Scoring Cheap Hotel Rooms
A couple of times each year, two or three of my friends and I will end up taking a weekend trip somewhere to explore a city for a few days. We are always on foot — so always relying on public transportation — and definitely prefer to stay in the “heart” of a city for both convenience and experience. Thus part of the planning for these trips inevitably involves trying to arrange a hotel room. Unfortunately, hotel rooms in “the heart” of a city can often be quite expensive.
Sometimes I have found you can get lucky using a normal travel search engine — Travelocity, Hotels.com, Expedia, etc. — but these days I find myself frequently turning to William Shatner for help.
Enter Priceline
Well, not quite William Shatner, but the company for which he is a spokesman — Priceline.com. You may have seen their television advertisements, where they talk about “naming your own price” for hotel bookings. Priceline also offers airfare, but I’m going to focus on bidding for hotels. Priceline’s system is simple — they break their hotels into geographic categories (in New York City, for example, the categories incldue Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Times Square, Downtown-Soho, etc.), as well as star-quality rating (1 star through 4 stars).
To try to name your own price, go to Priceline’s website, click on “Name your own Price”, and tell it the city, dates, and number of rooms you are looking for. You’ll then be taken to a page where you specify which areas in your city you want to try to bid for, as well as the hotel star-quality level. You then name your own price, and click submit. Because of the auction nature of the site, you have to provide your credit card information upfront, because if the bid is accepted you will be charged immediately. If your bid is not successful, you will not be charged, and can rebid after a day or two.
Student Ticket Agencies
I needed to book a domestic flight for next month, and with such high airfare prices lately, I spent the last few days trying to find the best airfare deal. While I wouldn’t call the ticket I ultimately purchased a great deal, given the current economic climate I’m pretty happy with it, and, much to my surprise, I ultimately ended up booking it through StudentUniverse.com.
STATravel and StudentUniverse.com
There seem to be two major student ticket agencies out there — STA Travel and StudentUniverse. These ticket agencies target students and (in some cases) faculty, and employ some weak level of verification that you really are a student. In the case of StudentUniverse, my .edu school email address acted as verification . Both STA Travel and StudentUniverse heavily market international and “study abroad” travel services (flights, hotels, train tickets, etc.), but also sell domestic air tickets as well.
Trouble with STA Travel
Take this as anecdotal evidence if you will, but I ended up going with StudentUniverse partly because of the difficulty I had using STA Travel’s website, which seems to both be poorly designed and questionably functional. Read more
Earn Cash-Back For Your Online Shopping
There are a whole crop of websites out there that offer cash back when you shop at major online merchants through their site, at no cost to you.
Earn Cash-Back: A Primer
How do these sites work?
- Each cash back site, such as Ebates, maintains a long list of merchants, such as ProFlowers, Travelocity, BestBuy, Barnes and Noble, and many many more, with which they have affiliate commission agreements.
- Say you need to buy something at Barnes and Noble.com. Ebates has an arrangement with Barnes and Noble where they offer 4% cash back.
- To earn that cash back, you need to click on the link to Barnes and Noble at Ebates; when you do that, Barnes and Noble records that you came from Ebates.
- Shop as you normally would. Other than having to make sure that you complete the purchase in one session (without closing your browser window, for example), your shopping experience at Barnes and Noble will be no different.
- Complete and pay.
- Several weeks later, once Ebates has confirmed that the transaction went through and was not returned, you’ll get your 4% cash back.
It’s a win-win scenario — Ebates gets a commission for sending you to Barnes and Noble, and Ebates passes some of that comission on to you.
Cash-Back Sites
There are a whole slew of sites that offer cash back, many with initial sign-up bonuses. Some of the major ones include:
- Ebates.com – Earn $5 for free with your first purchase (If you use this link, I get $5, too)
- Cashbaq.com – Earn $5 for free with your first purchase (Again, if you use this link, I get a referral commission).
- Fatwallet.com
And many more, each with slightly different lists of participating merchants. Also, note that many airlines and hotel programs offer affiliate programs that offer rewards in the form of frequent flyer miles per dollar spent — unless you’re a frequent traveler, these aren’t the best deals — but they can be useful in extending the expiration date of your frequent flyer miles.
Comparing Cash-Back Sites
One of the most frustrating aspects of these cash-back programs is that the list of merchants is different at each site, and the same merchant at one site may have a different cash-back than a merchant at another site. Knowing which is the best cash-back site to link through is a lot easier when you use a website like RewardsDB; simply go to RewardsDB and enter the website from which you are looking for cash back, and RewardsDB will tell you the different rewards you can get at different cash back sites. Definitely useful.
Enjoy!
The Microsoft Office Burden
Term papers in Microsoft Word, lab reports in Microsoft Excel, presentations in Microsoft PowerPoint — if one set of software has become increasingly essential in a student’s world, it is the Microsoft Office suite. Unfortunately, Microsoft Office is certainly not free, and can at first glance seem incredibly expensive, especially to a student on a budget. There are steps that can be taken, however, to minimize the financial impact.
Do You Need Microsoft Office?
The first question to ask is whether or not you even need Microsoft Office. Almost every student should have an office productivity suite of some kind in order to perform various commonplace tasks; however, there are several free alternatives to Microsoft Office out there that might suit your needs just as well as the expensive alternative. Consider:
- OpenOffice – OpenOffice is a completely free product of the Open Source community. Once you get past the name differences, you’ll find an extremely powerful word processor, spreadsheet manager, and presentation designer, all of which interact almost seamlessly with Microsoft Office. For the types of tasks most students perform, OpenOffice should work great — only seriously power users of Microsoft Office products are likely to notice significant differences. Read PC Magazine’s Review or download OpenOffice at OpenOffice.org.
