Avoiding Airline Fees
I hate annoying fees. Which is why I was not thrilled this morning to read that effective May 12, American Airlines is charging a $25 fee for checking a second bag in most cases (excluding international travel). That makes them at least the eighth carrier to make such a change. Alaska, Continental, Delta, Northwest, United, and US Airways have all announced similar $25 second-bag fees. Even low-cost carrier JetBlue has announced a $20 fee for second checked bag.
When I travel, I rarely check a bag — it does not matter if I’m going on a one-day trip or a two-week trip, I can usually fit everything into my carry-on bag. Unfortunately, the only time I can’t avoid checking a bag is when I’m moving in and out from school for an extended period of time (summer), when I easily fill two bags to capacity. This means that now, in addition to trying to stay under American’s 50 lb limit, I’ll have to give careful consideration as to whether or not I’m willing to pay for an extra bag — $50 round trip.
Unfortunately, with soaring fuel costs and airlines filing for bankruptcy left-and-right (R.I.P. ATA, SkyBus, Aloha, Eos…), these added fees are becoming a common occurrence. Just last month, Delta raised or added fees for an astonishing ten different categories. Its becoming increasingly important to be aware of the changing fees when flying so that you don’t get caught at the airport.
6 Steps to Avoid Fees
- Always purchase from the airline directly if possible (up to $10 saved). Travelocity, Expedia, and Orbitz are great resources for comparing airfare — however, all three charge service fees for buying tickets through them that can range from $5 to $10 a ticket. You can usually avoid this fee if you book through the airline directly. If the itinerary is all on one airline, the airline often, if not usually, will have an equal or better price. Does your itinerary have multiple airlines? Sometimes you can still book through an airline by selecting an “All airlines” search.
- Always purchase over the internet from the airline ($10 or more saved). Most airlines are now charging fees for booking travel over the phone or at ticket counters at airports. Simply purchasing online from the carrier can avoid that fee.
- Check-In Inside ($2 or more saved). Or, better yet, check-in at a Self-Check In Kiosk. Just don’t use a skycap — several airlines now charge for curbside check-in on a per-bag basis.
- Know Your Airline’s Baggage Rules ($25, $50, or more saved). This is the big one that gets most people, and it doesn’t help that the rules are constantly changing. You need to know three different types of restrictions — limits on the number of bags, size of bags, and weight of bags.
- Number of Bags - As mentioned, the big news now is that most airlines are charging for a second checked bag. The going rate seems to be $25 each way. Some will still let you have a third bag, but that will cost you even more.
- Weight of Bag - The standard baggage limit for legacy carriers — American, United, and Delta, at least — seems to be 50 pounds, which is a surprisingly easy weight to hit, especially when you’re trying to avoid the last fee. Go over the 50 lb limit on Delta, and that will cost you $80 each way. Go over it on United, and they’d like a $100 for that 52-pound bag.
- Size of the Bag - This is a less common problem, but most carriers also limit the size of the bag. If you’re using a normal piece of luggage, you shouldn’t have a problem, but its worth checking.
It is hard to stress how quickly these fees can add up, especially given that they apply each way. On Delta, now, if you bring a third bag that weights fifty-one pounds and is oversize, round trip, those fees can add up to $610.
- Know Your Carrier’s Food Policy. Or Don’t Fly Hungry ($5 or more saved) - Only a few airlines even offer snack service these days in domestic coach (Continental being a notable example with coach meals on some domestic flights) — if you’re the type that is going to get hungry, plan ahead. Most airlines are more than happy to give you some food — but for a price. You’ll cringe when you pay $3 for a candy bar on American.
Airport food is usually slightly cheaper than airplane food, but for the best value — and most healthy meal — bring it from home. Over at the Beat of Hawaii and Beyond blog, there is a very informative piece on “How To Eat Well At 30,000 Feet” that talks about how to prepare a meal for a flight.
- Know Your Change Options - Unfortunately, on most airlines, changing airline plans can be expensive after ticketing. On United, to confirm a change in advance will now cost you $150. However, these policies are not uniform and some are quite generous. On Southwest, they won’t charge you a change penalty, just the change in price (you may even get a refund if its cheaper). On American, they’ll let you make a same-day change to an earlier or later flight for $25. Even more useful on American, though, is that on most domestic fares you can standby at the airport for free same-day for an earlier flight — if there is room on an earlier flight, they’ll put you on for free.
No one likes being hit with extra fees, but with a little planning you can work to avoid them.
Anyone else have any tips for avoiding airline fees?
