Consumerist posted this hilarious clip from Current TV where Sarah Haskins makes mockery of jewelry, jewelry advertising, and the whole concept of shiny carbon and pretty rocks in a wrapped 3 minute, 31 second robin’s eggshell blue box. Just some background, the clip is part of a recurring feature called Target Women on a show called infoMania. Target Women makes fun of something that media or marketing targets towards women. All this is hosted on Current TV, which bills itself as “the world’s leading peer-to-peer news and information network” and it has a ton of great content on it (like great smart content, not just videos of monkeys smelling their fingers and falling off trees).
I need to find myself a woolly mammoth (and a HUGE red bow) because I’m tired of jewelry face. Haha, wonderful video. (This one about Lessons for 2008 is great too)
Want to get hooked on Current? This is what got me hooked. Check out this video where Kaj Larsen and Christof Putzel go to a gun market in Mogadishu, Somalia in search of AK-47s. Yes, you read that all correctly… a gun market… in Mogadishu (site of the Black Hawk Down incident)… to buy an AK-47. If all that wasn’t insane enough, they brought a video camera. Actually, that’s not a bad idea… I should buy an AK-47 for my wife for Christmas!
When I was much younger, I remember going with my parents to department stores like Sear’s and JCPenney (a tradition I would continue with my wife, about a dozen years later) and the one department I never understood was the “layaway department.” When I asked my parents, they didn’t know what it was either because at the time, they paid cash for everything (didn’t have cash? save until you do!). I didn’t learn until many years later that layaway was where you could have the store hold something while you made regular payments, then you could keep it when you fully paid it off. Layaway was tossed into the gutter when credit cards became the norm, but now they’re making a come back.
I think layaway is fantastic. My parents strategy of saving up money before buying something, while prudent, was risky because the item could go out of stock while they were saving. With layaway, you could put a deposit, save money through regular payments, and then be assured the product was yours when you saved up enough money. There are service fees and cancellation fees involved with layaway, so it’s not a free service, but it beats paying 20% interest on a credit card. With the credit crisis and people being saddled with so much credit card debt, I think the return of layaway should be a welcomed thing.
Layaway works different at each store but basically you select your items, bring them to the register, and request that they be put on layaway. You often have to put down a deposit (some dollar amount or a percentage of the total) and pay a non-refundable service fee. Layaway isn’t indefinite and isn’t available for all products at a store. They often exclude certain hot items (electronics) or things that are not easily layaway-able (like food, plants). Finally, there is often a time limit on how long you can put things on layaway.
It sounds like a lot of rules but it isn’t, check out Sears’ Layaway policy (it’s only 2 pages):
See? Not too tricky but it’s also not free, I suppose you have to pay for the right to store the item so it’s not entirely unfair.
Have you bought anything on layaway?
(Photo: notramstolimestreet)
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