The Daily Deal for Saturday, October 11, 2008

It's been coooolld here in Portland over the past few days, and I'm getting ready to start outfitting my family for rainy fall and winter bike rides. I am looking for a jacket with a nice high collar and a bright, but snug profile. Bingo! The Burton girls' 'System' jacket is just what I need. And at a daily deal price too, down from the original $169.95 to only $67.98. It's a girls' jacket, but the sizes available are large and extra-large, ideal for a smallish woman.

It's a boarder jacket, so if I ever decide to hit the slopes, I'll be stylish and snug there too. The closest comparable jacket, the Element, ranges from the low $70s up to $89.97 at other online retailers; no one else seems to carry the System, which is a 2006 style (and in my opinion, way cuter than this year's fashion).

The Daily Deal for Saturday, October 4, 2008

My sweet husband has a problem with phones. Specifically, he loses them. He's lost his Blackberry and I've been tiring of paying the monthly fee for his account on the 'friends and family' plan, without having the benefit of being able to actually CALL HIM.

Perhaps we can remedy that without having to pay the rather large cost AT&T would charge us for replacing his equipment in less than 22 months. J&R.com has the refurbished Blackberry 7100 on its Weekend Sale for only $99.99; $17 less than Amazon.com's deal and $80 less than the regular discounted price (the list price is $349.99, but we all know no one pays retail for these things). The phone is unlocked, so you can use it on any cellular plan. This Blackberry utilizes the "SureType" keypad; I haven't used it but, according to RIM, it's the best evah.

One of the quickest ways to throw yourself into financial turmoil, is to seal a deal with a handshake. I'm not implying that handshakes are bad, I'm just insisting that they need to be backed with a bona fide contract. Even when conducting business with friends, family, or trusted coworkers, a great deal of discomfort and confusion can be avoided by spelling out the rules of a deal and by putting your signatures to it. The bigger the deal is, the more critical a contract is. When dealing with large amounts of money, a professional lawyer should be consulted also.

I had a situation once, which involved having a coworker install new wood siding on my garage. I thought it would be a fairly simple arrangement. We agreed on a price, and a completion date. He was to be paid when the job was finished. The problem arose when I came home one day to see the new siding on my garage. What had happened was that the garage wasn't level, and rather than leveling the siding with the environment, my carpenter friend applied the siding in accordance with the structural lines of the garage. I'm not kidding when I say that the garage looked like a ship in the process of sinking.

Don't miss the rest of our series on 15 Ways to Ruin Your Financial Future!

Because we had simply agreed to a siding installation, my friend insisted that he had fulfilled his part of the bargain. I bit down hard on my pride and cut him a check, then I stripped the siding off of the garage and reinstalled it myself. In retrospect, a contract would have specified that the work would be done correctly and in a "workmanlike manner." I have not made any business agreements without signed, written terms, since that one hard earned lesson.

As a notorious deal hound I was excited to find out about a new service which makes use of Pricegrabber.com's comparison and searching abilities to provide users with email alerts when an item drops below a certain price. Its similar to having a limit order on a specific stock, except in this case, you have to make the purchase yourself. DealAlerter.com goes beyond traditional deal hunting which for example focuses on finding the cheapest LCD TV over 40 inches with 3 HDMI ports and helps you find the best price on a specific TV.

By letting me first select a specific item based on user reviews and brand experiences, DealAlerter helps find the best item at the best price! DealAlerter also recognizes that not every store on the Internet has stellar quality and customer service, allowing you to choose what stores to include in the alert. You can further limit your price alert by quality to include brand new items or to look only for refurbs, which often provide an excellent quality at a much lower price. Unfortunately as good as the Deal Alerter system is it won't catch deals which revolve around coupons such as the current 12% off coupon for BestBuy.

DealAlerter looks like it will free up a lot of my time and money the next time I am in the market for a major purchase. One final thing I like about this kind of deal alerting system is that it reinforces the idea that you don't need to buy something the second you decide it is what you want. With a little bit of waiting and the right technology you can hold off until the price drops to fit your budget. Too bad they don't have a deal alerter like this for used cars!

The Daily Deal for Sunday, April 20, 2008

Yes, the offer sounds too good to be true. Therefore it probably is. But it's splashed in true living color on the Internet and they say it's available to people like you and me. You may get a FREE Gucci hand bag and watch. Be warned though, I'm advised that the site has already been put under watch by McAfee as a source of possible excessive email spamming. That's the problem with these once in a lifetime internet offers. They're designed mainly to harvest email addresses, among other things.

To become eligible for the Gucci gifts, the offer is subject to the following conditions. First, you must take membership in a promotional purchasing program. You must register, provide a valid email address and provide a shipping address also. Then, you must complete what I interpret to be three surveys and six product promotions from sponsors of the offer. It sounds like a giant phishing scam to me, but hey, who am I to judge?

