Pros

• You can get a free flight to Europe just for signing up and using the card once
• You can get another free flight by spending $2000 (see the note below to learn an easy way to do that)
• These rewards are double what most cards offer

Cons

• Requires a little more effort than just buying a flight
• The card has a $75 annual fee, so you had better make sure you get your benefits
• You’ll still have to pay the taxes and fees that come with any airline tickets

Note: one trick that many credit card gamers use to meet spending requirements is clever and not difficult…

1. Use the credit card to meet the requirement by buying $1 coins from the US Mint (they’re sold at face value and with minimal shipping charges)
2. Deposit the coins into your local bank
3. Pay the credit card from your bank account

But wait just yet. Holidays or no holidays, it’s always a perfect time to save or cut back on expenses too. So before you go on a spending frenzy and rack up additional credit card debt, take a step back and see where you can buck tradition without skimping on the things that really matter. Here are some tips that might come in handy:

Trimming the tree (or not)

True, having decorations for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas may be one of the highlights of these occasions (especially for the kids) but it doesn’t mean that you’d need to order 7 lbs worth of tinsel for your tree. Remember that the decors will only be there for a few days or few weeks at most, so putting up a lot will be a big waste of time, money and effort. Instead:

• Buy your decorations from dollar or thrift stores.
• Go walking through the park or around the neighborhood for pine cone varieties rather than buying them.
• Use LED lights to save on energy. You may have to spend more upfront for this type than traditional lights but you get to save up to 90% on energy costs.
• Make homemade decors. I usually bake a batch of gingerbread cookies (or any of my kids’ favorite characters in gingerbread dough) and have the little ones decorate them to hang up on the tree.
• After the holidays, look for marked down decorations (some can get as low as 75% off!) for use next year.

‘Tis the season for giving

While being an age-old tradition of Christmas, giving gifts is again, more of a kids’ affair. Now I’m not saying that friends and family wouldn’t appreciate getting a present or two, but as cliché as this may sound, there’s really truth to the saying that it’s the thought that counts. That said, you could save on gifts this Christmas by:

• Narrowing down your gift list. Save for immediate family and really close friends, we rarely give out gifts to anyone else on Christmas. However, I do send out Christmas cards to far-off friends and relatives, and prepare some baked sweets my co-workers can share.
• Sharing a gift with someone else for someone close to you both. For instance, siblings can split the cost of gifts for dad and mom, or for nephews and nieces.
• Exchanging, rather than simply giving gifts. Alternately, you can also broach this idea to your family or group of friends. And I mean the exchange where you take out a name from a hat and just give to that one person. That way, all of you save a ton on gifts yet everyone, and not just the kids, still gets to open a present. (Admit it, we never lose the thrill of such moments!)
• Offering your services or expertise as a holiday present. Mind your best friend’s toddlers for a day, offer to lead in the games and entertainment at the local orphanage holiday party, fix that computer your brother hasn’t gotten to bring to a repair shop yet, or help out your elderly neighbor on his own holiday errands. Whatever skills or talents you have, I’m pretty sure they can be of good use to the people around you.

Christmas, Thanksgiving, or Hanukkah are long-standing religious celebrations we would never think of giving up just because times are hard these days. But if we can take out some of the commercial value attached to them, we’ll find that these holidays can be enjoyed just as much without needing to spend a lot.

I know you may have thought you’d never hear the words good news and recession in the same sentence but that time has perhaps finally arrived. Financial experts are saying that signs are pointing towards an economy finally on the path to recovery, however long and arduous that road may be.

Now I’m no finance analyst, and this is not going to be some boring discussion about the factors that brought the country to the brink of depression, but what I’d just like to explore is how Americans have come out of this crisis. One thing’s for sure, though. We didn’t emerge unscathed. More resilient maybe, and with a few lesson tucked under our belt. Gone is the shop-’til-you-drop, devil-may-care mentality that was more often than not, dependent on easy credit from (then) low interest credit cards to home equity loans. But no sir, not anymore. The new America is now frugal. Here’s how I know that this is so:

• Carpooling or public commute is in. Prices of gasoline are slowly eating up a big chunk of our daily expenses. Because of this, it has become more practical to just take public transport or arrange for carpooling with colleagues. Compared to last year’s figures, the number of people who carpooled grew by 0.3%, while those who commuted jumped by 5%.

• Dollar stores are showing strong sales. Been to a Family Dollar, Dollar General, or Dollar Tree outlet lately? If you’re like most of us, you probably have. At a time when most retail businesses are cutting back and even closing shop, dollar stores have finally become mainstream for most consumers.

