I’m headed out of the country for a couple months and I’m just not gonna be able to continue updating during that time period. I’ve burned myself out over the past couple weeks trying to save up tons of posts to publish while I’m away. It was crazy and I’m temporarily just out of energy to work on this blog.

I know the traffic I’ve worked hard to build is going to drop a lot, and that’s okay! This is a sacrifice I feel I can’t avoid making because I’ve gotta get out there and work on some other stuff for a little bit.

I’m going to come back in two months to a blog that’s languished and that’s going to be discouraging. At that time, I’m going to reevaluate my goals for this blog, give it a long look-over. If I do start posting again, I can guarantee this blog will be better than it ever was before.

Thank you to everyone who continues to come here regularly to check out the new posts. Unfortunately, there won’t be any more for a while, but I’m quite thankful to everyone who has commented, offered encouragement, or just stopped by.

See ya!

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I said “consider” because I do think there are a few reasons you might want to continue working a job. In my mind, there are only three such reasons:

1) Your job is the task you were put on earth to accomplish. Let’s say you were born to be a poet and can make money at it - awesome! Let’s say your life’s mission is to help orphans in Ghana and you’ve started a charity to accomplish this - wonderful! Don’t change anything. Unfortunately, many people spend their lives working jobs they hate because they believe there is no other choice. There is always another choice. Always, always, always. The other choice usually requires you to change your mindset, and most of the time, people too lazy to do that. For instance, I advocate reducing your “wants” and spurning conspicuous consumption. This is one very important step in the journey toward financial freedom, but it takes effort, and if you can’t be bothered, you won’t reap the benefits.

2) Your boss is someone you can respect and you are learning something invaluable at your job. You should never be stuck with the feeling that you are throwing away your time when you are at work. You may feel this way if your boss doesn’t know anything about being a boss and his simply wormed his or her way into that position by playing politics, or if the task you have to do every day offers no long-term benefit to anyone. One example of an individual who worked a job for a good reason is Robert Kiyosaki (at least by his own account). Kiyosaki sold photocopiers for several years, mastered sales, quit his job, and went on to use the techniques he learned to build a huge financial empire. (Wealth alone means nothing, of course; learning is what’s important!)

3) You need a reliable source of cash while you try to escape the rat race. This is perhaps the most depressing of the three reasons, and I hope you don’t have to spend long in your job if this is the main reason you are there. Put very simply, the long-term financial strategy I advocate involves lively cheaply and using the money you save to finance reasonable, simple, long-term, passive investments. Of course, while you’re still in the beginning stages of this process, you need a source of cash. This doesn’t mean you have to work a desk job. For instance, I work as a teacher, writer, and translator, which allows me to set my own hours - but I’m still exchanging my time for pay. I’d ultimately rather spend my time building income-producing assets, and I am in fact doing this on the side. Once I’ve attained some measure of success at this, I won’t take on any work I’m not totally thrilled with.

Maybe there’s a fourth or a fifth reason I’ve missed, but if you’re working a job for any reason other than the three listed above, I think you should take a long, hard look at your decision to stay in your current job. Consider the huge benefits of working for yourself: job security (no one can fire you!), independence, earnings potential that is theoretically unlimited. Quite honestly, whatever path you choose, I wish you the best of luck - but you already know which path I prefer!

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Stuff is insidious and it’s ubiquitous. Sometimes, stuff is so obvious we fail to notice it.

With this in mind, I hereby present five types of stuff you can eliminate from your life today. You won’t notice any reduction in your quality of life. You’ll simply have more money in your pocket!

Fabric softener. Try this little experiment. Next time you wash your clothes, do so without the aid of fabric softener, then check to see whether your clothes come out hard. If not, you can quit buying fabric softener! The same thing goes for dryer sheets.

Drano. In almost all cases, one or more of the following remedies will clear up a tough clog: 1) Take a plunger to it. 2) Pour about half a cup of baking soda paste down the drain, then follow up with vinegar. This should create a fun, bubbly mess and will likely dissolve the clog. 3) Dump a potful of boiling water down the drain.

Garbage bags. Get a small garbage can and line it with plastic bags from the grocery store.

Premium gas. Unless your car’s manufacturer says you need it, premium gas offers no benefit. It doesn’t increase your gas mileage, it doesn’t make your engine last longer, and it doesn’t bring you good luck. It’s simply a waste of money!

