This catchall category covers general services (eg drycleaning, etc.), electronics, office services and supplies, pets and transportation.
While we would never say no to getting a great deal, we do think that unless you are in the market for something specific and you know for sure that it will be on sale at a shockingly low price, shopping on Black Friday weekend can be a colossal waste of money and time. Read more
CHEAP & PERFECT | Say what you will about the note-taking capabilities of a laptop, smartphone or tablet, sometimes it’s more satisfying—and quicker—to write stuff on actual paper. For me, jotting works best on notebooks that are both attractive and quirky, and the best selection of these kinds of notebooks I know of is at Daiso, my favourite dollar-style store. Read more
SAVE TIME & AVOID STRESS | Anyone who has ever packed up their belongings to switch dwellings doesn’t need to take the Holmes and Rahe Life Changes Scale Stress Test to know moving is stressful. Anything that makes moving house easier has our stamp of approval, which is why we love FrogBox, the company that delivers reusable plastic moving boxes and supplies to your old home (or office) and then picks them up at your new one. Read more
BUY RIGHT | Supermarkets everywhere contain aisles full complex and sexy (the Method brand comes to mind) home and laundry products all claiming maximum cleaning efficiency. Would that everything their manufacturers said about them were true. Then again, there isn’t much any of these companies could say about their liquids and powders that would sway us away from our arsenal of basic, inexpensive household cleaners. Why make a switch when every one of them is a miracle worker—every time out.—Team Frugalbits Read more
SAVE TIME & EFFORT | What’s on your bucket list? Exotic travel? Learning how to play an instrument or speak a foreign language? What about creating a digital inventory of the gazillions of snapshots and slides you’ve got stashed in drawers and boxes around your house? That fun (hahaha) undertaking is on my list for posterity (plus iPad) reasons but was buried near the bottom until a recent article in the NYT persuaded me to push it to the top. Written by my tech journalist crush Farhad Manjoo, it outlined the various options for converting all manner of old media—photos, videos, cassette tapes, paper documents—to new digital versions. Yeah! Just what I’d been looking for, a relatively painless not-so-expensive fix. Read more
BUY RIGHT | After squeezing the last bit of paste from the only tube of toothpaste in our house last week, I rushed out and bought a replacement at Shoppers Drug Mart. The next day I was cruising through WalMart, a store I seldom visit, when I noticed my toothpaste brand was regularly priced at $1.25 a tube cheaper than at Shoppers. That’s a considerable savings, so I made a mental note to return in the future and stock up. I didn’t buy any that day because I already had some at home.
Gretchen Rubin, The New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Project, coined a term for people like me. She calls us under-buyers, and she knows one when she sees one because she’s an under-buyer too. Read more
WASTE NOT | It all started with my first highlights. My stylist swung me around to the mirror for the reveal, and I basked in the glow of my glorious, glittering bangs, confident I would gleam forever in a radiant halo. Then he pulled me back to earth with a thump: “You’re going to have to stop washing your hair so much.” My wise stylist explained that daily washing strips the hair of colour and leaves it dull and dry.
I’d spent big bucks on my hair and was determined to protect my investment, so I cut down on the number of times I washed, and I revisited everything I thought I knew about shampoo. Instead of Shampoo, Rinse, Repeat, it became Shampoo, Rinse for me, all the way. Then one day it occurred to me—not only was my hair looking just as good or better, my shampoo budget had been cut in half. Read more
SAVE TIME | Everyone has their own idea of Hell On Earth, but sorting a year’s worth of scrunched up cash receipts spilling out of plastic bags and bureau drawers is a one-way trip to bookkeeping-Hades for pretty much anyone.
I’ve tried various organizing and recording methods, but my favourite is NeatReceipts, a mini “scanalizer” that reads, records and analyzes data from both sales receipts and business cards. It also allows you to print out copies with multiple receipts on a page. Read more
SAVE MONEY & TIME | Is the high and climbing price of gasoline weighing on your mind? On Saturday, the Vancouver Sun reported that over the past week the price of gas across Metro Vancouver jumped to $1.40 a litre and that locals should brace for increases as high as $1.60 a litre heading into summer (CLICK HERE for the story). Last spring The New York Times ran a practical piece on ways to save on gas with reporter Michelle Higgins recommending, among other things, that drivers download an app like GasBuddy.com to help them find cheap gas while on the road (locally try online at VancouverGasPrices.com); that they fill up with regular instead of premium; and that they check to make sure their tire pressure is right (CLICK HERE for the story).
Fabulous as Higgins’s 13 suggestions are, she neglected to mention a proven way to economize on fuel, save on time spent in traffic and reduce injuries to drivers and passengers: Avoid turning left. Read more
LIFESAVER | Everyone has their own definition of personal insanity. Mine is wasting colossal amounts of time trying to log in to all the Internet stuff—websites, social networking platforms, and software applications, whatever—I subscribe to. Experts warn us to mix up passwords to keep hackers at bay, but that’s created a nightmare for me, and plenty of embarrassing moments when I’ve needed to access key information quickly and couldn’t do it. Read more