• More Americans are saving. From being nation of big spenders, America has become one of prudent savers. Five years ago, the rate at which people have been saving was at less than zero percent. As of May this year, the savings rate is already at 6.9% — and that’s even with interest rates at a record low.

• Less people are borrowing. Not that we could if we wanted to. Qualifications and terms for availing of credit have become so stringent that those who do want to borrow money find the proverbial doors slammed in their faces. Still, the general attitude prevailing with most people is to stay away from credit as much as possible.

• We don’t find sunny climates as tempting now. Or maybe we still do; but in the face of a slump of this magnitude, people have opted to stay put rather than move around. For the first time in so many years, Florida’s population is actually decreasing. And the same goes for taking family vacations too.

• We’ve learned to make do without many conveniences. Families have discovered the joys of just eating in on Friday and Saturday nights, and then watching a DVD. Some are canceling their cable subscriptions, bringing lunch to work, and taking advantage of events like the National Museum Day (free admission on that day) instead of sending their kids to science camp.

Whether saving just $5 or $500, it’s apparent that many Americans have realized that sometimes, the basics are just all we need.

I admit, these are my reasons, and they may not apply to everyone’s situation, but I think it’s worth going through my thought processes to see why sometimes what appears to be the most frugal alternative isn’t always the best one.

I should also mention that I haven’t actually used the product – but I don’t think that matters in this case because my reasons for not using it have nothing to do with the quality of service – and everything to do with the circumstances of our household.

Let’s start with a simple description of the device:

At base it looks like a fat USB key with a phone jack. In spirit it’s almost like a reverse modem.  You plug the device into a spare USB slot on your Windows (XP or Vista) or Mac computer, and use its internet connection to access the telephone network.  You can get a local number in many areas, and once it’s up and running you have a perfectly usable phone as long as you have an internet connection:

So, why didn’t we take advantage of it?

(Answers after the cut)

One reason is that I don’t like putting everything on one wire.  Currently, we have two phone lines coming into the house – one for the main phone and our DSL connection, the other for the kids’ line.  Given the reliability of our phone service, I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the idea of putting the kids’ phone onto the same wire as the house phone and our DSL.  If we lost one we would lose everything, and that happens a bit more often than I really care to admit.  So, that’s strike one.

Strike two has to do with how it works.  Basically, you only have phone service while the computer it’s connected to is up and running with an internet connection.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that; but it doesn’t work for us.

You see the only computer that we keep up and running all the time is my desktop – which runs Linux.  MagicJack doesn’t support Linux, so we’d need to use it on one of the other computers.  In principle that’s fine, we have two Windows desktops and a couple of laptops we could use:  They’re older systems, but they could do the job.

The only catch is that they’re the teenagers’ systems, and we lock those down so they only have internet during certain hours of the day.  We also shut them down at night.  That would mean we’d either have to let a teenager who would rather spend time on the internet than breathe have 24/7 access to the web, or accept that we could only make 911 calls when the kids are allowed on the internet.  I’m also not keen on the idea that we’d have to wait for Windows to boot before we could make a phone call in a late night emergency.

Ummmm, yeah, no.

Anyway, that’s a brief explanation of why we didn’t go with MagjcJack.  It’s a perfectly useful product that doesn’t meet our needs – and there is nothing less frugal than buying something that doesn’t meet the need you bought it for.  That, for me, was MagicJack.

It’s a great idea, and if you keep a Windows machine (or a Mac) connected to the internet and running 24/7 it’s probably a really good way to save money.   If you don’t you probably won’t find it quite as useful.

What I would like, is if someone who does use it and reads this blog could give us a brief review in the comments.  That way, people who are considering it will be able to get a bit of a heads up before they spend the money.

The important thing is not whether you choose Netflix, cable, satellite or any other entertainment provider, but whether your choice both meets your needs and makes good financial sense.  That’s the key, you need to do both.

We’ve all seen the deals:  Six months of service for this low introductory price, with three months of six movie channels for free and an automatic upgrade to a “free” DVR.  It sounds great.  Everyone wants free and everyone wants a good deal.   It all reminds me of a term from an old Robert A. Heinlein novel: TANSTAAFL.

• There
• Ain’t
• No
• Such
• Thing
• As
• A
• Free
• Lunch.

At this point you’re probably thinking of all the hotels that offer free continental breakfasts and all the other “free” things you’ve received from various companies.  None of it invalidates TANSTAAFL.   Companies give you free stuff for one reason and one reason only:  (answer after the cut).