End of Year: The Textbook Dilemma
One of the inevitable tasks at the end of a school year is what exactly to do with textbooks. As any one who has had the pleasure of attending college recently can attest, these books are not cheap — I cringe when I think about how much I spend each semester — which makes the problem of what to do with them all the more difficult. Over time, though, I have started to figure out a system that works for me.
Sending Books Home
The first step I always take is to identify which books I might want to keep for the future. I have never found much use in keeping old textbooks with me at school — all they do is take up valuable space — so I generally pack up and ship home any books that I want to keep.
Unfortunately, textbooks are often quite heavy, which is never a good thing when shipping. Thankfully, the US Postal Service provides a special shipping rate for boxes that contain books and media only, called Media Mail shipping. It is not the fastest shipping method, but gets the job done — to ship a five pound book across the country from New York to LA, for example, would cost a little under eleven dollars using the normal parcel post, but only three and a half dollars using Media Mail.
Selling the Rest
That is usually the easy part — the hard part is dealing with the books I no longer want. I quickly learned that selling back to the campus bookstore is a terrible deal. So instead, I have generally been selling them on the internet.
Despite my initial concerns, It is actually remarkably simple to sell used textbooks online. There are lots of websites out there in this field (just try searching Google for “sell used textbooks“), but I generally stick with Half.com, which is a part of Ebay. With Half.com, the process usually goes something like this after registering:
- Select “Sell your stuff” and enter the ISBN number for the textbook
- Fill out the quality information and description, set a price, and list it for sale.
- Wait to be notified that you have a sale
Once you make a sale, you need to mail the book fairly quickly; Half.com provides you a small payment to cover shipping costs on-top of your sale price. For each transaction, Half.com takes a small commission for itself, and then the rest of your earnings are held in your account, and soon thereafter are direct deposited into your bank account. It all is very straightforward, and I have had nothing but pleasant experiences as both a buyer and seller on Half.com
Just a quick note on pricing: one of the nice things about Half.com is you get to see the range of prices at which other sellers are offering your book. Not surprisingly, the cheapest copies are what people gravitate towards, and as a result I generally will be fairly aggressively in listing my textbooks at the lower end of the price range. It may not maximize my return, but it usually results in a quicker sale.
Read more
Ryanair Airport Check-In Refund
File this under the “annoying” category. While in Europe last month, I flew a quick leg on Ryanair — one of Europe’s low-cost carriers that provides dirt cheap airfare and tries to get you by charging for everything extra they can. Ryanair also pushes you to use web check-in; if you check-in at the counter, they make you pay a check-in fee. What is annoying, though, is that if you don’t have an EU/EEA passport, you have to check-in at the airport, and thus have to pay the check-in fee. At Stansted, that fee was 3 GBP.
On the help section of their website, though, they have this section: “Where a passenger is unable to avail of Online Check-in by reason only of not being the holder of either a valid passport or a National Identity Card, issued by the government of an EU/EEA country, any airport check-in fee paid will be refunded upon application.” So, from that, due to my US passport, I should be entitled to a check-in fee refund of the 3 GBP. Of course, Ryanair provides absolutely no information on how to do this on their website.
Luckily, there is the internet, which led me to the post “WARNING: RyanAir Online Checkin” over at Less Than a Shoestring who managed to figure all of this out. Apparently, to request the refund, you need to write to them with your name, flight details, and confirmation number to:
Ryanair Refunds Dept
Ryanair Head Office
Dublin Airport
Co Dublin, Ireland
Yes, that’s right, you actually have to write in, which just makes this process even more annoying. So if you’re going to write to get the fee refunded, its probably a good idea to mail it while you’re in Europe. From the United States, it cost my ninety cents to mail the request to Dublin.
Ryanair will reply to your letter at the email address you used to book the ticket (so while I have to pay international postage, they don’t respond in kind). Frustratingly, they got back to me telling me that they needed a copy of my passport identification, and that, you guessed it, they would appreciate it if I mailed it to them in Dublin. Now, there was no way I was going to provide them a copy of my passport, but I did send them a heavily censored copy of my identification page that removes most of the private information, which should suffice.
At this point, its pretty much a matter of principle that I am trying to get this fee refunded. The current weak value of the dollar makes this slightly more worthwhile, too — 3 GBP is somewhere around 6 USD right now, so even spending two dollars to get four back seems somewhat worth it. While it probably is not worth getting worked up over a single 3 GBP fee, it almost certainly is worth writing in after a round trip (which would have TWO check-in fees) or several legs.
