JD asked his readers today for energy conservation tips after a reader in Juneau wrote in about electricity prices in his state increasing from 11 cents a kilowatt hour to 50 cents a kilowatt hour. Over at the BFP household, we do quite a bit of energy conservation, many of which were documented in a guest by Fred from One Project Closer titled 10 Homeowner Secrets That Save You Money Now!. However, if energy prices were to increase five-fold, I think we need to think out of the box and turn to more drastic measures. That measure… is housepooling.

Simply take the idea of carpooling, where you share a commute to and from work, and extend it to living in the home. Once a week, invite a few friends over for dinner, drinks, board games, and then a slumber party. It allows multiple households to live under one roof, one energy bill for one night. Since the idea would be for everyone to housepool, your friends would reciprocate and you’d get several nights “energy-cost free.” It would cost a little more than usual to cook and entertain, but I suspect the increase would be minimal and you might even find that the heating bill going down with more people milling about your home.

The reader estimated that their new energy bill would be around $750, which is about $25 a day for heating alone. Put in a few housepooling days and you can cut maybe a hundred bucks or two off the cost of your bill, plus you get some time with your friends and have a good old fashioned slumber party!

What do you all think? Feasible when energy prices are 50 cents a kilowatt? Am I off my rocker?

Tomorrow is Earth Day, so why not start off the week with an environmental friendly post? When most people think of being green, their brains immediately jump to organic foods and recycling. Organic foods can be expensive, recycling can be a pain, and many come to the same conclusion as famed philosopher Kermit The Frog, who once sang, “It’s not easy bein’ green.” In all fairness, what Kermit was singing about was entirely different but it perfectly sums up what many people think of environmentally conscious living - it’s not easy. That’s because many focus on the difficult and expensive aspects of going green, because we commonly associate difficulty and expense with impact, rather than the relatively easy things we can do that can still make a difference. In fact, many of the easy things can save the Earth and a few dollars (and even a few pounds!).

Reuse Plastic Containers

Most people think recycle, recycle, recycle - but remember the mantra is actually reduce, reuse, recycle. Reusing plastic containers, when it’s safe to do so, is a great way to reduce the amount of plastic we consume as a whole. When we order take-out food from the local Indian restaurant, our meals come in plastic containers we can then turn into lunch boxes. While it’s great to also recycle, some municipalities don’t take certain types of plastic so reusing is the only option, besides throwing them away. Reusing plastic containers helps your wallet because you don’t have to buy these containers yourself! Plus, I always get the feeling that those Glad or Tupperware containers are overpriced anyway.

No More Bottled Water

I understand it’s convenient, I understand it’s healthy, and I understand you think your tap water tastes like crap. But every single year 29283094293 plastic bottles are thrown out and the poor penguins are choking on them. If you think my random number is an exaggeration, it’s actually not too far off because the Clean Air Council estimates that Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour (that’s 21,900,000,000 a year). Can you imagine that? No, I can’t either.

Want a good reason for your wallet? The cost of tap water, even if you add in a filter, is microscopic compared to the cost of bottled water. Buy a reusable water bottle, a filter, and fill your own each day and you can save yourself some serious money. If you buy a $1 bottle of water each day, that’s $365 a year you can spend on anything else. And you don’t contribute to this ridiculous level of wastefulness.

No Prepackaged or Premade Food

We love convenience right? We love throwing a Healthy Choice or Stouffer’s freezer/TV dinner into the microwave and eating it for our lunch or dinner. The only problem is that you introduce a paper box and a likely non-recycleable plastic container into the trash. Plus, to be honest, it’s really really not good for you. The amount of sodium in a typical meal like that, even if you can get it for a buck when it’s on sale, is ridiculous. If you consume that much sodium on a regular basis, it’ll have significant negative effects on your body (high blood pressure, heart disease) which will definitely impact your wallet in medical costs down the road. Instead of going with the prepackaged or premade foods, check out allrecipes.com and try making your own meals. You’ll find them more fulfilling (who eats only one of those meals anyway?), healthier, and perhaps even cheaper.

Carpool

You can’t have a list about being green and saving green if you didn’t throw in carpooling. The secret to cutting your gasoline bill by 20% is to carpool once a week. Brilliant right? That’s because saving on gasoline is not difficult, people just don’t want to be inconvenienced and the best way to do that is to strategically pick the day you’re going to carpool. By consuming less fuel, you contribute less in greenhouse gases, reduce the demand for petrol, and you save yourself some money each time you hop in a rideshare. Considering how many people complain about fuel prices, it’s amazing there aren’t more carpoolers.