They want to make their money from you somewhere else.

If a hotel provides a “free” breakfast, the rooms cost a little more.   If a bar gives you “free” snacks it’s always salty foods like peanuts and pretzels to make you thirsty in the hope you will buy more beer.  There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s not evil, it’s just part of doing business.  Businesses exist to transfer money from your wallet to their coffers – the more the better.

That’s what all the special deals are for:  give  you a good deal now, and collect more money later.

They load you up with more channels than you could possibly watch, then bring the price up gradually as the additional packages move from free to pay.  Most people take the free movie packages at the start, and then just don’t cancel them. Some cancel the packages a month or two after the bill hits, and almost no one cancels them before they start to charge you.

It may not sound like much, just $20/month for cable movie packages, but if you really look at it, there’s a lot more to it than first appears.

This is exactly the kind of thing that got us into the current economic mess in the first place!

It’s the housing collapse writ small.  People bought houses on two-step mortgages with a low initial payment that later ballooned beyond their means and drove them out of the houses and often into bankruptcy.  Get them in cheap, and jack the price up later.  It’s been good business, lots of profit to be had doing things that way.  The problem from my point of view is that once you run all the nunbers it usually ends up costing more than it would otherwise – and spending more isn’t frugal.

My own advice is that if you do think about getting one of those deals, you sit down and do all the numbers first.  Make sure you know what you are getting into financially and when the charges will hit.  Don’t take the movie packages:  that way you won’t get used to watching them or get hit with bills because you didn’t cancel add-ons in time.  Phone companies are the same way:  these companies are literally banking on the fact that you won’t cancel a feature before they can start charging for it.

Take your time and think it through.

In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to use the comment box at the bottom for your thoughts, rants, and responses.

I used to think that Netflix was a good idea, but not for me because I don’t watch many movies. I still don’t watch many movies, but there are a few things that won me over and keep me paying every month.

1. We use Netflix instead of TV. The selection on “Instant Watch” is continually growing, meaning we can just decide on a whim that we want to watch something, and don’t have to depend on the (terrible) odds of something good being on TV. There are tons of TV shows as well as movies on Netflix, and when you’re talking about suspenseful shows like MI-5/Spooks, the ability to watch “just one more episode” is exactly what you want (a time sink, yes, but I think that’s a given when watching TV).
2. We share our Netflix membership. My sister used to live with us, and when she saw how many options we had on Netflix, she agreed to pay a few bucks a month to upgrade to the next-highest plan. That meant that our membership allowed several DVDs, and Netflix makes it easy to maintain separate queues that are sent automatically when a movie is returned. She’s been going through the seemingly infinite backlist of Dukes of Hazzard.

To be clear, if it was just us on our membership, and if it was just full-length movies by mail, it would not be a good deal for my family. We just don’t watch enough of them. But the Instant Watch feature is totally worth the money to us. We use Netflix instead of cable, satellite, and even a DVR (we thought about buying one but have so far put it off since there’s little on TV we’d rather watch than what’s already available to us on Netflix).

All this to say: if you think Netflix would be a good deal for you, this is a good time to try it.

Netflix periodically gives existing customers special links to send to their friends and family that allow a one-month free trial (they normally offer a 2-week free trial), so here’s mine: Netflix one-month free trial (it expires October 31, 2009).

If you do use it, make sure you put a reminder on your calendar before the end of the trial to evaluate and consciously decide to keep it or cancel it. If you keep it, decide what other expenses you can eliminate (e.g. cable/satellite/rentals).

I doubt I’m alone in being glad the days when one spouse made all the financial decisions for the household are behind us.  Now it’s a matter of give and take, and more importantly:  Communication.

Frugality is all about controlling your spending and not letting it control you.  That’s doubly true when there are multiple people with access to a single bank account.  The question is how do you do it when you don’t know whether someone else is going to come along and withdraw money you have earmarked for something right before you need it – or worse, just after you write the check but before it gets cashed.

That’s what we call a bad thing.

Read on after the cut, for more on avoiding that particular kind of bad thing.

The best way to avoid expensive problems like the one I just mentioned is simple:  Communicate.

If you’re part of  a couple, you don’t live in a vacuum.  You need to share your thoughts with the person you’re sharing your life with.  If you’re working from a shared account you need to let the other person know what you’re doing.  This isn’t a step back to the fifties where the wife would ask her husband’s permission to spend money– it’s common courtesy mixed with common sense.

