Get Rich Slowly

If you’re new here, you may want to learn what this site is about. I encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!We received a Costco coupon book in the mail today. Costco — a membership warehouse store — has very low prices and generally does not take coupons. A few [...]

Marshall Loeb at MarketWatch recently shared some tips for online coupon clipping:
A recent study by comScore, an Internet information provider that tracks consumer behavior, found that 53% of consumers say they regularly visit brand Web sites to find promotions.
Visiting a manufacturer’s web site is a great way to find coupons (or other promotions) for products [...]

Yesterday morning was a rough one for me. It’s a day I both dread and crave every year: Steve Jobs’ Macworld Conference keynote address. I’m a Macintosh fanboy from way back, and as other Mac fanboys can attest, there are few things more dangerous to our wallets than new products from Apple.
In fact, there’s [...]

This is a guest post from Amanda, a Colorado tech writer and an activist for children with congenital heart disease.
I grew up poor: single-wide trailer-house, shared-a-room-with-two-sisters, garage-sale-wardrobe, government-cheese, worked-full-time-in-high-school, and paid-for-my-own-cap-and-gown poor. You might think that growing up poor would have made me frugal. Not so. While I do have an overwhelming urge to get [...]

Did you get a lot of gift cards for Christmas? Would you rather have cash? Would you rather have a card for another store? Richard O. Johnson at the fascinating Beyond Barter has created a page highlighting smart gift card strategies: how to best acquire or dispose of them.
This page offers a wealth of sound, [...]

Kris and I have been reading Unplug the Christmas Machine by Jo Robinson and Jean Coppock Staeheli. This book urges readers to escape the commercialism of the holiday season, to make it a “joyful, stress-free” time for the family. In a chapter entitled “The Four Things Children Really Want for Christmas”, the authors write:

One concern [...]

I have been swamped lately — absolutely buried. I’m busy at the box factory, busy with my blogs, and busy with holiday social activities. It’s been nearly impossible for me to juggle everything. Now I’m getting sick, and I can’t help but think it’s due to the stress.
But the stress has done more than affect [...]

This morning’s post on the pros and cons of gift cards generated some great discussion. GRS readers seem fairly evenly divided on the topic. Some of you like gift cards, but many do not. My favorite parts of the conversation were the various gift card hacks people shared:

Greg noted “You can frequently get 90-105% of [...]

There’s always a lot of fuss this time a year about gift cards. Some people love them, and some people hate them. I’m sort of in the middle.

On the one hand, I continue to believe that anything a big company wants you to purchase is probably not in your best interest. That is, if a [...]

Alan wrote to tell me about a new site he discovered. Price Protectr is a smart little web app that helps consumers save money after they’ve purchased big-ticket items.
There are lots of stores out there that offer price protection policies — when the price drops on an item you’ve purchased, they’ll refund you the difference. [...]