Eat Less Red Meat

How could I, editor of Grill Maestro and lover of red meat, possible endorse the idea that we eat less red meat? I do this because I read in a recent Ode magazine article that stated a single cow produces as much as 132 gallons of methane a day! The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization calculated that the livestock industry accounts for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, compared to 13.5% produced by all of the world’s transportation. That’s downright amazing. And meat is hardly cheap too, chicken on sale is $1.99 around us and beef is far more expensive (obviously depending on the cut). I don’t think I’d ever go vegetarian, ever, but consuming less red meat is something we’ve done accidentally given the rise in prices and changing food preferences.

Bag Your Lunch

Bagging your lunch is better for the environment because you don’t need to drive somewhere to eat and you don’t have all the waste associated with the restaurant. For your wallet, saving yourself that $6-$10 lunch each day is going to translate very nicely to your bottom line and you’ll probably be eating healthier if you cook the food yourself. There’s a reason why so many restaurants are fighting new regulations regarding nutritional information - their food is terrible for you. Super Size Me may have been a gross exaggeration but the point is still clear, fast food restaurants are horrible for you and the fact that they don’t want to list nutritional information on the menu is proof positive they know it too. So, save yourself a few dollars, save yourself the gas, and save your arteries!

Buy Stuff Online

I once gave 8 reasons I do my shopping online and reason #5 was that online shopping meant less driving. Less driving, of course, means less fuel. Now, the trade-off here is that companies will have to ship you the packages, which will mean more driving on their part. I believe that since they are shipping packages anyway and are on optimized schedules and driving routes, their consumption, after you factor in how they won’t need to ship that product to their stores, will be less than yours. I think there will never be a provable answer to this but I’m confident that shopping online is better for the environment.

There you go, seven easy ways you can be green and save green - just try one this week and see how easy is and good it feels!

Cut out the morning coffee at Starbucks!

Bring a bag lunch!

Stop drinking alcoholic beverages!

If you’ve been trying to find areas to cut back on your budget, those are likely one of the first three things you’ll hear suggested, right? The Latte Factor! It’s horrible that you’re wasting money on coffee you can brew at home! It’s a travesty! Okay, except you don’t have a coffee maker at home, have hardly any time in the morning to brew it, and if you don’t have it… oh boy, your office better watch out because you’ll be one cranky man/woman/beast. And bag lunch? Forget it, you don’t have time to make the lunch, let alone lug it to work, stuff it in the fridge and then eat it alone at your desk later! Alcoholic beverages? That’s the high point in the day, you can’t take that away! Plus, people who go to happy hours earn more… and you want to make more money right? Of course!

Of course, all that was tongue in cheek but the “excuses” are legitimate. It’s difficult to restructure large parts of your day just to save a few dollars but sometimes it’s important to do so. So, rather than make wholesale changes that you’re likely going to abandon within a few weeks, if you can even get started, try doing it incrementally.

Brew your own coffee on Friday. Friday is usually the laxest of all days and many people come in later than their usual start time. Take advantage of this by brewing your own coffee. If you don’t have a coffeemaker, you can buy one for around $20 and a hundred pack of filters for around $4. Then, all it takes is some coffee and you’re on your way to brewing your own coffee. If you really want to be efficient, set it all up the night before and set it to brew before you wake up. You can wake up to the wonderful smell of brewing coffee just like in the commercials! So just brew it on Fridays and you can hit Seattle’s Best Coffee the other four days. If you can save yourself the $3 on Friday coffee habit, that’s $150 a year in savings a year.

Resolve to bring in lunch on Monday. You have all weekend to pack, and cook it if you need to, yourself a nice meal so you can’t complain you have no time at night because you’ll have all day. Monday is also the busiest of work days as everyone catches up from the weekend so you can take advantage by eating at your desk and getting more work done. By cutting out one day of $7 lunches and replacing them with $2 lunches, you can save yourself close to $250 a year. You can get something really nice for $250 a year (or save it!) just by eating lunch on Mondays.

Bag lunch on Monday, brew coffee on Friday - get $400 a year that you can use for whatever you want. As for cutting out alcohol, sorry but you’re on your own on that one.