Bottled water. I know, I know, it tastes better than tap water (in most places I’ve lived, anyway). But you know what tastes about like bottled water? Tap water that’s been run through a filter. I’ve used Brita and Pur filters and both brands have worked great. Tap water is literally about 1000 times cheaper then any kind of bottled water, so if you refuse to drink H2O directly from the tap, you’ll save big bucks by purchasing a filter. I recommend the pitcher type rather than the type that screws onto the faucet.

These are far, far from the only examples of stuff, so don’t stop with these five. Come up with some more, then simply stop buying those things. It’s so easy - you close your wallet and you never notice the absence of the thing you didn’t buy. How satisfying!

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I do not recommend that you engage in credit card arbitrage if you have trouble paying off your cards each month. You’ve got to be anally on top of things and read all the fine print and if you don’t trust yourself to sock away the money and not touch it then you’d better keep far away. If you do have the disciple to sock away the cash, credit card arbitrage can be quite profitable.

But this post is not about credit card arbitrage. It’s about a new and exciting credit card game that has the potential to produce great profit for those willing to read the fine print and experiment and take on a little risk (mostly, the risk that you yourself will screw up and the whole house of cards will collapse). I realize that people are going to flame me for suggesting something “risky” to my readers, so if this idea sounds unappealing or dangerous to you, just don’t do it. You’ve gotta trust your instincts.

Nevertheless, I think this scheme is fascinating and it certainly has the potential to make you some serious cash. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve never before seen a similar scheme discussed on an internet forum or blog.

The Basics

Okay, so here’s the basic idea behind this new credit card scheme. You’re aware of cash back credit cards, right? Y’know, the kind Dave Ramsey warns listeners and readers away from (I happen to disagree with him)? The kind that’ll give you anywhere from 1-5% back on your spending?

Well, you find a way to run tons of purchases through your cash back card and then pay all of them off before the bill comes due. You pocket the cash back. If you can somehow convert those purchases into cold, hard cash, you can put the cash in a savings account and pocket the interest, taking advantage of credit card arbitrage as well. You could literally make thousands of dollars a year this way, but there are, of course, a whole bunch of details you’ll have to attend to…

The Details

Let’s start with the biggie: how exactly do you “run tons of purchases through your cash back card?” You could try to buy something you know you could resell and break even on, but unless you’ve hit on the deal of the century, that’s probably too risky, and you wouldn’t be able to profit by placing the funds in an interest-bearing bank account. Instead, I’d suggest purchasing a cash equivalent as the best way to retrieve the funds from your card.

A money order is one type of cash equivalent. Unfortunately, there aren’t many places that’ll allow you to purchase a money order using a credit card. Western Union won’t do it, nor will most banks, nor will the post office. The reason for this, I think, is that there are costs involved in issuing the money order and there are also costs involved in accepting your credit card. Businesses already make a set amount of money - not very much - on each money order, and the merchant’s credit card acceptance fee would seriously eat into or eliminate that slim profit margin. If you can find a place that will let you purchase a money order with your credit card, there you go! I’ve heard that some grocery stores will do this, but you’ll have to look around. Also, you must ensure that the money order fee does not cancel out the cash back you’ll receive, and I would want to double-check that your purchase will not be counted as a cash advance (which would generally mean you’d be slapped with absurdly high fees, whereas purchases, of course, are fee-free).

Additionally, a My Money Blog reader recently pointed out that you can purchase dollar coins from the US Mint with no fee whatsoever, and free shipping to boot! Feel like annoying your bank by depositing hundreds of dollar coins? There you go! There appears to be a $500 limit on orders, and I’m not sure how the Mint would react if you were to place ten or fifteen such orders, nor what your bank would think. Perhaps they’d suspect your deposits were part of some kind of money laundering scheme. I don’t know. For the sake of science, somebody out there has to try it!

Can anybody else think of a creative way to purchase a cash equivalent using a credit card?

It is important to note that this scheme would carry the same risks as credit card arbitrage. You’d have to have enough discipline to simply toss the money in the bank account and not spend it frivolously on something, and you’d have to watch the due dates for the cards. If you missed a due date, you could be in big trouble. Your interest rate could increase and you’d almost certainly be slapped with a high late fee, plus your credit score would get dinged.

How Much Can You Earn?