- Google Docs — Google Docs is a rather impressive service that operates entirely online. Google Docs can create presentations, spreadsheets, or presentations. While many of its features are still quite limited–especially its presentation service–it is becoming more and more comprehensive. In particular, it is quite strong at sharing documents with other users. It also makes it quite easy to upload or save copies to your computer. Check it out at http://docs.google.com/.
One thing to keep in mind when deciding whether or not either of these products would work as an alternative to Microsoft Office is that almost all schools provide free computer labs with free access to Microsoft Office. If that is the case for you, consider whether or not either of these services would work most of the time; if that is the case, you could do most of your work using your free alternative on your computer, and whenever you run into something OpenOffice or Google Doc can’t handle, you can run over to your computer lab.
If You Must Purchase Microsoft Office…
However, I will fully admit that Open Office or Google Docs are not for everyone, and that, for some people, Microsoft Office is a better fit. If that’s the case for you, read on…
- First, find out which Office products you need. It used to be mildly confusing when Microsoft Office came in a couple different versions. As of Office 2007, things have gotten more confusing — eight different versions! You can compare here, but for most students, Microsoft Office Home & Student will do the job, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote — but does not include Outlook.
- Check out Microsoft’s tip page for students. It has some useful information, but I think this page is more helpful!
- In most cases do not buy it with your computer. Just because its packaged with your brand new computer does not mean you are getting the best deal. The last time I checked Dell, they wanted $149 for the Home & Student version with a new laptop, which is the full price, and as you’ll see, definitely not the best deal.
- If you can wait until August, and are a student, take advantage of Microsoft’s The Ultimate Steal program. It just ended for the academic year, but the program will be back again in the fall and offers the full Ultimate Edition for $60. This is -by far- the best deal for students, so if you can wait until it returns, do so!
- Your next best bet is to check your school’s IT department for school discounts – many schools offer the full Microsoft Office Standard Suite for $65 – $70 dollars through one of their online partners like e-Academy or JourneyEd. This is the route I went, and it worked out well.
- Also, check your school’s campus bookstore – but only after checking your school’s official resources. At my school, the bookstore is not affiliated with the University, and while it offers a Microsoft Office discount, it is not as nice as what my school’s IT department offers.
- If you can’t find a suitable educational discount, you can always buy it at full retail — but check around for the best price. The full retail price for Microsoft Office Home & Student is $149, but Amazon.com has it for $110 (plus, you can use an appropriate credit card to save 5% at Amazon!)
- Finally, and this is not so much a frugality tip as an ethical one – resist the temptation to steal Microsoft Office. I know plenty of college students do this, but regardless of how you try to justify it, it is wrong. Don’t compromise your ethics.
Hopefully these tips can come in handy. Anyone else have any tips for saving on Microsoft Office?
The Outrageous Cost of Movie Tickets
Last Friday, for the first time in a long while, I went and saw a new movie in theaters (Ironman, which was definitely an entertaining, if not lighthearted, movie), and I was somewhat shocked at the amount of money simply buying a ticket cost – $10.75 for an adult ticket, with no student ticket option, and that was before any sort of concessions.
Now, I realize that ticket prices are inevitably going to creep up, if for no other reason than inflation — looking at Box Office Mojo’s list of ticket prices by year adjusted for inflation helps illustrate the extent of this creep, though (As an aside, if you are interested in the economics of movie theaters, you might want to check out a pretty interesting article from Slate, “The Popcorn Palace Economy” by Edward Jay Epstein). Since 2000, ticket prices have gone up a little over 25%, to a current estimated average price of $6.88 for the year. That is a pretty significant increase in price. What can we do?
Do you need to see it in the theater?
The obvious way to save money on movie theater tickets is to simply not go. Over at the Get Rich Slowly blog, Kevin at No Debt Plan recently had a post “Dumb Money: The Movie Theater,” assailing the movie theater experience as largely a waste of money (as opposed to seeing movies at home), listing a variety of ways where movie going is an inconvenient and sometimes unpleasant experience.
If you’re willing to forgo the theater experience for your own living room, its not hard to see how microwaving your own popcorn and loading a DVD can save money. Some tips for saving while renting:
- If you watch movies often, give Netflix a try. I have been a subscriber for years, and have nothing but positive experiences. I stick with the 1 DVD at-a-time for $8.99 a month plan (so for the price of one movie ticket, you can get a good four or five movies a month).
- If you don’t watch movies often, check your public library. My public library offers movie rentals for only a dollar or two. While the selections are often limited, libraries are often quite receptive to suggestions for new acquisitions. (Better yet, you could read a book…)
- You can also check out Redbox, the new DVD kiosk service, which offers DVDs for $1 a night. The kiosks aren’t everywhere, and they often have a limited selection, but for new releases Redbox is a great option. Plus, with creative Google searches, you can often find coupons for free rentals.
- Try to avoid renting from major chains - at my local Blockbuster, it costs almost $5 to rent a movie, which is simply absurd. Try to find a local family-owned rental store, which often have cheaper prices and much better service.
Coincidentally, Mike over at Living the Frugal Life recently posted “Never pay to rent a movie again“, which has a much more extensive list focusing on getting free movies (one recommendation that Mike didn’t include – Hulu.com, which now includes some free movies in addition to their growing selection of free television shows).
If you need to see it in theaters…
While I understand and appreciate the arguments for avoiding movie theaters, sometimes it is just too hard to resist seeing a new movie in theaters, especially one that is generating a lot of buzz and excitement — it is never fun to be culturally out of the loop (I fully plan on seeing Indiana Jones 4 in theaters, for example). Plus, there is something to be said for the movie experience. So, if you absolutely must see a movie in theaters, here are some cost-saving steps that can help mitigate the blow from ticket prices:
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