Always Take the Free Stuff - Discounts

A friend of mine from college had a saying he repeated like a mantra. “Always take the free stuff.”

For him, that meant things like maps, information booklets and brochures from places he’d visited; a couple extra napkins at a fast food restaurant; free samples in a grocery store or a food court; the pens, pencils and notepads hotels set out for their guests; even promo items like basic solar calculators, tape measures, earphones, golf tees, cable ties and any trial-sized food, products, or OTC medications that various businesses wrote off as advertising.

Admittedly, he was a gamer, so much of this ended up in his backpack as supplies. The informational content almost always added whole new levels of detail to his games. Another of his favorite sayings was “I’ll file that under I, for I might need that someday.” Ok, in the end, he was a bit of a hoarder, but that’s different story.

He didn’t steal anything; he just took what was freely offered. Although he was not above smuggling out a particularly amusing phonebook, say from a place like Waycross, GA (“where there is absolutely no reason to be bored”), which he knew would be replaced. He used them to create encounters and as random name generators. Sadly, this is what we were reduced to in the dark ages before the internet.

The funny thing is, there are always a ton of things being given away in a capitalist society, and tons of discounts if you know where to look for them. Karen has picked up more cool swag from conferences she’s attended than I’ve ever seen. And if you can con someone into giving you an official tour of their business (which many are more than happy to do), they basically throw this stuff at you in hopes you’ll remember them if you need them.

After the last essay, you were probably wondering how we generated some of that extra cash to pay off the mortgage. Prepare to be bored by basic math for the next few thousand words in a way you haven’t been since second period in sixth grade.

Ok, remember way back in the essay where I talked about my second financial lesson in college? Of course not. Here’s a quick refresher.

I had just moved into an on-campus apartment and cut out the cafeteria meal plan to save money by cooking for myself. Most of us know that cooking at home is cheaper (and healthier) than eating out almost anywhere. Anyone can learn basic cooking if they apply themselves. Even children can learn to cook. It’s a survival skill I highly recommend. And the longer you do it, the better you get.

But that’s not what this essay is about.

At the time, I had two roommates. One cooked, one didn’t. The one who did taught me a trick for stretching a food budget that I’ve never forgotten. Buy meat in bulk and freeze it. Meat is generally the most expensive staple in a grocery bill, at least if you are an omnivore like me (sorry vegetarians but Nyala says your food is what our food calls food). Next is fresh fruit and vegetables, though as an interesting aside, flash frozen fruits and vegetables are nutritionally equivalent to fresh because of the way the technology and the supply chain works.

In the apartment I had to split the space in a regular fridge freezer with the roommate who cooked, which wasn’t really a problem as I was still working out the kinks of my system. The year after he graduated, I ended up with three roommates who didn’t cook so I had almost all of that little freezer to myself. I bought in bulk, which shaved about 10% off the price of meat per pound.

10%, that number should ring a bell. Yup, the S&P return number I keep harping on. But I didn’t know that at the time.

I dumb lucked into some of that savings because I basically hated grocery shopping. Not the act itself, just the time it took. I would only go every four to six weeks and stock everything into an overflowing cart. Which meant bulk buying worked for me on two fronts. Synchronicity.

Since those days of yore (when someone would just kill the mastodon and slap it on a glacier), I’ve continued and refined that approach.

After we moved into the house, the first appliances bought after a washer and dryer (because laundromats are the devil’s waiting room) was a small chest freezer. It cost $250.

I am what I call a lazy cook. Left to my own devices I eat pretty Anglo-Saxon basic (meat, veg, starch at the time, which is now meat, veg, salad). Combined with my aversion to spending time grocery shopping (only countered by my aversion to eating out), which got somewhat worse once I had a career, I still liked to stock up. The chest freezer meant we could.

I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow history lesson and just tell why it was perhaps one of the best investments we’ve ever made. In fact, we still have and use it over twenty years later. The same one, never replaced. Remember way back in another essay when I mentioned Kenmore? Yeah.