(Photo by Amy March)

A few years ago, with my last car, I did a little calculation to help determine the “cost per mile.” I was doing quite a bit of driving back and forth from Baltimore to Pittsburgh, then Baltimore to New Jersey, to visit my girlfriend (now by wife, so I suppose it was worth it :)) and so this number was important for me to know. I also found that it helped make other decisions in my life easier because it gave me a very tangible cost associated with driving somewhere, such as to the gas station across town instead of the gas station on my route home.

The Calculation

The cost per mile can be broken up into three major categories and one catch-all:

• Gas: Clearly the dominant value in the calculation, gasoline is something that has to be based on actual costs rather than estimated costs. You can’t take the cost of gasoline, the EPA value for your car’s mileage, and figure out based on that. Ignoring the inaccuracy of EPA values, though they’ve made a push to make them more accurate, your car is probably not the standard car. You have crap in your trunk, your tires are probably not inflated perfectly every single drive, and your maintenance isn’t going to be perfect (get that 30,000 mile checkup exactly at 30,000 miles?). So, keep a log for five fill-ups, reset your B trip odometer, and calculate your gas cost per mile that way.
• Insurance: This value is easy, simply take your premium and divide by the number of miles you drive in a given year. The “rule of thumb” is around 15,000 miles a year, but if you have an especially long commute then you can increase that. You can always just throw in a guesstimate because what you use as your miles driven per year isn’t going to drastically affect this number. For example, if you pay $2,000 a year and you drive 15,000 miles, that’s 13.3 cents a mile. At 20,000 miles a year, it’s 10 cents a mile. Sure the difference is 33% but you’ll ultimately use this value for trips in the tens or hundreds of miles… meaning a difference of only 30 cents - $3.
• Tires: Depending on how expensive your tires are, you might want to go through with this calculation or just consider it part of the noise. I know tires say they can last 30,000 miles, but I believe most of my tires run only maybe 20,000 miles. Either way, this math should be pretty simple. Divide the cost of the tires by the mileage and add it to the running total you’ve been using.
• Everything Else: I always throw in an extra 3-5 cents to cover everything else, from windshield wiper blades to routine maintenance to oil changes. I figure that a $20 oil change put across 3,000 miles (I actually changed my own oil with synthetic but do it once every 10,000 miles) is small enough to be considered noise in the equation so I use the 3-5 cents catch-all value.

So, what’s the final number? The IRS business mileage deduction is 50.5 cents a mile, how close was your value to this one? When I did this calculation a few years ago, I found my value was close to the mileage deduction back then (it was 40-something cents) but that was before the spike in fuel prices. For comparison’s sake, my value for gasoline back then was 7 cents a mile based on a car that was running around ~32 miles to the gallon (Acura Integra and I was doing a significant amount of highway driving).

How do you use this number? Let’s say it’s 280 miles between my home in Maryland and my parent’s in New York. The tolls between Maryland and New York, I believe, are around $60 a round trip. Given the cost of fuel alone (7 cents a mile), the cost of the trip is over $100 compared to the cost of a Southwest flight that can be bought for $39 a round trip. So, driving alone would cost over a hundred dollars and nearly 5 hours - flying would cost ~$100 and 3 hours… it’s a no brainer and the math is facilitated by knowing the cost per mile.

Finally, your car’s cost per mile is only part of the story. In my drives to Pittsburgh or to New Jersey, tolls played an important role and often threw the entire equation out of whack. Back then, the toll for the Pennsylvania Turnpike was around $8 a round trip and nearly $50 a round trip to New Jersey. Another factor was time. I could take a $15 Chinatown bus from Baltimore to Grand Central in NYC, then jump on an Amtrak train out to New Jersey… but it would take me like 15 hours to make the trip and time is money! (and back then, that was time I could spend with my beautiful soon-to-be wife, and yes she reads this blog)

(Photo by an0nym0usmuse)

This guest post comes courtesy of Fred at One Project Closer, a home improvement blog written by one of my friends. As a sign of how good of a friend he is, he still made to my wedding despite his basement being flooded by a burst water heater. And until I read his post, I had no idea he was late!

With rising energy prices, fear of a recession, and the stock market erasing the gains of the last six months, you’re probably looking to save wherever you can right? Well, today I have the opportunity to share ten fantastic tips you can use, many with hardly any up front investment whatsoever, right this very second to save yourself some money.