You must be 18 to apply and you'll be filling out a credit application (of course you will). The site page warns that failure to submit accurate registration will cause forfeit of your eligibility. By then however, they'll have enough information to purchase a house using your name. The site also disclaims any endorsement by the manufacturers of the products it offers. As if we might suspect that Gucci would have a hand in something like this.

One last note: This offer is not valid in Ohio. Do you think they might know something the rest of us don't?

I should introduce myself a little better, my name is Josh Smith and while I think of myself as frugal, pretty much everyone else, including my wife, settles on cheap. Normally this is a good thing, although on several occasions I have pushed my luck with incentives at retailers ending in either the completion of a killer bargain or the embarrassment of my wife...heck...sometimes I even accomplished both!

To this day I still have several friends who utilize the "WWJD" method of dealing with companies they feel have done them wrong. That isn't, "What Would Jesus Do" but the much more menacing "What Would Josh Do." While I don't claim to be a deity, I do consider myself to be a master of retail strategy often using the promotions and tactics of retailers to exact the best price or exact compensation for being wronged.

Sometimes the combinations of coupons, sales, price matching and luck aligned and I could walk away with a set of $150 speakers for $14.99. Other times you get asked to leave the store. Several years ago while I was still an undergrad with plenty of free time, I happened across a deal for recordable DVDs at my local office supply store. This particular deal involved a trifecta of savings: including a price error, a 50% off web coupon and an additional in-store coupon. This is the type of deal I live for, multiple points of savings and no rebates involved. The only way this deal could have been better is if it involved a price match as part of the deal. Here I go drowning you in details when the real fun comes when I go to the store to pick up 300 DVDs.

The Daily Deal for February 24, 2008

You've waited for him and he's here at last. A garden gnome in realistic full color is shooting the moon. As if the pose isn't great enough by itself, this little pointy capped pixie can be had for the astounding price of just $12.95 plus $5.95 for UPS ground delivery shipping. If you purchase eight of the little buggers, you can have them shipped for free! (limited time free shipping offer).

I found this whimsical gnome at Perpetual Kid by comparison shopping via the amazing NexTag website. If a booty bearing woodland citizen isn't quite what you had in mind for a garden pal, NexTag has comparison prices on thousands of other home and garden items.

This feisty garden gnome will be the talk of your garden. Your ceramic bunnies and wooden twirling cardinals will just love him. Your neighbors will probably turn green with envy. Even the mail carrier should get a chuckle. You can also take him to work and place him in your cubicle, but you might want to stash him when your boss's humorless lumbering footsteps approach your work station.

He's the perfect gift for your green thumbed friends who have everything and he can serve as a gardening reminder also. Remember that old gardening rule: Plant above ground crops by the full moon.

The Daily Deal for January 12, 2008

Dreaming of spring? You could spend any amount of money grasping at the season-to-come. You could take a long weekend trip to the southern hemisphere. You could buy tulips and peonies shipped from Chile. You could get your fill of out-of-season asparagus.

Or you could get an heirloom seed catalog, and fill your long dark afternoons of winter planning a garden that would help preserve biological diversity, combat global warming, and fill your summer tummy full of delicious, fresh, healthful things. Sweet Chocolate Bell Peppers. Cimmaron Red Romaine. Grandpa's Cock's Plume Tomato. (Or Silvery Fir Tree, Zaryanka Sunrise, Whippersnapper Cherry.)

You can shop online, but seed catalogs are full of plenty and far more authentic. Seeds Trust will send you their 2008 catalog for $4.00; Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds will send you a catalog faster for $3.00 (it's slow, for free); Victory Seed Company will send a catalog for $2.00; Territorial Seed Company offers a free catalog.

The Daily Deal, January 7, 2008

There's no better time to stock up on bike gear than the dead of winter. And if you're like most fanatic bicyclers (raising my hand!) you're about done with your drippy bike gear. If only you had something new, bright and reminiscent of the sunny tropical climes to get you inspired to leave the car behind...

How about this one? A 'Caribbean Blue' Bell helmet for only $14.95 from Bike Nashbar, the respected dealer in all things bicycle. The retail price is $34.95, but the 'last seen' price was $19.95. And if it gets you to ride your bike instead of driving, well, it could save you a lot more.

Wine.Woot.com is branching out (har, har) into gifts of all "classy" sorts for a week of gift giving. (Unlike the daily Woot.com, Wine.Woot.com typically has one item each week; this week will be one non-alcoholic gift each day.)

The first one is a great buy on an attractive and zen-tastic plant, a six-year-old bonsai juniper tree. Why six years old? A bonsai's age is its mark of distinction; the older, the awesomer. And, as someone points out in the comments at Wine.Woot.com, you'll want to keep your bonsai somewhere close to a window and frequently expose it to outdoor air (a porch or windowsill would be ideal).

The price is, indeed, a bargain: the same tree is $36.95 at The-Gift-Wizard.com, and a non-age-specific tree is $35.00 at eastern leaf.