The savings this 5.5 cubic foot freezer generates currently works out slightly differently than in college. While we don’t buy bulk packages as much anymore, we still stock meat in quantity. Because we always have a running stock, we can be picky and only buy it on sale. Saving $1/pound or more on chicken that normally costs $5/pound works out to a 20% savings (no, we aren’t buying the cheapest meat anymore). That’s a hefty discount. With Buy-One-Get-One, it gets even better. Lamb shanks, salmon, pot roasts, ducks, turkeys, all that stuff goes on sale at one point or another. And it easily keeps until we need it. Because we have enough stock to see us through, all we have to do is keep notes on what we’re low on and wait for a sale.

The only time we run down the freezer is leading up to hurricane season so that if we lose power for several days, we don’t lose several hundred dollars of meat.

As well, we can make and freeze soups and stews and lasagna all winter which we can then thaw when we don’t really feel like cooking. Karen calls it our “fast food”. As I said, I am a lazy cook. Which means the best countertop appliance we own is a crock-pot. That allows us to brown some meat, chop up a bunch of veg, throw it all together with some stock, wait a few hours, and presto. A hearty Anglo-Saxon meal. At least when served with fresh bread.

Which is another thing that gets stocked in the freezer. Every few weeks, Karen bakes a batch of bread that she makes into little two-person loaves. Mostly now we have it for breakfast but occasionally we have it with dinner. The discount of her baking over buying (multigrain, no additives, no preservatives) adds up. As does her making fresh yogurt, but that we store in the fridge.

Anyway, you get the point. This little freezer was one of the best investments we ever made, easily paying for itself a thirty-fold or better over the years with the discounts it allowed us to capture on stuff we normally buy. Which freed up the fridge freezer for larger bags of frozen veggies.

Say that generates $25 a month, which might be a little low. Doesn’t seem like much, maybe not worth going after. But that’s $300 a year, which for us is a better way of looking at it. $300 is money I can work with.

Next up in the grocery aisle is coupons. As I mentioned in the essay on budgets, I track coupons on our bill. I never really paid much attention to coupons until the Great Recession. Boy, do I wish I had.

For a long time, we had a subscription to the local paper. I occasionally glanced at the coupon flyers but when I was working, they didn’t seem worth my time. I started clipping them after I left engineering.

Coupons are an old lady's game, right? Wrong. In the past ten years, we’ve averaged savings of about $25 a month. That’s another $300 a year. A little less when we still received the paper (the coupons easily paid for a Sunday subscription). We killed the paper several years ago because we had better sources of news. Now the only coupons we get come in the local throwaway, in the mail and in the store flyers. But until last year, that’s been enough.

For us, there are a couple tricks with coupons. First, we are somewhat brand loyal. We have brands we like, so we only cut coupons on them. Second, we only use them on products we normally buy. Just because there is a coupon on ice cream doesn’t mean I’ll clip it. We don’t normally buy it. In fact, I don’t generally want to buy it. Third, when there is a coupon for multiples, like shampoo, we stock up. Karen usually has 2-3 containers of the shampoo she likes in the bathroom cabinet beneath the sink. Finally, our grocery store allows us to combine manufacturer’s coupons with store coupons for a double discount. They also accept competitors coupons.

A funny thing about coupons. They follow the economic cycle. When times are good, you don’t find as many offered. When times are bad, you find tons on items you almost never see. When times are really bad, like the Great Recession, grocery stores offer $5 coupons off a general bill about every other week just to get you in the door.

Right now, times have gotten good enough that we only averaged about $6 a month in coupons last year. That’s way down from our peak in 2011, with a whopping $55 a month. That was $660 that year. Which paid for our flights and registration at Dragon*Con. Currently, we see more BOGOs that we take advantage of in the same way, overstocking the pantry with sale items that won’t go bad.

So on groceries alone, we came up with $50 a month or $600 a year. And that’s without considering how much cheaper it is to eat at home is than eat in restaurants. Tastier, too, in my opinion. Those savings alone would have shaved five years off our mortgage. Or been a nice supplement to a vacation. Or a little more money to invest.

Let me give you another example. About ten years ago, we started having trouble with our cable company. The upshot of it was a technician walked out of the house saying he needed to get piece of equipment and never came back. We cancelled our cable the next day, though not our internet.