Bookmarked: What I’ve Found Interesting - April 24
Here are some of the blog posts I have starred in Google Reader in the last week:
- Get Rich Slowly describes “How to Stop Junk Mail in Its Tracks.” A lot of the steps listed have effectively helped me. Unfortunately, I have not yet found an easy way to take care of the worst offender in my mailbox: charities. No joking - during the last year I have received dozens and dozens of those sheets of personalized labels. I now use a template email to send to each charity I receive a solicitation from, and slowly it has gotten better, but there must be a better way…
- Living the Cheap Life asks “Is it worth it to buy an Entertainment book?.” I have to agree with Mike’s conclusion — the Entertainment book is often a good deal if purchased at a steep enough discount. For me, the movie theater discounts and the 5% American Airlines coupon pay for the book.
- Hustler $$$ Blog tells us how to get a “Free DVD Rental every Monday” using the RedBox DVD Kiosk service. I’ve used them before and it was quite a good deal — unfortunately there isn’t one convenient to me, so I’m sticking with Netflix for now. (If you do use RedBox, be sure to check out their credit card skimmer security alert).
- The Digerati Life has a recent article “Coupon Tips and Tricks That Can Cut Your Grocery Bill By 80%” that has a ridiculously long twenty-five coupon tips to lower your grocery bill. Definitely very interesting reading.
- Finally, No Credit Needed presents how “The $100-A-Day-Rule Prevents Impulse Buying.” It is a simple, but very clever, way to try to fight impulse buying and force careful consideration before purchasing.
Why Debit Cards Scare Me
I’ll be honest, debit cards scare me. I know that I am probably in the minority on this; if my close friends are any indication, debit cards are quickly replacing cash as the average student’s primary means of payment, and are perceived as responsible, safe, and easy to use. But while there are certainly benefits to debit cards, compared to credit cards, there are risks, too. What scares me?
Bankrupt Airlines
I cringed the other day when a friend bought an airline ticket home using his Visa Debit Card. Within the last month, Aloha Airlines, ATA Airlines, and Skybus have all completely ceased operations. For customers with tickets on those airlines, the airlines themselves gave no refund option — the only advice was that if you purchased using a credit card, you could contact your credit card company for a full refund. Otherwise, out of luck.
If you have the choice, you should always purchase travel arrangements using a credit card. Over at Money Blue Book, Raymond wrote an excellent post recently covering this very topic, “Always Pay By Credit Card to Protect Against Airline Bankruptcy Loss,” which does a very detailed job of explaining how credit cards offer federally-mandated protections that you just don’t get with debit cards. With a credit card, under the Fair Credit Billing Act, you can dispute charges within sixty days for services that were not delivered as agreed to, and get a full refund. With debit cards, you simply don’t have the same protections; some banks may offer more limited debit protections, but these policies are not standardized and are on much more uncertain territory.
These protections, of course, do not just apply to airlines, but also to any transactions where the goods or services weren’t delivered as agreed.
The Blank Check
The other major factor that scares me with debit cards is how they are directly tied to your checking account. Now, many people consider this to be a major positive over credit cards — with debit cards, you pay immediately out of money you currently have. However, consider the danger if you lose the card: the thief has the ability to drain all of the money in your checking account. For me, that is a scary proposition.
Most banks these days try to reassure you with zero liability protections. Bank of America says that it guarantees “reimbursement for fraudulent transactions when reported within 60 days from statement date.” Chase has a similar claim, promising that “your account will be credited by the end of the next business day as we resolve the unauthorized transaction dispute.” What is the problem, then?
The problem is that your money is still taken out of your account to start. Unless you are in the habit of checking your bank account every day, it may take a while to realize that someone has gotten your debit card number. During that time, your account could have been wiped out, and you might be bouncing checks to utilities, having debit card transactions declined for insufficient funds, or not have immediate access to that money in an emergency. Its true that in all likelihood the bank will get you your money back quickly, but you may still have quite a headache to deal with. This is where a credit card comes in handy; you always get to see the final bill before paying it.
Favorite Student Credit Card - Citi mtvU Visa Card
College students spend a lot of money. Friends of mine occasionally ask me what credit card I would recommend, and while it usually makes me cringe to say it, my answer is always the mtvU Platinum Select Visa Card for College Students from Citibank. Despite the annoying name and card design, this card has probably the greatest reward structure for college students, and has been the primary card I have used in college. What makes it special? The card offers rewards for book purchases, restaurants, good grades, and paying your bill on time.
ThankYou Points and the Citi mtvU Card
The mtVU card offers Citi ThankYou points as rewards — you can view the current catalog on the ThankYou Network website, but the best value usually comes from $100 gift cards, student loan rebates, or travel rewards. I plan on covering ThankYou Points in more detail later, but the bottom line is that if you save your points and redeem wisely, you should be able to get about $100 in rewards out of 10,000 points.