1. Insulate Your Hot Water Heater ($20.00 investment). Unless you have a newer tankless model, your hot water heater has a large reservoir of water it keeps constantly heated. Traditional hot water heaters are constructed with a relatively small layer of insulation between the inner water reservoir and the outer metal shell, requiring the heater to run frequently to keep the water hot. Manufactures under-insulate hot water heaters to keep the units small enough to fit into tight spaces. For about $20.00, you can find a hot water heater insulation wrap at your local home improvement big box. Upon installation, a typical homeowner will save between $3.00-5.00/month on energy costs.

2. Turn Down Your Hot Water Heater Temperature ($0 investment). Most people are very conscious of raising/lowering the thermostat on their central AC/heating system, but haven’t even considered lowering the temperature on their hot water heater. Your hot water heater should always be set to the lowest temperature that provides your household the hot water you need. Lowering the water temperature from 125 deg. to 115 deg. saves a typical homeowner about $3.00-$10.00.

3. Don’t Let the Water Run While You Wash Dishes ($0 investment). It sounds silly, doesn’t it? But the reality is that nearly all of the cost of running the water is in heating the water. Leaving the water running for 30 minutes could cost you as much as $3. Instead, use your dishwasher (just don’t use the built drying heater or a water heating option like sanitize rinse). Dishwashers use less than half of the water to perform the same task. Or, better yet, fill your sink basin and wash dishes with the water turned off. That method uses less than a quarter of the water of the first method.

4. Don’t Use Your Fireplace on Extremely Cold Nights ($0 investment). Traditional wood fireplaces require an open flu to allow smoke to escape. The air that’s leaving the house with the smoke has to be replaced with air from somewhere else. In most traditional setups, replacement air comes back into the house through pores open to the outside (outlets, leaky windows and doors, attic accesses, etc). On very cold nights, the cold replacement air coming into the house more than offsets any heat gained from the fire itself. As a result, using a fireplace on a cold night could cost $1.00-$3.00 in energy just to replace the lost heat.

5. Caulk Your Attic Access Door ($3.00 investment). Gaps in attic access doors allow heat to escape from the upstairs of your house. Since you don’t go up into the attic much anyway, caulk the rim of the door to prevent your energy from floating away. Estimated savings: $2.00-4.00 / month.

6. Replace Your Light Bulbs with Energy Efficient Models ($20.00-80.00 investment). Compact Fluorescent (CFL) technology has come a long way in the last 5 years. More than ever, CFLs look and behave just like incandescents. These bulbs use about 23% of the energy of their incandescent counterparts and last about 20 times longer. One 100-watt equivalent CFL can save a homeowner more than $60.00 over the course of its life. You shouldn’t wait for your incandescents to burn out either. Every day an incandescent burns, it wastes nearly 80% of the energy it uses. Since you’ll have to replace it when it burns out anyway, you should make the switch today.

7. Consider Replacing Your Refrigerator ($700-1000 investment). Refrigerators that are more than 10 years old use about 50% more energy than their modern counterparts. The older your model, the more inefficient it is. For models that are more than 20 years old, a homeowner can expect to recover the investment in as little as 2.5 years. If you can find a newer model on Craigslist or in the classifieds, you might realize a recovery period of as little as 1 year.

8. Change the Filter on your HVAC every 3-6 months ($5 investment). HVAC filters remove dust and allergens from your house as your HVAC circulates air for heating/cooling. These filters get dirty, eventually restricting air flow. When this happens, your furnace has to work harder to achieve the same temperature change - wasting energy. Changing the filter takes only minutes. If you haven’t changed your filter for more than a year, you can expect a ~$5.00/month savings in months where you run your HVAC the most.

9. Install (and use) a Programmable Thermostat ($50-$100 investment). Programmable thermostats allow you to adjust the temperature in your home based on the time of day, and day of the week. If no one is home during the day, it simply doesn’t make sense to keep the house at the same temperature. Typical homeowners can expect to see $10.00-$40.00 / month savings after installing these nifty little devices. Remember that a programmable thermostat will only save money if it’s programming features are actually used. So, get a programmable thermostat that’s easy to learn.

10. Set Your PC to Auto-hibernate ($0 investment). A computer, monitor, and printer can easily draw 300 watts. With electricity as high as $0.15/KWh, this equates to more than $1.00/day. If you only use your computer for 2 hours a day, setting the system to auto-hibernate (instead of leaving it on) saves as much as $25.00/month.