This simply depends on which cash back card, or cards, you’re carrying. The best cards are those which impose no limit on the amount of cash back you can earn, such as the Citi Cash Returns card and the Discover More card. Most cash back cards offer just 1% cash back on everyday purchases, so let’s say you get a hold of a couple of cash back cards with no limit on the amount you can earn and that each one gives you access to $10,000 worth of credit. If you use each card to its full capacity each month, you could make $2400 a year - and that’s from cash back alone. I haven’t included the interest you could make by placing the money into a savings account, i.e. engaging in arbitrage. It’s too hard to calculate the potential benefit from this due to changing interest rates and other factors. However, I think you could easily make something like an extra $1000 from the arbitrage aspect of this scheme. All in all, depending on a number of factors, you could make at least a few thousand dollars a year this way. Enough to max out your IRA contribution, say. And that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Am I Actually Gonna Do This?

I think so. The dollar coins are currently on backorder, and I’d like to see that situation remedied before placing too much reliance on the US Mint. I also need to check into the money order situation at stores in my area. Since I’m currently using my cash back credit cards for arbitrage, I’ll at least wait until the 0% APR fun ends before putting this new scheme into motion, but I do plan on at least trying out a small-scale test run. We’ll see what my bank thinks about getting rolls and rolls of quarters at the deposit window. I can just see the faces of those befuddled bank tellers now!

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Briefly, here’s how virtual card numbers work. You go to your card company’s website. You log in. You get a card number which is attached to your account but not to any actual, physical card. It has its own expiration date and its own security code. You use it to buy stuff online. Even if the merchant leaks your card number or hackers get their hands on it, it doesn’t matter. The card number expires after the purchase is complete.

Citibank lets users customize their virtual cards, specifying expiration dates and credit limits which don’t necessarily have to have any relationship with the expiration date or credit limit of the actual, physical card. This is a really nice service which I only discovered about a year after becoming a Citibank card-holder. I now use it frequently.

I recently used a virtual card number when I signed up for Shoppers Advantage, a discount buying club operated by Trilegiant, a company I now know to be dishonest and generally naughty. I paid $1 to enroll. The purpose was the $20 AMEX gift card I got out of the deal (but only after complaining to the BBB that I didn’t get it despite repeated promises on the phone). I canceled my membership within the 30-day trial period and was not supposed to be charged any monthly fees, but lo and behold, Shoppers Advantage tried to charge on my card to the tune of $15 or so. Since I’d used a virtual card number with a $1 limit, the charge did not go through. True, most major credit cards offer zero liability for unauthorized charges, but this way, I didn’t have to go through the hassle of proving to Citibank or to Shoppers Advantage that I had actually canceled my membership.

In the case above, the merchant attempted to charge me even though I’d already canceled my membership, but even if I’d forgotten to do so, I still would have been protected. The company simply wouldn’t have been able to charge me its monthly fee. If you’ve signed up for some sort of trial membership or when a company is going to try charging you periodically and you don’t want it to happen, consider using a virtual card number.

Here’s another situation in which a virtual card number could be very useful. Let’s say you go to the Papa John’s website and order a pizza and that afterwards you respond to the offer inviting you to sign up for a free Entertainment Weekly trial subscription and get a $10 PJ’s gift card. Of course, if you forget to cancel the trial subscription, you’ll be charged for an annual subscription to the magazine. This way, you don’t have to remember. Create a virtual card number with a $1 limit and forget about it.

Some folks might question the morality of this. I mean, it really is your responsibility to adhere to terms you’ve agreed to and cancel your subscription/membership/whatever. And the company could do something crazy like turn you over to a collections agency (I’ve seen it happen even for tiny debts). Everybody will have to weigh out these factors individually.

Card companies are reporting that usage of virtual card numbers if very low and I think is mostly due to lack of public awareness. If your card company allows you to create a virtual card number, keep this in mind the next time you purchase something from an online merchant you wouldn’t exactly trust with your life. A virtual card number could save your butt, or at least save you a few bucks.

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We all do this to some extent. I mean, I spent a little money on some decent furniture for my room. I could have left everything in boxes, but then my room wouldn’t be very presentable or comfortable. I wouldn’t be happy in it and I wouldn’t want to show it to anybody else. This is a mild version of the impulse that sociologists began to see in the “new rich” of the late 1800s, when the term “conspicuous consumption” was coined. The industrial revolution bought a lot of people a lot of leisure and a lot of people began using that leisure to buy expensive stuff and show it off as a means of displaying social position.

