5 tips for stretching your holiday budget

If you’re looking for great ways to save this holiday season, check out Consumer World, run by our friend and staunch consumer-education advocate Edgar Dworsky. Dworsky, who collaborated with me recently on a story on shrinking product packages, has cobbled together a list useful online services that can help you get more for your money. So for this Election Day morning, we thought we'd offer some of Edgar's good money-saving tips ...

• Get the buzz on unadvertised bargains. The best deals aren’t always widely advertised, but some sharp-eyed bargain hunters share their finds on two websites -- FatWallet.com and SlickDeals.net. Visit the "Hot Deals" forum at either site for a message board full of finds ferreted out by members. The deals listed often combine sale prices, rebates, coupon codes and other savings tactics.

• Find brick and mortar sale circulars online. Interested in a particular item but didn't save the Sunday sale flyer? Find out what’s on sale at local stores at SundaySaver.com (which links to store circulars) and SalesCircular.com. The latter allows you to select a product category like "GPS units" or "digital cameras" and then displays a list of those items with their sale prices at stores near you.

• Get in the habit of checking price histories. Just because an item is on sale, doesn’t mean it’s a blockbuster bargain. One way to distinguish a so-so sale from a great one is to check the price history of items at PriceSpider.com, which displays a graph of price fluctuations at hundreds of stores over the past six months.

• Ship gifts for less. Shipgooder.com lets you compare the price of having the store or Internet seller send the goods directly to the recipient vs. what it would cost you to ship it yourself. The site provides a comparison chart of shipping costs for your package based on weight, destination, and speed of service at UPS, FEDEX, DHL, and the US Postal Service. (And incidentally, Consumer Reports will soon release its own comparison of several of the overnight services ... more when this comes out. Tod)

• Get notified when the price drops. DealAlerter.com, a service of Consumer World, is one of a number of sites that will send email alerts to shoppers when the items they are following drop in price. Basically, you find the item you want and set at target price. The service will then automatically recheck prices daily until it finds the item at or below the target price, and notify you.

TOD ADDS: You might also check out Edgar's blog at MrConsumer.com. And by the way, we'll soon be posting the Tightwad Blog Roll and asking you to suggest other sites that might be added to it. So feel free to shoot suggestions to me at tightwad at cro dot consumer dot org.

Comments

[Flexo]

I'd also suggest dealnews.com -- they usually have a good handle on Black Friday deals (but only confirmed sales since some of the leaked ads tend to be bogus).

[Johnny Dick]

Hey Tod,

This is always an exciting time of year to find deals with Black Friday upon us.

I recently came across an article [http://www.adropofwater.net/finance/planning-ahead-there-is-always-a-sale/]. One of the things they had mentioned was to wait at least 30 days before you buy anything. With these great deals, we are definitely more tempted to drop some coin on something we may not need, waiting a bit may clear our minds.

Hope this article is helpful for everyone :)

[Ken]

Take a spending holiday from the holiday season. Buy nothing. Boom. Done.