At least today on the way to the studio it was bright and sunny. Since the tax deadline is almost up that means a lot of people are already anticipating on what to spend their tax refund on. Therefore, I talked about what I felt would be the most ideal use of these funds and that if you really insist on spending it that you may as well use the tools available to you to try and get the best deal.
My first point was if you have any kind of debt then it is probably wise to put your funds towards that. In my opinion, it doesn’t make sense for example to keep spending or even saving if you have say a credit card debt that is incurring interest charges. Like with that, it’s better to use your funds to try and wipe out any outstanding debt or liabilities first.
If you do happen to have money leftover, then finding ways to invest that money to make more is probably the most productive use of it. I was even saying, if you want to play it safe then there are always choices such as placing it in high interest savings account. Here in Canada even things like a tax free savings account wouldn’t be too bad of an idea.
For the people that are insisting in buying say a new TV or computer, it was surprising to me that a lot of people don’t use price comparison sites. These will probably make bargain hunting a lot easier as oppose to you having to search every single store manually. The two sites I used as an example was http://www.shoptoit.ca/ and http://www.shopbot.ca/. I personally save a lot of time doing research this way personally.
As well, especially with electronics the other point I made was that you shouldn’t just focus in getting the best value for big ticketed items such as the main TV unit itself. Most of the times when it comes to those little accessories such as the cables to hook up the TV’s they are heavily marked up. For example, you can often find cables that companies buy for $1 only to be resold for like $15. I don’t think anyone wants to overpay that much when you don’t have to. A lot of these price comparison tools can help you see this too.
I then dove a bit into price comparison apps for smartphone users. I know in the US applications such as http://www.redlaser.com are really popular where you can simply take a product off the shelf, take a picture of the barcode and it then tries to scan prices from various sources for you to find the best deals. As well, if you are on the road shopping don’t forget that a lot of retailers nowadays are wiling to match online prices as long as you show them proof of the price from authorized dealers.
The example I used was that there was a DSLR selling at a retail store called Futureshop here for about $450 ass you can see:
Knowing that dedicated online stores like Amazon can often be cheaper I used its price checking app and sure enough the product was cheaper by like $50.
So this is a way too where if you are at a store and want to buy it now as opposed to online, a lot of stores will actually accept that as proof and match the price on the spot. A very simple thing you can do to save money. I know there are probably a ton of other apps and sites people use, but hopefully you do take advantage of at least some of these free tools so that you can save more of your tax refund money.
Who knows, maybe looking at all the different prices may hold you off from doing impulsive purchases and instead hold off until you truly find a killer deal.