Which cut our bill in half, down from about $100 to about $50. Again, that’s a savings of about $50 a month or $600 a year. But we weren’t quite ready to ditch small screen entertainment completely. We bought a digital antenna and converter box to pick up the major broadcast channels (which we only tune in for sports, and increasingly not that). As well, we picked up Netflix and Amazon Prime subscriptions (Amazon for the video content, though it comes with other perks). Those totaled $250 a year, leaving $350 extra, or roughly another $25 a month.

Initially, we weren’t certain how we’d do without cable television. As it turns out, we are happier without commercials and have more quality content than we could ever watch on just two services. And again, at over a 50% savings, which well outperforms the S&P on even the best year. That’s year over year savings, at least until the cable companies figure out how to recoup their loss.

So we are up to $75 a month in savings we can track.

Where else could we look?

Well, a couple places. Fun fact, a number of businesses offer discounts on monthly services if you pay a year in advance. Currently, our pest control gives a 10% discount. They didn’t offer it, we had to ask. Now they just give it to us every year. Again, that magic S&P number. Though it only generates about $16 a year, it’s now our $16, not theirs. As well, they offer another 10% discount on termite coverage for having pest control with them, which is a little more. And they only cost half of the previous national service we had with none of the problems.

A number of companies also offer bundled service discounts. Cable companies for things like TV, internet and phone. We used to get a 10% discount from our insurance company for having auto and homeowners through them (we still would if they were writing policies in Florida, which most aren’t). Our old AC company used to offer a deep discount to do an annual service check if we scheduled it in February ($30 vs. $80-100 in May).

Speaking of pay-in-advance discounts, the State of Florida discounts our property taxes 4% if we pay four months early. Worth if for both parties (we get a discount, they get to put our money to work early, write fewer bonds and pay less interest).

Speaking of taxes, a perk to being a resident of Seminole is free access to the workout room at the rec center. That alone is worth about $250 a year just for me, though I’ve only used it sporadically. But I wouldn’t use the gym much either. I prefer to do my Jane Fonda impression without an audience.

And speaking of insurance, the longer you initiate a policy for, the deeper your discount in general. I had friends who paid their auto insurance monthly. The difference between that and a six-month policy for the same driver is amazing. A yearlong policy, if you can get it, is even better. Companies want a guaranteed, stable revenue stream and are often willing to pay for it.

AAA gets us a deep discount on our glasses when we need new ones, which easily overcomes the $80 a year fee (we have rarely used roadside assistance but it’s nice when we’ve needed it). We also get a 10% discount on labor with our auto mechanic. It also gets us better rates on hotel rooms and cars, among other things. AARP offers comparable discounts for many goods and services with much less of an upfront fee. A few professional organizations do as well.

On the utilities front, our power company offers an energy check and duct leak test which they subsidize half of, along with an insulation upgrade, which they also subsidize. We’ve had good luck with both and have seen the savings. Though we didn’t have as good luck once I was home with their energy control program that would interrupt our AC or water heater at peak hours. Upgrading our incandescent light bulbs to LEDs and turning on every energy-saver mode we can find on our devices (especially the computer and monitor) has made a noticeable impact on our power bill. Another reason why I track kW-hrs, as I mentioned in the essay on budgets.

Similarly, a low-flow toilet in back (and fixing a leak we didn’t know existed) made a difference in our water bill. The crossover-point there is probably a long way in the future, but the work had to be done regardless.

On the travel front, both our old employers allowed us to register and keep our frequent flyer miles from work-related trips, as well as hotel reward points. Which has meant free airfare to Dragon*Con and more than one free night in the Marriott Marquis. Karen’s employer also had a discount program for employees buying computer equipment and software, 5-10%.

All that easily adds up to another $25 a month, if not more. And that’s without breaking a sweat.

So now we’ve made that $100 a month. That’s ten years off our mortgage if we still had one by paying a little extra each month. And we could do more.

But honestly, I don’t really work that hard at this. Believe it or not, I spend very little time searching out discounts, especially now. But I haven’t lost the mindset or the discipline so I do know other places I could look should I need to.