If your better half knows you left the money in the checking account to cover the check you wrote for fuel oil, they’re going to be that much less likely to go and do something else with it:  and if that’s not the case, maybe you need to trade them in.

Communication isn’t just a buzz-word, it’s a process.

It starts when you’re making up a budget – when you’re sitting down and figuring out how much money you have and what you need to do with it.  You talk honestly about how much money each one is bringing in – and set up a plan for spending it.  One good idea is to use a spreadsheet such as Google Docs to manage your money.  The big advantage of Google Docs is that you can both work from the same document without worrying about keeping things straight.  After all, the spreadsheet loses half of its effectiveness if only one of you can see it.

One thing that affects us, but may not affect others as much is that even though we both work, we don’t work anywhere near the same amount.  Not only do I work fewer hours, I’m a freelancer.

Freelancing comes with a lot of freedom – and a number of benefits – but there’s one massive downside.

It’s inconsistent.

I can work fifty hours one week, and five hours the next.

The heavy weeks are great for the budget, but not for everything else – and the light weeks bring another set of problems.  There’s also the fact that it varies on very short notice. so it’s not really practical to budget too far ahead on my income.  It does bring up the importance of communication, though.  The only way we can plan anything is if I make sure she knows how much money I’m going to be bringing in as soon as I do.  It’s great when I get a large sum just when we need it, not so great when work disappears.

At least it’s something we can mitigate by communicating  far enough in advance that neither one of us is taken by surprise.

Talk to your spouse.

In the meantime, if you have any comments or questions, don’t hesitate to use the box at the bottom of the post.

We live in a place with mandatory annual car inspections – they cost $16 and ensure that car owners keep up with all the important maintenance on their vehicles.  I think it’s a good idea.

So our second car, a 99 Honda, was coming up on its inspection date.  It needed a new muffler, so we figured I could take it in, get the oil changed, the muffler replaced, and have it inspected all in one fell swoop.  We’d called around earlier and from what we understood a replacement muffler could be expected to run us $70 or so.   It all sounded pretty reasonable.

So, anyway, I take the car down to a local chain outlet that has usually done well by us in the past:

This time they didn’t treat us quite so well, as you’ll see after the cut:

I got there first thing in the morning and put in the order, telling them I needed an oil change, a muffler replacement and finally an inspection.  No point getting the inspection before the muffler was done, because it wouldn’t pass until without it, anyway.  That was when I got the first case of sticker shock:  They wanted about $250 for everything.

Here’s how it broke down:

• $16 for the inspection
• $30 for the oil change
• $70 for labor
• $110 (approximately) for the muffler.

Add in a few taxes and fees and you get $250 – which was about double what we had expected to pay.  I wasn’t a very happy camper.  The guy who took my order (the service department’s assistant manager) couldn’t give me an exact price because he said he wasn’t sure which of three mufflers would fit the car – but as they ranged from $105-110 I wasn’t that concerned about which one we needed.

Fast forward three or four hours:  I get a call from the shop.  It seems none of the mufflers they have in stock will fit a 99 Honda Civic, and they’ll have to special order one.

For $201!

Now the cost has about tripled!  I ask if they’ve already done the oil change – tell him not to do any more work and come down to grab the car.  I’m sure it doesn’t legally count as a “bait-and-switch” but it sure felt that way from where I stood.

I get down to the shop, and pay for the oil change – and they’d also done the inspection – which the car failed as expected.  Needless to say, I was furious.  They had been told not to do the inspection until the muffler was replaced – and they had told me all they had done was the oil change.

We’re not going there again.

We checked around a few local places – and they wanted anywhere from $160 to $270 for the part.  It seems that on the 99 Civic the muffler comes as a piece with the flex pipe that goes over the rear axle and that’s expensive.   It was also unnecessary, as the flex pipe on the Honda was fine.  All we needed was a new muffler.

After a series of calls we found a small place in the industrial district just north of town, which said they could get it in the next day for about $70.  So I took it in the next morning – and they actually managed to get it done for $60!

And yes, it passed inspection.

So, what was the big difference between this place and all the others?

They only fixed what was broken.

All the other places wanted to replace the flex pipe as well as the muffler, as a unit.  This place just chopped the bad muffler off the end of the perfectly serviceable flex pipe and welded a new muffler into place.  Total cost was lower than the chain outlet was going to charge for labor alone.

So, what’s the point of this story?

Make sure you’re not paying them to fix what isn’t broken.