You can earn points for a variety of activities, but most significantly it offers 5 ThankYou Points per dollar at restaurants and bookstores — that is effectively a 5% reward on all your textbooks and restauraunt charges, which can be huge for a college student.
- Earn 5 Thank You Points per dollar for purchases at restaurants, fast food joints, bookstores, and selected entertainment categories.
- Earn 1 Thank You Point for every dollar spent on any other category.
- Earn up to 2,000 Thank You Points a semester for maintaining high grades
- Earn 25 Points a month for paying your bill on time (which you should be doing without any incentive!)
Maximize your money on Amtrak train travel
The subject of Amtrak came up recently in a discussion with a friend about traveling over the summer. Having spent some time on the East Coast, I have come to appreciate how useful Amtrak can be for traveling in certain situations. That being said, Amtrak is certainly not always a cheap option. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to mitigate the cost.
Book Early
Simple rule: the later the book, the greater the risk of a more expensive ticket. Amtrak ticket prices go up as seats fill up.
Discounts, Discounts, Discounts
One of the amazing things about Amtrak is that there are virtually always discount codes out there that can save money. For example, on my last trip to Philadelphia, I used a coupon code that reduced the price of our second and third tickets by 50%. While the discounts are not always that great, in my experience I have almost always been able to save at least 10% on tickets.
These discount codes are given out to various audiences around the United States, but there are several places on the internet that pull together these discounts. They often are restricted to certain track lines, seasons, or number of passengers — so sometimes it takes a few tries to find one that works. Two important caveats: first, these discount codes can in theory make it difficult or impossible to cancel and get a full refund (I have successfully refunded tickets purchased with discount codes in the past, but some codes may prohibit it — your mileage may vary). Second, while you should not run into any problems picking up the tickets at a ticket counter, I would recommend using the QuickTrak machine to avoid any questions about the discount.
I recommend checking the list of 2008 Amtrak discounts kept on the FlyerTalk forums. Otherwise, doing a Google search for “Amtrak discounts” will usually yield useful results.
Losing a Credit Card While Abroad
While I was in Germany briefly last month, I had the unfortunate experience of losing my credit card. Losing a credit card is never a fun experience, but there are certain steps you can take to quickly and safely resolve the issue:
- When traveling abroad, it is a very good idea to write down the customer service number for your credit card companies and keep it somewhere separate. Think about it: if you lose the card, you’ll no longer be able to look on the back of it for the number.
- When you lose your credit card, you should immediately contact your credit card company. Most major banks now maintain 24 hour lines, so it should not matter what time zone you are in.
- While its true that your liability is limited in the event of your card being used without your authorization, it will create far less of a headache if you get the card shutdown right away. Furthermore, your credit card company may be able to (for a fee) expedite a card to your abroad or help you immediately access money.
- Call Collect. Most banks have not only a 1-800 number, but also a direct number for use while abroad that will accept collect calls at no cost, so dial them up from a land-line phone collect and let them pay for the call (why do they do this? It is in their interest to get stolen/lost cards shut down as quickly as possible, so they want you to be able to call even if you have lost all your money).The collect call number is usually listed on the back of your card as for “Outside the U.S:”. The collect-call numbers for some banks:
- Bank of America: 1-757-677-4701 (source)
- Citibank Credit Cards: 1-605-335-2222 (source)
- Chase: 1-302-594-8200
- Don’t have your bank’s number? If you have internet access, just look it up. However, if you have your cell phone, try texting Google at 466453 — (more information on the free service can be found here). Essentially, if you text “Bank of America 12345″ to Google, it will look up in the phone listings the number for the BoA branch in zip code 12345 — calling that local branch, even at two AM local time, can get you forwarded to the general customer service number.
In the interest of full disclousure, I hadn’t completley followed my own advice — I used to keep emergency bank numbers in my phone, but had let that go — but after my experience in Germany, I’ve started following these steps again.
Hello World!
Welcome to Student Scrooge, my attempt to blog on financial frugality and common sense from a (college) student perspective. I have always had an obsession with trying to make the most of my money, through smart earning, saving, and spending, and I consider this blog a chance to share what I have learned, both my own tips as well as those from around the internet. While I hope that many, if not most, of the posts on Student Scrooge will be useful to all audiences, my main goal is to help other students with financial matters through my own experiences.
I hope to slowly pick up speed with posting on Student Scrooge, and I do hope that you stick around. Please feel free to comment on the blog or contact me through the link at the top.