This wasn’t actually the lowest price tag for a house I heard this year as another person was literally giving his away for free. I just a saw a news segment today that talked about a lady who is selling a fairly old fashion home that has been restored in some ways for a $1.

The stipulation was that she did not want to just sell it to just anyone fear that the buyer will simply destroy the old home. Therefore, whoever buys it has to agree to spend the necessary money to take the house off the land while spending the necessary money to revitalize it if warranted.

Simply moving the house alone was said to be about $100,000. The thought of having to abide to various restrictions like that in purchasing a home doesn’t exactly seem appealing in my view. While I’m not sure if this qualifies, apparently there are things like government grants where owners of very old style homes like these can receive free money to help restore them.

I kind of wondered why the current owner didn’t look into something like that as during the report it seemed like the reason she was selling was that she didn’t have the money to restore it. Then again, maybe she did and that part was left out.

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I was having an interesting conversation today with a person in regards to choosing partners to do business with and one main point that came up was to focus on one another’s core values. This was very true I thought as a lot of times people focus on one’s skills or financial capabilities as the determining factors to partner up with someone.

Really when you think about it, focusing on the other person’s values instead can pretty much tell you immediately what the venture will be like afterwards. For example, some people believe that the way to go in growing a business is to grow with your cash flow and work with that. Whereas some believe you need to go all out financially in the beginning.

Little things like that alone can tell you so much about one’s vision, financial management style, risk assessments and so fourth. This is even true for jobs I’d say. The person with the best attitude and values that match what you are looking for is usually a lot better than a person that is the complete opposite but has the best skills.

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Over the week I was interested in finding an activity partner to do some martial arts before I get rusty from not practicing. Now normally the first thing that comes to mind is to join a club or school and pay some kind of monthly membership fee. Instead, I went looking at some free classified ad listings online within my area to see if anyone was looking for a person to train with too.

Fortunately, I was able to find someone and it was great that he was willing to teach me an art that I was actually interested in before too as he mentioned he needed someone to practice with and so money wasn’t really a factor.

At the same time, I was just looking at other listings for other topics and it’s amazing how many service/skill exchange requests are out there. For example, the most common ones were language exchanges which in many ways can make more sense than say spending money for a casual one month course. As well, there were also professional service exchanges such as photographers looking for film editors and vice versa.

I guess the main drawback to this is that you can risk meeting some crackpot, but I guess that is true even in a commercial style setting and so due diligence is needed. Pretty decent and fair way to save money though.

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A lot of companies usually offer people some type of discount or special benefits to entice new customers to do business with them. Very common examples are stores that give you say a $10 coupon that can be placed towards your first purchase.

Recently, I was reading about a person who was willing to go the extra mile by literally creating a new account every time for a particular online vendor in order to get the new customer discount. The only real difference in information would be things like a different e-mail address and in some case the person would ask friends and family members if she could use their billing information instead.

Going a little too extreme I think. I personally always saw discounts like that as more of an incentive/gratitude to risk trying out a new place as oppose to a vehicle to save money, so to speak. Kind of like a store giving first time customers a free bag of some sort. Seems kind of wrong to keep taking in that fashion.

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A topic came up the other day where a person was telling me how he didn’t get how one of his competitors was able to offer pretty much the same computer related service that he did at such a lower price. His price was more expensive and he barely made any profit on it as is.

We then started to talk about some of the more questionable ways businesses are able to provide products or services at what appears to be a low price and a great deal. Some of the following came up in our discussions:

1) Outsourced Cheap Labor – This is probably the most common method people are aware of as when companies hire cheap outside labor they can in turn put a cheaper price tag on the product and still make a decent profit. Example, if you ever phone a customer support line where the person doesn’t seem to quite grasp the native language of the area then odds are the company is using cheap labor.

2) The Practice of Overselling – A lot of service providers often oversell its actual service capacity in an effort to lure people into believing that they are getting a great deal for the price. This is very common in the low end web hosting industry.

For example, you may see a provider offering you this package stating you get say 50 gigabytes of space for only $3.95 a month which seems great compared to everyone else. Essentially, they know that most people will never even come close to using that much and so it is basically a marketing ploy to get you to sign up.

3) Knock-Off Products – This is probably another more common knowledge factor where if you see some place that appears to sell the exact same brand of product at an extremely lower price there are chances that the product isn’t genuine.

4) Restrictions To Prevent You From Fully Using It – More times than I can count, a lot of companies who claim to give you a lot for a low price often place these restrictions and bottlenecks that we often overlook. As a fictional sample, let’s pretend that we need a lot of specially filtered water and a company agreed that you can get up to 150,000 gallons of water from them each month for $300.

On their guides and restrictions, they indicate that the dispenser you must use to get the water is able to dispense 100 gallons of water an hour. If you think about it, even at 24 hours a day for thirty days that means at max you can only get 72 thousand gallons of water. You’d be surprised how common this practice is used.

5) Selling Demo Goods and Products – This might sound off the wall, but sometimes certain companies sell to the end consumer products that were either given to them for free or at a heavily discounted price for the sole purpose that they were suppose to use it as a display or learning tool.

I remember when I bought a printer from an online vendor back in the earlier Internet days the price for the product seemed to be cheaper than everywhere else. To my surprise, when I actually got the printer it came with all these manuals and stickers on how to set up “this demo model” for display at a store.

Those were just some of the things that we were aware of personally. There probably are a lot of other methods used out there and so it never hurts to become savvier about the things you buy.

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