I posted just a couple days ago about the evils of stuff, and if you’ve been reading this blog with any regularity, then you already know that I believe the impulse to accumulate stuff is what leads people to financial ruin. The urge to display your wealth won’t get you anywhere except the poorhouse! If your money is burning a hole in your pocket, you’re gonna end up with no money and burned pants.

So stuff is naughty and conspicuous consumption is bad - right?

Well, there are shades of gray to everything, and I’d say that spending money to impress others really isn’t always bad. You can let yourself do it if you maintain some restraint. Everybody does, and I’m pretty sure that’s not all bad.

When stuff takes over, that’s bad. Likewise, when the urge for tightwaddery takes over, tightwaddery can distract you from more important goals.

Lemme explain.

The whole point of living frugally is to reach your financial goals and your life goals sooner. As I’ve said several times before, “living the cheap life” has a purpose. Financial freedom will help you do what you were put on earth to do. Theoretically, anyway.

But you know what, I think it’s possible to get too caught up in being a cheapskate. It’s possible to worry too much over conserving every last cent.

I’ve noticed this in myself recently when I’m driving. My roommate and I recently got into this informal competition to see who could conserve the most gas. Now, when I drive my car, I’m always worried about saving every last vapor of gasoline and it’s kind of distracting - distracting from what’s going on on the road and distracting from conversations with friends. Distracting from the important things that make life flavorful.

Distracting.

I think I’m gonna call off this competition pretty soon.

Lemme think of a couple other quick examples of conspicuous tightwaddery… I want to make sure the car salesman realizes that I don’t care about the monthly payment, only about the final price of the car and the interest payment; I want to show my friends that I know how to get the best deals on airfare and hotels. I do, on occasion, have the urge to show off how cheap I am.

I think this is fine when you are genuinely trying to teach someone else a better way of doing something - when that person wants to learn. But sometimes, your tightwaddery is better kept private. Showing off your tightwaddery is generally a waste of time. Who cares if anybody acknowledges you or not? You don’t need outside approval. The whole point of being a cheapskate is reaching your life goals and making the world just a tiny bit more pleasant for everybody.

Hopefully, your tightwaddery is not simply intended to impress others. After all, who cares if there are a few extra pennies left in your estate when you kick the bucket? Even if you fool somebody else into believing it matters, that doesn’t mean it’s true!

Hopefully, you always keep your eyes on the prize: the life goals that financial freedom will help you achieve.

Hopefully, you know that being a cheapskate isn’t just about being a cheapskate. That’s the big secret of living the cheap life! Being a cheapskate is about goals.

And as long as you don’t lose sight of that, you oughta be just fine.

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My Carnival Submissions

Carnival of Careers #3 - Hosted by Cash Money Life and featuring my post Why having a job is not cool, which was honored with an editor’s choice. Yay!

Carnival of Personal Finance #157 - Hosted by Consumerism Commentary and featuring my post Rental car fees at airports stink.

Festival of Frugality #130 - Hosted by Out of Debt Again and featuring my post Cheap travel on Amtrak.

Money Hacks Carnival #17 - Hosted by Mrs. Nespy’s Frugal World and featuring my post Is it worth it to sign up for a Student Advantage card?

My Favorite Posts

…that are from these carnivals but are not by yours truly.

The job interview: To shave or not to shave? (That is the question) - I Am Sheamus knows how to ask the right question. Wait a minute, I think the right question might actually be, “how do I support myself without getting a job?” Well, anyway, this is an amusing post. Via the Carnival of Careers.

My top five personal finance blunders - Ron of The Wisdom Journal spills the beans about his five top (bottom?) personal finance mistakes. The “I lived paycheck to paycheck spending every last dime I made” one sounds familiar to me. Via the Carnival of Personal Finance.

Free isn’t really free: a story of mendacious marketers - A blog called Are You Going To Be This Way the Rest of the Time I Know You? (cool title) tells a story about telemarketers which sounds a lot more frustrating than the one I related a couple weeks ago. Just what is this world coming to? Via the Festival of Frugality.

The ins and outs of reward credit cards - Free Money Finance says cash back credit cards are best, and I agree. Via the Money Hacks Carnival.

Other Links

101 ways I saved money this year - Wow, nice list. From Save, You Fool!

How we organize our coupons and execute our coupon strategy - I’ve said before that I’m not into coupons, but I’m considering changing my position. The Simple Dollar presents a simple and sensible couponing strategy.

