Comments on: It’s Frugal Confessions Friday!!!

By: Mixer Shower

Mixer Shower — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 06:10:28 +0000

just like health insurance, home insurance is quite important too and should be prioritized–:

By: Frugal Confessions

Frugal Confessions — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 12:16:01 +0000

[...] operator surcharge’ anyway?). Because of this, my experience with insurance agents has been to call them every six months or so and try to squeeze extra savings out of them—mostly with success—and to ignore them at every other possible [...]

By: Bath Screens

Bath Screens — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:15:00 +0000

i always apply for home insurance whenever i bought a new house, this gives additional level of security*,”

By: Frugal Confessions

Frugal Confessions — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:09:18 +0000

[...] Your Fixed Expenses: If you own a home, you can shop around for lower home insurance, as well as fight the appraisal to your home to see if you can get your tax load lowered. If you [...]

By: CentralNC

CentralNC — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 21:57:09 +0000

I shop around for insurance at least once every 2 years and it pays off every time. In fact, we recently switched all our policies to save over $1,500/year.

I recommend to shop around once in while, because your risk profile and insurance rates may change frequently. You may be losing money by sticking with the same company for years.

A time saving tip: Keep a document with the informacion you need to get quotes (coverage amounts, deductibles, driver license #’s, vehicle VIN #’s, etc.) That will allow you to get quotes from many companies in a short time. I set aside 2-3 hrs. to get quotes from several companies in one shot.

By: Crystal

Crystal — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:20:30 +0000

@Aurora
I love buying and using discount gift cards! It only makes sense if you know you need the money at a specific place in advance, but then it is awesome. I usually find great deals on Ebay, but make sure you only buy from someone who has tons of great feedback and free shipping.

We also use our Discover cash back rewards to get discount gift cards to places we’d go anyway like Bath and Body Works since we’re addicted to their hand soaps. $25 gift card costs $20 from the cash back rewards, so we are using free money to get an additional 20% off!

It works well for gifts too since you can get $25 values for $20 from a variety of places like AMC Theatres, Bed Bath & Beyond, Borders Books and Music, Gap, Staples, Men’s Wearhouse, The Container Store, Waldenbooks, etc.

You can get $50 gift cards for $45 from places like Applebees, CVS, Chili’s, Dillard’s, Kohl’s, TGI Friday’s, Olive Garden, Lowe’s, Panera, Red Robin, Starbucks, etc.

Discount gift cards bought wisely in advance completely rocks!

By: FruGal

FruGal — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:12:01 +0000

Aurora: Hello, and awesome job on the toilet! Also, I love how insurance companies will do multi-policy discounts, like car and homes together. Woohoo!

By: Aurora

Aurora — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:43:29 +0000

When we bought our house we shopped around for homeowner’s insurance and ended up switching our car insurance to the same insurance company in order to save even more on both policies!

Something I’ve done to save money recently: We knew we were going to buy a new toilet from Lowe’s for one of our bathrooms so I checked out PlasticJungle to see if they had any discounted Lowe’s gift cards. It seems like their selection for some stores varies and changes quickly, but I was able to find gift cards worth about the same as we planned to spend, for an 8% discount! On top of that, I signed up for an email that got us a 10% off coupon, and since we live in PA close to the Delaware border we decided to drive a couple extra miles to the Lowe’s in DE where there is no sales tax, which saved us another 6%! All in all I calculated that we saved around $45 for my efforts. The only other thing we might have been able to do if we had bought from a different store, would be if we bought it online though ebates but selected a “store pick-up” option (unfortunately Lowe’s isn’t on ebates!)

By: FruGal

FruGal — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:39:48 +0000

BluSky: Thanks for your information as well! That is awesome that you shopped around on car coverage, and you’re right, it’s utterly amazing that comparable coverages can be so different in prices…

By: BluSky

BluSky — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:18:56 +0000

Hmm. My homeowner’s for my house at the beach (I rent with my brother here now) is about $560 for coverage of $123k. It’s the seperate windstorm policy that is a killer but well worth it. It goes up for sale today if anybody wants to buy it Definitely shop around for any insurance policies though. Recently for my car, there was over a $300 gap between the highest and lowest quotes for a 6 month policy for coverage that was virtually identical. That’s $600 a year! What was unexpected is that the lowest quote came from State Farm while the highest came from Geico.