The more you spend in a single visit, the better a service center does.  That being the case, it’s always in their best interest get you to have as much done in a single visit as possible.  There’s no benefit to the chain outlet in cutting the muffler off the pipe and welding a new one on.  They charge $95/hour for labor and that’s much less labor for the same basic job.  The place we finally had it done only charged $50/hour for labor – which is part of the reason we got away so cheaply:   less work at a lower rate.

Now it’s true we didn’t get a genuine Honda replacement muffler assembly.  But we didn’t need one.  We just needed something that would both work and pass inspection, which is what we got.

Also – the reason we’re not going back to the chain outlet?  It’s not just the appearance of a possible “bait and switch;” it’s also that they did work that hadn’t been authorized, and misinformed me about what had been done.  They were told not to do the inspection until the muffler was replaced – they didn’t replace the muffler so they shouldn’t have done the inspection.  Second, they told me the oil change was the only work they had done – so either they did the inspection after being told to stop work – OR – they told me it hadn’t been done when it had.

Well that’s all for this special Sunday edition.

If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to use the box at the bottom:  and thanks for reading.

It would be so easy to say that full-time parenting beckoned at me, or that I simply wanted to be my own self, free from the trappings that the corporate life can sometimes hold us in, but then again, that wouldn’t be an accurate picture of it, either. To put it simply,

My being a work-at-home parent had nothing to do with noble or grand aspirations, and everything to do with what needed to be done at that time.

Calling it a lifeline or a last resort would be nearer the truth.

I started a (working) life online as a freelance writer and blogger through oDesk.com less than a year ago and haven’t looked back since. In the span of 9 months, I was able to clock in 1,000 hours already just last week. I refer to it is as my millennia moment. Yey!

So, what could be cooler than this? Well, not counting the times when I wish I could just magically disappear from a bunch of screaming kids, and excluding the sleepless nights when a deadline is looming, not much actually. I earn a pretty decent income and get to be with my kids while they are still young enough to love the fact that their mom is around all the time. The clamor for attention does get to be a pain sometimes but I always remind myself to just savor these moments before the time comes when they would prefer to hang out with everyone else except (sob) me.

If there’s one common misconception about being a stay-at-home parent, it’s that of the job being easy. You read that practically everywhere. So at the risk of being called repetitive, let me just say it one more time:

Working from home is far from easy.

If only people get it the first, second, or nth time, we wouldn’t have to repeat it so often. Let me give you a quick rundown of why the job of a full time parent and freelance online worker wouldn’t be right up everyone’s alley:

Knowing all these now, would I still go up this path given the chance to do it over again? In a heartbeat. Right now, the kids are still giggling, unable to settle down without their customary goodnight cuddles. Hmmm… looks like duty calls.

Admittedly, we have two teens at home who can keep the seven-year-old entertained at least some of the time.  But being teens, they tend to disappear for hours at a time, themselves, leaving me to keep an eye on the youngest, as well as working. Luckily, I don’t usually have to put in a full 40 hours every week, so sometimes I can take the day and spend it doing things with my daughter.

One way to maximize that is to take advantage of my partner’s commute.  She works near DC, and we live about two hours away.  That’s just great for a day trip with my daughter.  We just ride in with my partner and while she’s at work I can take our daughter down to the Smithsonian.  We can tour museums all day, and it’s free!

In fact, we’re taking advantage of it tomorrow:  I’m going to take my daughter to the Air and Space Museum.

What’s great about it is that we don’t have to spend a lot of extra money to get there, because the trip to DC is covered by my partner’s commute anyway.  Beyond that it’s just a few dollars for the Metro to get down to the National Mall.  I’m going to pack water and snacks so food won’t be an issue.  The only expense beyond the Metro is going to be tickets to get into the planetarium.  There’s also a free children’s story time that we’re going to attend, too.

We’re getting a day out for less than $25 which isn’t bad when you consider everything.  We could cut that down to under $10 if we weren’t going to the planetarium, and just add another museum or so.

While not everyone has access to museums of this quality, you might be surprised to find what’s available in your area; especially for those who live near major cities.  Most cities have at least a few attractions that are either free or cheap, and it’s worth taking the time to check them out.

If you do decide to try this for yourself, it’s important to remember to pack a few important things.  Water and sunscreen should top the list, followed by snacks like fruit or granola bars.

We’re off tomorrow and it should be a great time.  My daughter loves space and astronomy so this should be right up her alley.

If you have similar ideas, feel free to add them in the comments section.