Frugal People Don't Buy On Credit

So, how are you at Monopoly? Ever played? Any good at it?

Imagine we change the rules a little bit. Imagine if, when you played Monopoly, every time you passed go, you gave the bank the $200. Not the other players. Just you.

How long do you think you would last in the game playing like that?

Well, using credit cards and other forms of interest is like playing monopoly that way.

Not only are you paying the price for whatever you're buying, but the interest that you're paying on top of the purchase prices is like tossing money away, jacking up the prices of everything you've bought.

Just like in the crazy Monopoly game I described above, people who regularly use credit to make purchases are unnecessarily inflating the prices of everything they buy, tossing a little bit extra away every month that could have gone to other things or been saved.

Saved money earns interest instead of costing it. It's better to know about savings products like CDs, money market accounts, and other savings products than it is to learn about great credit card deals or how to float a balance between cards to keep an interest rate low.

That's like getting the bank to pay you the $200 plus some every time around the board.

Now that would be how to get ahead in Monopoly.

And it's the secret to getting ahead financially in real life.

Get Money And Save Money With Inbox Dollars

There are a ton of rewards programs out there on the internet that give you "points" for buying products or participating in offers.

Inbox Dollars cuts straight to the quick and gives you cash. Long story short, they share some of the incentive bonus they get when you buy products from one of their sponsors, so for you it works out like getting discounts or rebates of up to 15% off the products and services you would buy off the internet anyway.

For example, if you're a regular iTunes purchaser, you can get 5% of every iTunes purchase back as cash through Inbox Dollars. If you were to get the NetNanny internet filter, you'd get 15% of your purchase price back.

They also offer specials where you can combine discounts with cash back to get even bigger discounts. For instance, at 411 Inkjets, they offer 12% cash back. Plus, they have a deal going for 5% off your order. So that works out to even bigger savings!

They also give you a few cents for every email you click on, whether you purchase the product or not, and you can get a dollar for completing surveys as well. So there are ways to make money even if you don't buy anything.

Plus, they'll put $5 in your account just for signing up.

They've also got a "Get Paid For Playing Games" feature, but I don't recommend it. It's one of those pay-to-play deals where you can win money for playing games, but they pay you based on how much money you put in, not how long you play. It's something like 5 cents for every dollar, so I don't recommend it, since losing a dollar because somebody's better than you at Bejewelled isn't any way to make 5 cents.

But the paid emails, paid surveys, and cash back for shopping programs all work fine.

Save Money With Half.com

Okay, this is a serious one. This has been one of the biggest ways we've saved money in our family over the last couple of years. We never, ever pay full price for books or DVDs. We get deep discounts on both of them. We get them from half.com.

Half.com is owned by Ebay, and it's sort of the same principle. People who have stuff log on to half.com and register it. Rather than having an auction, like on Ebay, they just list the condition of the book and the price. Then, you log on looking for whatever you want to buy. When you find a combination of price and condition that suits your fancy, you buy it.

The good news is, the more popular the book or the DVD, the more of them there are out there, so the cheaper the price is.

And it's not just DVDs, CDs, and books--they've also got video games and electronics.

This is the used book place I swear by. The other advantage they have is that you can combine shipping if you buy more than one thing from the same seller, and they make it easy to browse the seller's store for other products you want. Keep that in mind as you're looking at products--one store's products might look a little more expensive, but if you can combine shipping it can sometimes bring the total cost down.

Have fun looking for deals!

Check out eBay's Half.com for great deals on books, CDs, DVDs, electronics, computers, PDAs and more. Save Big!!

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