Today, on my way into work, I was listening to some morning radio show talk about how 47% of British men give up six months of sex for a 50″ plasma television. It sounds ridiculous (that’s why they did the study in the first place!) but the interesting part is what followed. Approximately 25% would give up smoking and 25% would give up chocolate for the 50″ plasma television. That’s when one of the hosts said that if you gave up smoking for six months you could buy the television.

So why not reward yourself for frugal behavior? If you’re a smoker and you want a new 50″ plasma television, why not give yourself an added incentive to quit? If you smoke one pack a day at around $5/pack (my guesstimate), it would take 268 days to save up the $1,339.98 for a Samsung HPT5064 50″ Plasma HDTV. That’s a little under nine months at $5 a day. If cigarettes are more expensive in your area or if you’re a heavier smoker, you can save up even faster (and that’s not even taking into account all the positive health benefits you get!).

Don’t smoke? Don’t want a 50″ plasma television? Replace smoking with another dirty little secret habit (mocha lattes?) and replace a plasma television with something you’ve always wanted (trip to Europe?). Having a goal always helps you be frugal.

A few weeks ago we booked our tickets to Hawaii, where we will be spending our honeymoon, and we had a quick little $60 decision to make. On the way back, we have the option of two flights:

• $390: Departure at 11:50pm, arrive at 6:30pm, or,
• $330: Departure at 10:50pm, arrive at 7:30pm.

The two flights were similar otherwise (the first had one extra stop, but you never deplaned and second flight had a longer layover) so the difference was in just the flight time and departure times. The first flight was $60 more expensive but we were able to stay in Hawaii an additional hour and we arrived at home an hour earlier. So, which flight did we choose?

We chose the more expensive flight. This was probably one of the first times in which I’ve chosen convenience over cost when the two choices were so similar. In this particular case, there were reasons to pick the more expensive flight outside of the characteristics:

• Landing at 6:30pm: We will be tired from our trip and having an extra hour of “home” time before going back to work the next day will probably help tremendously.
• Fewer hours total: This was the only real trade off, paying $30 an hour to save that travel time really cuts down on fatigue.
• Later departure: By leaving at around midnight Hawaii time, it lets us enjoy the full final day in Hawaii. It also let us have a nice leisurely dinner prior to our departure. If we were to leave at 10:50pm, we’d feel compelled to arrive at the airport by at lets 9:30pm, which means we’d have to leave our dinner by 9 (depending on how far away it was). If we plan on having a nice dinner, that means we have to eat by 7… so for a little extra we can take our time and have more breathing room.

How do you go about deciding whether to take the cheaper option or the more convenient option?

A trimmable expense is an expense that fulfills a want rather than a need. Buying fruits and vegetables is not a trimmable, buying chocolate covered fruits is a trimmable. While you could try to go through all of you expenses and try to eliminate everything that is discretionary, you may find yourself enjoying life less and less. Trimmables, while fulfilling wants and not “required,” are there to help you live life and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

So, rather than cutting out some of your trimmables, consider reducing your trimmables in terms of quantity or frequency. Spa treatments are sometimes seen as frivolous but if they are valuable in reducing stress, then cutting them out entirely may not be a smart move in the long run. If you go every week, consider visiting every other week. If you go every other week, consider going every three weeks. Don’t cut it out entirely, reduce it so that you can save a little but not lose the recuperative effects.

Some trimmables you might want to reduce with the intent of eliminating them all together. Don’t make that decision now. Just reduce it a little and see if you lose any of its benefits. You may find that the less frequent visits help you look forward to them. You may find that you still get all the recuperative effects and that those bi-monthly visits were unnecessary. You may find that your sweet spot is really at once a month, rather than twice a month. So, you could be enhancing the experience while saving your money.

Also, you could discover that you need to go every two weeks - that’s fine. Rather than thinking you need it twice a week, you now know you need to go because you’ve tried once every three weeks or once a month and it didn’t work. Simply give yourself the opportunity to reduce it a little so you know for sure.

Finally, reducing something is far easier than eliminating it. Quitting cold turkey is practically impossible and impractical as a means of quitting something, reduce it until you hardly miss it. If you love that Starbucks and need it every morning, try cutting it out of your day once a week and replace with it regular coffee or with some tea. You may find that Starbucks’ hold isn’t as firm as you once thought! Or you may find that you like tea more than coffee, you never know until you try.

Reduce something today!

Zecco offers 10 free trades a month. Buffets offer all you can eat, which means you can get as much as you want for no additional cost. Casinos offer you all sorts of free “comps” to get you to come back into their casino. All this stuff is free, but it doesn’t meant that you should take advantage of it!

