Pay Attention To Per Unit Pricing

Sometimes you don`t even need a calculator.

I was at Superstore the other day looking at No Name peanut butter, and noticed that the smaller size was actually the better deal:

2 kg = $6.27

1 kg = $2.97 (x 2 = $5.94)

Alrighty then... 1 kg tubs it is!!
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Three Ways To Save On Mortgage Interest

There are three easy ways to shave off some interest from your mortgage.

Because mortgages typically have a long amortization period, the interest really adds up. In the end, depending on the length of your mortgage and the interest rates, you may end up paying as much, if not more, in interest than the original mortgage amount.

Here are three simple things you can do to significantly reduce the amount of interest you will pay:

1) Principal only payments. Every financial institution has rules about how these can be applied (for example, there are minimum and maximum amounts, as well as yearly frequencies). A friend of mine recently put $3,500 towards her mortgage principal, and saved considerably more than that in interest.

2) Shorten your amortization period. Use this calculator to see what I mean.

3) Pay more frequently. If you are paying monthly, consider bi-weekly or even weekly. The sooner you can reduce the principal, the sooner the amount that the interest is calculated on is lowered.

Remember that interest is how banks make money - whatever you can do to reduce the interest you pay puts some of that money back in your pocket.
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Save On Hydro Bills With Fan Timers

Here's an idea that I hadn't even considered until my husband had these installed in our bathrooms: fan timers.

We have the Leviton 5-10-15-30 Minute Timer shown in the link. It's beneficial because it prevents you from forgetting to turn the fan off. You can choose the fan duration according to your specific requirements - for example, for a shower I use the full thirty minute setting.

Prior to installing the fans and timers, we would leave the windows open to provide air circulation, which resulted in heat loss. Now we can maintain the room temperature while still circulating the air, and save money by not wasting fan use.
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Saving Money On Christmas Cards

This falls under the category of "buy off season".

I just got out of storage my box of blank Christmas cards, to find two boxes of beautiful, new gold foil embellished cards, bought at half price a day or two after Christmas last year (regularly $16 per box, marked down to $8).

I'll use these ones this year, and you guessed it... buy more a day or two after Christmas this year...
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Old Navy Online Sale

Here's a link to an area of Old Navy's website, where you can browse for gifts by categories:

http://www.oldnavy.com/browse/division.do?cid=5360

You can then specify your search further by price, where the items shown appear to have been marked down. There are also pages that say sweaters are 40% off this weekend.

Happy shopping!
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At The Mall Today...

I was at the mall today and lucked into a sale at The Children's Place - everything in the store was 30% off. I signed up for their store card and got an additional 10% off, for a total discount of 40%. Not bad. I bought some clothes for the kids for Christmas.

I then went to Old Navy where they were having at 50% sale - but on only some of the items. I found a pair of pants that I liked for my daughter, but they weren't marked down. I thought I'd ask anyway, and made a firm decision to not purchase them if they weren't marked down.

I asked the cashier (who overheard me tell my friend I wasn't going to buy them unless they were marked down) and she told me that they had a "promo discount" of 25%. Hmmm. I bought them, all the while wondering if the discount would have been applied if I hadn't asked about it...
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It Pays To Compare Prices

I'm lucky I'm a numbers nerd (lol). A lot of people, my hubby included, don't have the time or patience to calculate and compare per unit pricing.

Today I went to Shopper's Drug Mart, specifically for a couple of their "limit 4" sales items. Any time a store has a quantity limit, it's usually a good price, designed to get you in the door. If you can leave with only four of the "limit 4" items, you're bound to come out ahead.

Today's Shopper's "limit 4" sale was on toilet paper. I bought my four packs of 12 rolls for $3.99/pkg., and went fleeing for the exits, ignoring all the pretty Christmas displays... (!!! Ahh!!! Christmas shopping :-)

I got home and did the math, and sure enough:

Shoppers: $3.99 for 12 2ply rolls (352 sheets, ttl 4224) = $0.000944 per sheet
Costco: $19.89 for 36 2ply rolls (425 sheets, ttl 15,300) = $0.0013 per sheet

Good to know...
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Photo Calendar Sale

I usually order photo calendars every year as Christmas gifts, and the best price I've found so far was $14.99 each.

Until this year that is: Staples Copy and Print is having a "buy one get one free" sale. That means their highest price calendar, the "deluxe", which is regularly $20, is now $10 (if you buy two of course). This promotion ends November 28th.

The net results of that is this year I was able to get one MORE calendar than I got last year, at HALF the price that I paid last year.

Works for me!
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Tackling Credit Card Debt

Here's a tried and true method for dealing with credit card debt that many have had success with. I thought I'd review it here for anyone who hasn't heard of this method or tried it themselves yet:

1) Pay the minimum on all your cards except for the one with the highest interest; on that one pay as much as you can.

2) Once that highest interest card is paid off, take that money that you were paying on it and apply it to your card with the next highest rate.

3) Continue on down until all the cards are paid.

This is assuming, of course, that you're not charging more on the cards than you're paying... if you're not, then it's an organized, sure fire way of definitely paying them all off.
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Organizing Coupons

One of the deterrents I faced to actually using the coupons I had so meticulously clipped was the fact that I could never find the ones I needed while in the store. I finally came up with a simple system that works for me:

1. Sort coupons into piles by BRAND
2. Paper clip each pile
3. Put the piles in an order that works for you (alphabetically, by product type) and store them in a zip loc bag in your purse.

Voila! If you see Tide on sale, you flip through the clips until you get to your Tide coupons. I tried clipping by product type but found it faster to clip by brand, because by brand is usually how the coupons are redeemed.

For those of you who are interested in a more sophisticated system, there is a neat product called The Couponizer, featured in this post at www.homewiththekids.com.

Happy shopping!