The Wednesday Morning Weekly
This one will be short and sweet!
A brand new iPhone Pro costs $999 before taxes. After say 7% sales tax it’s $1068 out the door. This is quite pricey!
But for those who have a Chase Sapphire Reserve (CSR), Chase often runs specials where you can buy Apple products with Ultimate Rewards points at 1.5x, which provides a 33.3% discount on the iPhone — if you value Chase UR at 1 CPP as I do. This brings the $1068 out the door price down to $712.
The Wednesday Morning Weekly
I am frugal and I don’t travel much. The last time I flew in a plane was in 1992 for a work related convention — a round trip between Los Angeles and Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It was also the first time I had ever flown in a plane. Of all my credit cards, the primary travel benefit I make use of is the World of Hyatt transfer partner with Chase allowing us to get $150 rooms w/ free breakfast for effectively $50 per night. We do also make use of the Amex Business Platinum (ABP) $200 annual credit to fly my boyfriend’s mother out to visit every year or so, via a Southwest flight.
Many people believe the only reason to retain any Amex metal card, is primarily for the travel benefits. Now I perhaps agree with this with respect to the personal metal cards, but not so much with respect to the business metal cards. The effective annual fee for me on both the Amex Business Gold (ABG) and Amex Business Platinum (ABP) are around $100 each. Even with this one might ask me, “Why are they worth even that if you are not a traveler?”
The Wednesday Morning Weekly
(I will be brief with today’s article as I have some things going on today.)
This isn’t for everyone but it works for us. We switched from coffee & heavy cream to Walmart Great Value black tea and it is saving us $670 annually.
I have a US Bank Cash+ credit card as part of my 5%+ Customized Cashback Strategy. I use it primarily for Utilities but don’t get even close to the $2k quarterly spending cap — not even half that.
I learned from an acquaintance on RJ’s Profitable Content Pro discord channel that Ebay purchases code as MCC 5311 — Department Stores on the US Bank Cash+ card.
The Wednesday Morning Weekly
Making your own liquid stevia can be a huge money saver if you consume a lot of it. We save $453 per year making our own.
The Wednesday Morning Weekly
Our city water is very bad and we used to buy bottled drinking water from Walmart at $1 per gallon — now more recently $1.35 per gallon. It was a lot of work transporting the water and carrying them from the car each trip, not to mention quite costly over the year. Assuming a conservative 1 gallon per day, this results in $493 per year! Very pricey! We also didn’t care for the flavor as we could taste the plastic odor in it. 1 gallon per day wasn’t ever really enough for the both of us for drinking, coffee/tea & cooking. 3 gallons per day is more reasonable. This means if we consumed 3 gallons of this Walmart bottled water per day, over the year it would cost us $1479. This article shares an alternative at 2.5 cents per gallon or $27 per year for three gallons per day.
The Wednesday Morning Weekly.
A friend of mine recently told me he likes the deals where he can get 50% off dog food purchased at PetSmart — along with free shipping. But they can be hard to come by I guess because he hasn’t done them in a while.
In this article I share an alternative.
The Wednesday Morning Weekly.
This is a simple frugal hack we are using now to save around $47 dollars per year. We really enjoy discovering dozens of little hacks like these which allow us to easily, automatically and permanently save this amount of money or more per year, sacrificing nothing.
I mentioned in my recent frugality related article on Rotating Streaming Services, that I had quit Amazon Prime a while back because I was not satisfied with the increased membership price, commercials in Prime Video, the prices and quality of their services. In that article I also gave a link to a MMM forum post where many others discuss why they have quit prime as well.
Occasionally from time to time I get free month offers from Amazon. I just checked and they are offering it to me now. Are you not currently subscribed to Amazon Prime and also offered the same? You can find out as well here,
The Wednesday Morning Weekly.
This is my first post of dozens on how we save money, sharing various frugality tips I’ve learned over the years. The frugality hacks add up to thousands upon thousands of dollars saved each year when implementing them all.
I’ll never share any uncomfortable, unsafe or unreasonable hacks. For example, a comfortable air conditioned home is very important to us and I will simply work an extra bank account bonus in a given year to recoup the $200 per year we would of otherwise saved by making the home uncomfortable year round by keeping the temperatures very high in the summer and low in the winter. Not only is this frugality idea uncomfortable, it is also dangerous as well since I am older and heat intolerant with some medical conditions. It’s easy to just spend two extra hours per year to work the single extra bank account needed for year round comfort and safety. Again I try and be reasonable here and not too obsessed with saving every penny.