With Zecco, free trades sound great in principle because free is always good but they’re actually bad for most of us. The prevailing attitude, to which I subscribe to, is that you should be buying and holding, not actively trading a lot. If you’re a day trader with your finger on the pulse on the market, perhaps free trades is right for you. However, if you’re a “check your stocks at work for a few minutes each day” type of person, then ten trades a month is too much and feeling compelled to use them is dangerous. Buying and holding is preferable because you let time smooth out the volatility in the market, you let time lower your tax liability, and you let time temper your emotions so you don’t make rash decisions. Free trades are great, as long as you don’t feel compelled to use them.

How about buffets and their great all you can eat nature? For a while I would feel stuffed after going to buffets because I felt compelled to “eat my money’s worth” and eat as much as I could. If I paid one flat price and could eat as much as I could, I would try to eat as much as I could! Except that’s horrible! I’d feel bloated, then tired, then lazy the rest of the day… all because I felt compelled to take advantage of the free offer. Buffets are great, as long as you don’t feel compelled to actually eat all you can eat.

Lastly, casinos give you complimentary items just to get you to come back. They’ve done they math, they realize that every person they get into the casino will earn them a certain number of dollars. If they can get you back for the cost of a breakfast, that’s a win-win for both sides. You get the breakfast, they get the business, everyone wins… except for you because you probably will lose more than the cost of the breakfast right? So, comps are great, as long as you recognize what they’re trying to do (I can’t possibly say, don’t gamble because that’s how you got the comps in the first place!)

So… next time you see something advertised as FREE, think about it for a second. It might be no cost financially at the moment, but is it really the right decision?

One of the biggest scams in education, besides shelling out thirty grand a year for a private university (just kidding Mom and Dad!), is the college bookstore. They sell textbooks at full price and then, at the end of the year, offer to buy back that textbook at a fraction of the price. Buy a copy of Machine Learning, new, for $153.44 and then they’ll offer to buy it back for around $20 at the end of the semester! It’s a racket!

What you should do instead is buy a used copy of Machine Learning for a 79.99 and tell the university bookstore to go screw themselves and their monstrous profit margins.

Some people have reservations about buying textbooks online because they don’t like the idea of buying something sight unseen. I share those reservations if the item is something that’s thousands of dollars (I did buy two cars on eBay, so maybe I don’t share it quite so much) but we’re talking a savings of 50% on something as dull as a textbook. However, given those reservations, here are a few tips I have for buying textbooks online.

1. Read seller’s feedback - There are a number of sellers who are businesses selling used textbooks, one example is “ecampus_com” on Amazon who has over 69,568 ratings (86% positive). Go with these larger sellers (some are often stores or other websites using the Amazon Marketplace to unload inventory. I find that feedback through Amazon’s system is much more accurate than on Ebay because the buyers aren’t afraid of retaliation if the transaction goes sour (eBay recently changed this but the historical records still remain under the old system).
2. Use a reputable site with a strong mediation program - If the book doesn’t come, you want to make sure the website handles the problem. I’ve had people on Amazon not ship a book. I reported that the book never arrived, received a refund, and bought another one from someone else. It’s harder to do that on Ebay, Amazon requires only a simple explanation and a few mouse clicks. (which I suppose is bad for sellers, but whatever)
3. Buy a book at the bookstore, return it when the cheaper one arrives - If your bookstore has a liberal return policy, allowing you to keep the book for a few weeks, take advantage of it. Most stores offer liberal return periods because many students don’t drop a class until they’ve tanked the first test, bookstores are very understanding in this way.
4. Use a credit card - Instead of a debit card for your online transaction, use a credit card. If you’re balance is close to $0, having a textbook’s charge sitting in limbo limits your financial flexibility. Don’t put yourself in that situation.
5. At least buy from an online bookstore - While Machine Learning is an awful example because Amazon offers no discount on the retail price, at least look online to see if their prices are cheaper. Use resources like AddAll, a textbook search engine, to find the best price.
6. Don’t buy it online, buy it from another student - Rather than buy the textbook from a website, hit up your school’s bulletin boards or For Sale message boards to see if someone is selling that book on the cheap. You can often save on shipping charges and even get yourself a better deal. Remember, the seller is trying to get more than $20 for the book and you’re trying to pay less than $200, a happy medium can be found somewhere in there.

There you go, my tips for buying textbooks (or any book) online.

(Photo by larissa72350)