Perot Charts - Ross Perot is back with a vengeance! Here are some more of the incredibly detailed charts that imprinted him in the memory of every American who watched TV coverage of the 1992 election. I’m not sure I totally agree with all Ross’s political positions, but the charts are neat.

Retail sales jump in May as stimulus payments go out - Big surprise - people are spending their economic stimulus payments, not saving them! Well, it’s good for us even if it’s not good for them. Know what I mean? From CNN Money.

What’s your neighborhood’s walk score? - Consumerism Commentary introduces a neat web site called Walk Score that’ll tell you how easy it is to live without a car in a particular neighborhood.

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There are many cases in which a company or organization will slight you, whether due to sloppiness or by design. And you’ve got to let them know that you don’t appreciate it. You’ve got to let them know how they screwed up and what they can do to make it right. The best way to do this is by writing a good complaint letter.

Here are five ways to craft an effective, attention-getting complaint.

Send an actual, physical letter. There are a couple reasons to deliver your complaint by snail mail rather than by email or through a phone call. First, snail mail is hard to ignore. A letter is an actual, physical object and it can’t be forced to listen to muzak for 20 minutes on hold and it can’t be deleted with the click of a mouse. Second, when you send out a letter, you’re creating a paper trail. If you need to escalate the dispute (by, say, contacting a CEO, filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau or even perhaps filing a lawsuit), you’ve got written records of what you sent to whom and when.

Make it clear that you’re a loyal customer (if you are). Any business worth its salt values its regular customers. If you’re a regular, make that fact clear. If Steve’s Lawn Service screwed up your lawn, mention that you’ve been using them since 1989 and have been extraordinarily pleased with the service up until now, but that they stand to lose you as a customer if they don’t meet your demands. I actually think it might be better to start your letter out with a compliment - to mention how great everything was up until now so that the recipient sees you as a friend/asset instead of an enemy, and then launch into your complaint.

Be calm. Nobody likes to deal with somebody who’s insulting, sarcastic, or rude. Firmness will help you get what you want, but anger generally won’t, unless you’ve concluded that the people you’re dealing with are total zombies. There’s a fine line between firmness and anger. You want to make sure that other party understands that you mean business and that you refuse to be stepped all over, but you don’t want to be so harsh that the recipient of your complaint concludes that you are a jerk and loses all willingness to help you. Also, keep in mind that the person reading your complaint most likely isn’t the person who wronged you.

Suggest a concrete solution. Plant a little suggestion about what you want the other party to do in response to your complaint. If you’ve mastered the firmness/anger thing, your letter has just a slight tinge of unpleasantness and it tells the other party clearly how to get you out of the way so that everybody can go on with their lives. If you make it clear how the other party can please you, you make pleasing you the path of least resistance. Everybody likes to take the path of least resistance.

Say how long you are willing to wait. This is another way to urge action. Tell the other party in concrete terms when you plan to escalate the dispute, particularly if you have the feeling your complaint might be ignored. A concrete date can be the extra little nudge that will get the recipient to actually start to act (again, making acting instead of doing nothing the path of least resistance).

I hope you find these tips useful. Remember: be firm, be clear, be direct, and don’t cave in!

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There are many peddlers of stuff in the world, and there are many different kinds of stuff. Stuff is a name-brand food product that costs twice as much as the store brand but doesn’t taste any better. Stuff is a Mt. Rushmore keychain some guy at a streetside booth in Keystone, SD tries to hawk to you. Stuff is a brand new Bentley when a used Toyota would do. Stuff is name-brand prescription medicine when the generic brand is readily available.

Stuff is not strictly necessary, but many times, we convince ourselves that we deserve stuff. I already discussed this in my post Should you let yourself take a break from being cheap?:

The “I deserve” mentality can be pretty harmful. I deserve this new car, you think; I deserve to eat out at a fancy restaurant. Maybe, but all those “I deserve”s pile up pretty fast and it’s hard to save money when you live like that.

The fact is that nobody deserves stuff except the most boring, apathetic, unmotivated, sluglike individual imaginable. Stuff is worthless! How can anyone deserve something worthless? This is a contradiction in terms. You either deserve something good or you deserve something bad. You don’t deserve something that will have no lasting impact on your life or the life of any other person.

Nobody deserves stuff ’cause stuff is without value. On the other side of the spectrum, there’s something of unlimited worth that everybody deserves: freedom.

When you have freedom, you are fully human. You are the greatest version of yourself you can possibly be. Stuff falls away and crumbles to bits. All obstacles are obliterated. When you are free, you get what you deserve, because you deserve freedom.

