More frugality from Falstaff

So since I've been on this kick of reducing debt and accumulating extra income I've been on the lookout for additional ways to make a nickel and/or reduce the cost of things that I'm buying. So read about Ebates.com on a personal finance blog and decided to check it out. Turns out that there are a bunch of rebates out there on stuff that I buy all the time, and this site will help me capture them.

For example, the chair in my home office has had it. So much so that we've thrown it out. Now I've been putting off replacing it because office chairs are kinda spendy, and with not a lot of writing work since the WSOP ended, I haven't felt like it was enough of a priority to use the cash on that particular thing right now. Well, one of my advertisers renewed for a year today, so I had a little cash, and went looking for chairs.

So I went to Ebates first, and saw that they had a 3% cash back offer for Office Depot, and a 6% cash back offer for Office Max. So off I go to Office Max, and I find that they're running a new deal where you can pay via Paypal, and get 15% cash back on orders over $100. Well, the chair I decided I wanted only cost $70, and it wasn't worth it to me to spend $30 to get $15, especially since I was already getting $4 back via Ebates. So I ordered my new chair, and that $4 will get added to my Ebates account. In 3 months, I'll get the mobneys in my Paypal account.

Yeah, $4 isn't much. But it was something I was going to have to pay anyway, and OfficeMax delivers for free, so it's not like I paid more by going online. I'm not sure how much of a change this will make in the way I shop, but I get $5 for every one of you guys that signs up, and you get $5 just for signing up. So go to Ebates.com and sign up, and maybe we can both make a few pennies. This was not a sponsored post, just an idea that I thought I'd pass along.

On a semi-unrelated note - here's food for thought: if the current financial troubles that many companies and people are experiencing cause companies to rethink their lending practices and people to rethink their borrowing habits, won't it be worth this momentary pain? I mean really, the root of it is that companies loaned money to people who couldn't pay it back, and people borrowed more money than they should have. Both parties were stupid, and if they learn from it, there's value, right? Of course, with the gubmint standing there ready to give handouts to both companies and people who did these stupid things, it's gonna be hard for them to learn from their mistakes. Maybe the gubmint should take a little more of a mama bird approach and let people fly or fail on their own merits.

Yeah, I know - if you're not a liberal before you're 30 you have no soul, if you're not a conservative by the time you're 40 you have no brain. Some smart guy said something very similar that I've moderately butchered.