frugal underground

Ever seen those commercials for MagicJack?  You know, the ones where they’re offering you phone service for about $20.00 a year.  I see them a lot, and I keep thinking about getting one, but I always end up deciding against it.  However, seeing as they are so cheap, I thought it might be a good idea to explain why I’m writing on a site like this, and not taking advantage of something that seems so frugal.

I admit, these are my reasons, and they may not apply to everyone’s situation, but I think it’s worth going through my thought processes to see why sometimes what appears to be the most frugal alternative isn’t always the best one.

I should also mention that I haven’t actually used the product – but I don’t think that matters in this case because my reasons for not using it have nothing to do with the quality of service – and everything to do with the circumstances of our household.

Let’s start with a simple description of the device:

At base it looks like a fat USB key with a phone jack. In spirit it’s almost like a reverse modem.  You plug the device into a spare USB slot on your Windows (XP or Vista) or Mac computer, and use its internet connection to access the telephone network.  You can get a local number in many areas, and once it’s up and running you have a perfectly usable phone as long as you have an internet connection:

So, why didn’t we take advantage of it?

(Answers after the cut) Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 11% [?]

Quick question; how many grocery store discount cards do you have in your wallet?  Or on your key-ring if you’re like me and carry them there?

I have three on my key-ring: also a drugstore cared and two bookstore cards.  We’ve joined other discount clubs, too; these are just the ones I keep with me all the time. In case you haven’t guessed, I believe in membership discounts.

As we all know, membership discounts come in two kinds:  free and paid.  The biggest difference (apart from the annual fee) is that companies that offer paid memberships may not sell your data, and those that offer free memberships almost certainly will.

So, before you sign up for one of these cards that’s one thing may want to consider.  Do you mind having your data out there?  It doesn’t bother me, but there are some people who refuse those cards on principle, just because of the data collection.  One thing you can look into is seeing if they will issue an anonymous card without you revealing personal information.  Not all stores will do this, but I was able to sign up for a card at Albertson’s in Washington State without providing any personal information.  Wegmans in Virginia went to the other extreme and wanted a drivers license number.

Personally I would recommend signing up for every free discount card you can find.  It only takes a few minutes and the savings more than outweigh the effort.  My most recent receipt from one of our local supermarkets (not where we do most of our shopping) shows that we’ve saved over $220 this year at that store alone.

They also offer gas discounts:  every hundred dollars you spend there earns you a $0.10 per gallon discount on fuel at their gas pump.   You earn points over a period of six weeks or so, and can redeem them any time up to about two weeks after that period ends.  It works for us.

Paid cards are a different story:  Any time you think about signing up for one of those you should sit down and to the math first.  For example, a Books-A-Million membership costs $20 a year and gives 10% off everything in the store (and an additional 10% off the already discounted price on their website.)  If you spend less than $200 a year on books it’s probably not worth it.  I belong to a group that meets there every Wednesday morning, so I’ve probably saved the price of the membership on coffee alone.

As a reward for anyone who has read all the way to the bottom of the this post I’m posting a couple of links for Borders members.

First this coupon offers 25% off your entire purchase.

Second this one offers $100 off a Sony Reader.

Both coupons expire on June 14th and the Reader coupon is only valid in stores, not on the website.  I used the Reader one Tuesday night, so stay tuned for a post on saving money with eBooks.  There’s also a 20% off your entire purchase coupon floating around out there, but I didn’t see the point of posting it when there’s a better one.

Happy Frugaling.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Most of us have cell phones, many of us have teenagers:  put the two together and you have a recipe for a never-ending hole in your bank account.

Being frugal is about making smart choices; being a teenager is about making the mistakes you learn from later.  The two don’t go together.  But teens and cell phones do go together, and if you make the wrong choices you’ll be the one paying for their mistakes.

I used to work for a cell phone company, and part of my job was resolving billing problems.  I still remember the time a woman called up with a tiny little problem.

Her bill was several thousand dollars larger than normal.

It seems her son had been downloading pornography to his cell phone with predictable results.  Unfortunately there wasn’t anything we could do for her, but there are a few things I can suggest that might prevent it from happening to you.

So follow me past the cut and we’ll talk about various ways to be frugal with your teen’s cell phone bill.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 11% [?]

I know I just posted about Dreamhost’s deal yesterday, but today I’m going to post about a completely different kind of web host, and the permanent deal they offer you.

NearlyFreeSpeech.net is a very unusual host. To start with, they don’t offer any hosting “plans”. They do something that’s almost unheard of instead: they charge you for what you actually use. Specifically, they charge a penny per megabyte of storage you need each month (this covers the files you put on their system) and a dollar per gigabyte of traffic (the “traffic” is the amount of information your website sends over the Internet to reach your visitors—the more visitors you have, the more traffic).

Let’s do a little compare-and-contrast. Dreamhost offers a truly insane amount of storage space and included traffic. 99.9% of people will probably never use the full capabilities of this account.

For example, let’s look at my usage. I wanted to see how NearlyFreeSpeech would shake out for my actual sites, so I looked at my stats for storage and traffic over the last few months. Right now, I’m holding pretty steady at about 77 MB of storage each month. Since I’ve been a Dreamhost customer (around 7 months), I’ve used about 4.5 GB of traffic. I didn’t sign up for a really great deal with Dreamhost, but it’s not bad at $7.95/month. That’s about $56 over the time I’m looking at.

Now what would this cost me at NearlyFreeSpeech? Let’s look. 77 MB/month * $0.01 = $0.77/month. 4.5 GB (not measured per month, just total) * $1 = $4.50. My total for the last seven months would be $9.89.

Now beyond cost, there’s another upside. Because I’m paying for actual usage, it is definitely in the best interest of NearlyFreeSpeech (hereafter refered to as NFS) to keep my site up and running. All hosts try to keep sites up, obviously, but NFS has an extra motivator: if my site’s down, they stop earning money. If no one can visit my site, I don’t pay for traffic. NFS has every reason to try very hard to keep my site operating.

Similarly, if my site takes a long time to load, visitors won’t necessarily wait around. If they leave, again, I won’t be paying for traffic, and NFS won’t make money. So you can also bet that they care deeply about keeping equipment modernized and optimized, and will rapidly look into any issues that are hurting the performance of sites.

From a technical standpoint, I’ll also point out that NFS has a very sensible load-balancing setup designed to keep both slowness and outages to an absolute minimum.

Obviously, I think NFS has a lot of “pros”. There are a few “cons”, though.

First, they don’t seem like a “hand-holding” kind of company. They expect their setup to appeal to people who have some experience with web hosting, so while I hear that provide great tech support and a members forum, I would sincerely doubt that they have a lot of “touchy-feely” tutorials or techs. If you’re starting from scratch, and have never done the web thing before, and don’t have a web developer helping you, another host might be a better option.

Second, there are some technologies they don’t support. These are clearly stated in their Frequently Asked Questions and include (sorry for the geek-speak!) SSL, FastCGI, cron, and Ruby on Rails. If you want something outside of normal hosting, you should make sure you read the FAQ before signing up. (Actually, it’s a pretty entertaining read, regardless…)

Other than those two items, I see no downside. When my contract with Dreamhost runs out, I’ll be moving my sites to NFS.

I know this was a pretty nerdy post, so please, if you’re confused-but-curious, or have questions, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help you out!

Popularity: 31% [?]