I’m talking about something that’s bigger than money, but this is a blog about personal finance, so let’s stick to the topic at hand. One important step in the achievement of financial freedom is getting rid of stuff. If you set your standard of living high - if you think that you deserve stuff - you’ll spend all your income on it and you won’t have anything left over to buy freedom, which is what you’ll eventually achieve if you contribute consistently to safe, passive investments.

That’s why, as I’ve stated before, I’m all about lowering your standards as a means of achieving financial freedom. Whaddaya mean, you protest - the idea that you have to “lower your standards” is depressing! Well, I don’t think so. Lowering your standards simply means ridding yourself of the mistaken belief that you deserve stuff and realizing that freedom is what you really deserve. In other words, I’m talking about “living below your means.”

If you haven’t done so yet, figure out how much a $1000 IRA contribution you make today will be with in 30 years. Then find a way to eliminate $1000 of yearly spending on stuff, whatever stuff is in your life. I guarantee that living a less wasteful lifestyle will in itself be rewarding, and if that isn’t enough, there’s always the prospect of getting what you really deserve!

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Rental car companies are terrible about this. Local and state taxes, refueling fees, facility fees, and on and on; such charges can increase the cost of a rental by 100% or more. Ouch!

Airports, in particular, tend to levy extraordinarily high fees on car rentals. The most recent statistics I can find come from 2005 (see this study by Travelocity) and indicate that at that time, up to 66% of rental fees at airports were composed of fees alone, and that these fees were on the rise.

Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport is cited as the worst offender and is responsible for the inexcusable 66% figure mentioned above. Dallas/Fort Worth is not far behind, with fees of about 61%. Phoenix and Austin Bergstrom hover around 50%. All in all, there were, as of 2005, ten airports in the nation where consumers paid at least 39% in car rental fees. (A lot of them were in Texas. Looks like hats and churches aren’t the only things that are bigger there.)

Now, these fees are not all directly airport-related, but there’s no question that airport rentals come with the highest fees. Airport rental fees are typically not the responsibility of car rental companies themselves, but are levied by local governments to finance various projects taxpayers otherwise couldn’t be convinced to support. Local residents see taxes such as these as having the greatest effect on out-of-towners who, of course, have no say in the decision-making process. How convenient!

If you’re booking online with, say, Yahoo! Travel, it’s fairly easy to research in advance the exact amount of taxes and fees you’ll need to pay. Let’s take a look at the taxes and fees on a hypothetical week-long rental of an economy car at the Phoenix airport. The cost of the rental itself is $84 with Payless. Sounds pretty good, eh? Not when the following fees are factored in:

That’s right, the car rental itself costs $84 and the taxes and fees total $66.29, comprising a whopping 44% of the total rental cost ($150.29).

I wanted to know if it would be cheaper to rent outside of the airport, so I did a bit of research. As it turns out, taxes and fees are much lower outside of the airport, but the cars themselves tend to cost more! The cheapest rental I could find outside of the airport in Phoenix runs $125 a week, plus $23.19 in taxes and fees for a grand total of $148.19 - $2.10 cheaper than renting at the airport. The whole concept would be that you could take a taxi or shuttle into town to save on the airport-related fees, but you’d clearly have to pay more than $2.10 to get into town (alright, unless you could take a bus, but even in this case the savings would be miniscule and probably not worth the trouble).

This isn’t only the case in Phoenix. I tried researching airport vs. in-town rentals in several other cities, including Kansas City and Dallas, all with the same result: the airport had higher fees, but renting there was still cheaper or about the same overall. Looks like you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t! Results may vary in some locations, so I definitely encourage you to do your own research before concluding that it isn’t worth it to take alternate transportation to a rental location in town.

I believe this situation is the way it is because the large amount of competition at airports ultimately makes up for the huge taxes on rentals there. If only politicians would quit levying these “tourist taxes,” it’d actually be a lot cheaper in most cases to rent at airports!

The lesson here is that, although it might upset you that 50% of your rental cost is made up of miscellaneous taxes and fees which you weren’t informed about until the last possible second, you’re generally better off buckling down and shelling out. This is not advice I enjoy giving. I’m sorry that I can’t offer some clever, original solution and am left to report this unsavory conclusion. I feel like I’m advocating Satanism or something, because I really hate those fees. But until those politicians wise up, we’ve got no choice… and let’s not hold our breath for that!

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