I learned that owning a GPS does no good at all if it’s in the other car.
I have learned that it’s worth it to me to have one GPS for each car, and that low-feature ones are really cheap.
Category: Shopping
Shedding Some Light on Sales Taxes
For this Black Friday entry, I learned, from Dmitry, that NOT all online stores charge sales tax when shipping to a home in a state with a state sales tax! I thought they did!
So if you ship from Best Buy to NYC, you have to pay NY tax (sorry Kat!) because Best Buy has a presence in NY state. But possibly NOT for an Amazon purchase, as they are based elsewhere.
Who knew?
Really – did you know? Comment here!
Sequence is Everything
We learned this in our mall trip: Drop of the pictures FIRST! Or if you have uploaded them before you go shopping, go check on them FIRST. We also learned that you can use Best Buy as your own free internet cafe, if, for instance, you have to go resubmit your whole stupid photo order from within the mall!
Barbara’s Cocoa
This is Barbara’s cocoa. Isn’t it beautiful? She taught me that you can only get free cocoa with your Panera card IF you register it! Plus they know your name every time, automatically. That’s fun! Unless you are a privacy nut. And we are not.
Ask (again)
Although I am waiting until the end of the year of blogging lessons to look for trends, I can already tell you that “Ask” is going to be a big theme!
I needed a new kitchen timer. Just a simple countdown magnetic electronic thing. My hardware store has them for $20. Way too much! Our Big Lots store had none. So I went our local dollar-type store. They seemed like the right place for this. Nothing in the kitchen section. Nothing anywhere that I could see. I was going to give up but I asked the woman at the register and she said she had seen them somehere else. She went and found them in some random place. ONE DOLLAR!
Keep Asking!
OK so I tried to get the deal from Eddie Bauer: 25% off and free shipping if you use your card. And I had just remembered that I even had a card, so why not. Worth one more check or a few payment clicks for those kinds of savings, right? But then the website didn’t like my card. And neither did the nice lady on the phone. I asked for the 25% with my own card. She said no but she could still give me the free shipping with another card. OK, whatever.
THEN she changed her mind and said what the heck and gave me the free shipping AND the 25% off!
The year is not over, but “ask” is definitely a trend that will be showing up in the summary! Sometimes it’s little stuff, sometimes big, but there is world of difference between asking and not, I have learned.
Free Summary for your FSA
I learned, through an email from Medco, which manages my company’s prescription plan, that you can get a summary of EVERY prescription you filled all year, no matter where you filled it in America.
If you hit the right settings, you can get this for every member of your family.
This is going to save me taping many receipts onto paper to document and get back my tax-free Flexible Spending Account money! One report does it all!
I also learned that when a very popular feature such as this is announced in an email campaign, every Medco customer on earth tries it at the same time and brings their report server down. Learn to stagger, dudes!
Unwanted Catalogs Be Gone! (5 trees saved)
I learned that the Catalog Choice website has really improved since I last checked it out. This is a great way to reduce unwanted paper catalogs that arrive in the mail.
The user interface is much better and there is a global blocking feature for a $20 donation, one that should keep me from getting new catalogs. It says that I have saved 5 full-grown trees!
Check it out: http://www.catalogchoice.org
Hold the Phone
I learned that I can save $25 a month, all winter, by suspending phone service in our Ocean House.
What took so long to figure this out?????
YES I want cash back!
After a zillion years of using my Digital Credit Union (DCU) card, and thinking that they reimburse me for surcharges from other banks’ Automatic Teller Machines (or ATMs) because I have direct deposit, I learned that they only reimburse up to $5 a month for this!
The answer: If you are not at a DCU ATM (who is? I never am!) then get your cash at the register when you make a purchase.
Actually, now that I am typing this, I seem to remember Sally buying gum and getting cash. Did she already know this???
Jane's Lessons Learned 