One would be trading our landline (yes, the Copper Age still persists) for the simple cell phone I started carrying in 2012 for emergencies which gets fueled by $100 a year for more minutes than I use. That change would generate $50 a month, or $600 a year (which puts what I’ve outlined here close to $2000 a year, which you will see in the future is another magic number). Even trading it for regular cell service would save $120 a year.

Another might be signing up for a rewards program on a credit card. My personal card wouldn’t generate much cash back as I don’t make many purchases in a given month, but our joint credit card might since we started putting gas and groceries on it. But I wouldn’t pay an additional fee.

Over the years, we’ve found many enjoyable entertainment alternatives. When I was unemployed and living in Maryland, their library system was my bestest friend. One of the networked libraries specialized in science fiction which meant I read more classics than I ever would have otherwise. Recently, we’ve also purchased a number of HumbleBundles for books (and comics), which have contained a lot of classic and Nebula/Hugo award winning science fiction for exceedingly low prices.

We still look for free lectures at the local university and the community college by speakers we might never have found otherwise. We ended up seeing Robert Pinsky (a US Poet Laureate) at USF one year, for only the price of gas. They also hosted a small science fiction conference with major authors every few years. I’ve written essays on watching the US Men’s Under-16 team play down in Bradenton, again for the price of gas (which gave Karen an inordinate amount of joy). Plus many museums have free or discount days once a month, or once a year. And, of course, the park behind the house is open year-round, beautiful and completely free.

There are tons of these events for little or no money if you know where to look.

In the past we’ve also had good luck with rewards programs for businesses we went to regularly. Though like coupons, they tend to offer more in hard economic times than good. Total Wine still sends us 15-20% off coupons. While we don’t drink a lot of wine, what we do goes farther, especially on bottles recommended by Wine Enthusiast that only they carry around here. PetSmart still gives us discounts on necessities for the girls. Free and it about makes our 10% rule, although a few items are now cheaper online.

Of course, now that we have a Prime membership (remember, we got it for the video content), we end up buying more there. With two-day shipping we don’t have to plan out as much or wait as long for free delivery. We end up using their music streaming service off and on, but haven’t even tapped the Prime books we can get for free on Kindle.

Which brings me to an interesting point. Membership fees. In general, I avoid them unless I am positive they will pay for themselves (like AARP) or I want the underlying service anyway (like AAA or Prime).

Some people we know find good savings in a warehouse club like Sam’s or Costco. We never went that route for a couple reasons. First, I don’t like paying an upfront fee for potential savings. I feel like it locks me in to a location that isn’t always convenient for savings I am not guaranteed to get. That’s me. Second, when we priced out various items we regularly bought a number of years ago against what friends paid for the same items at their warehouse club, we found many of those items cost more, not less. In fact, I’ve read a number of articles that break down prices between the warehouses and groceries stores. You can generate savings but only by buying very specific items or brands, usually the in-house ones. There may be other non-grocery items that overcome that, but in general we don’t buy many of those.

As well, I’m now a lot more circumspect on various rewards programs. 10-20 years ago, they were mostly loyalty programs. Now they are data-mining operations. We’ve run into more than one scam (one being run at the local mall that made the paper which Karen neatly avoided by reading the fine print). If it seems too good to be true….

Another trick Karen uses. She created a special email account to give out just for rewards programs and other places that require an email. That cuts down on traffic to her regular account and keeps it separate from her social media (which we never use for offers, contest or promotions).

I always ask myself, how much is my data worth? In general, more than they are offering. The same with setting up a credit card for a discount on a purchase, which for me just entails the hassle of cancelling it (and a potential credit hit). Or free trials and introductory offers which automatically rollover to a paid subscription unless you cancel. No thanks.

Simplicity.

It’s easy to get carried away with all this and either spend more time or money than it’s truly worth. I always try to understand a rewards program or discount before signing up for it. We only tend to buy things that we want or need, not because they look cool and someone is giving such a deep discount. As I said in another essay, that is the easiest way to control our spending. And in general, we never pay for the privilege of receiving a discount.

In other words, we always take the free stuff, unless it’s not really free. 


© 2019 Edward P. Morgan III  

-->