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In the final months of each year, the Big Sales come out in force. Black Friday! Cyber Monday! Singles Day! (China)
Retailers need to make their sales numbers, and they offer all kinds of bargains* and discounts to get people into their stores. It’s like a circus, a sporting event, and an IQ test all rolled into one.
I can certainly appreciate the desire to pay less for something, assuming you were going to buy it anyway. Personally, paying retail is against my religion.
In this post I review how we routinely get discounts on everything from clothes to coffee to hotels, at a time and place of our choosing. It’s all part of a master plan to Never Pay Retail Again.
I’m fairly happy with some of the successful retail avoidance moves I’ve made in the past:
- Bought bike for $50 on Craigslist. Rode for 2 years then sold for $60.
- Resold all home furniture for same price I paid for it.
- Paid $50 for $100 gift certificate. Bought $200 winter jacket at Nordstrom Rack 50% off sale (net 75% off.)
- Bought $800 worth of home supplies (bedding, cutlery, towels) for $80 at Macy’s clearance sale.
Unlike on the TV shows where people use coupons to buy 1,327 bottles of Gatorade and a 14 year supply of toilet paper for $2, these purchases were actually practical.
It is really exciting when you can make the retail system work for you. I use three main strategies.
Buy Used
Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace are great places to find slightly used items. Since depreciation does most of the price damage in the first few years, there are a ton of great quality items available for a fraction of the retail price.
Things like bicycles and wood furniture hold value extremely well after 2 or 3 years. Sometimes the original owner never even used the stuff, just storing it in a garage or a guest room.
Thank you retail shoppers for your fickle (and fiscal) ways!
Cash Back Shopping Portals
Sometimes used items just aren’t available or don’t fit the bill.
In that case, we just go to our favorite online store and have what we need shipped directly to our home. Right?
But wait!
By simply clicking through a shopping portal such as Rakuten, we can get cash back too. Nothing else changes… we buy from our preferred online store, we use our preferred credit card… But instead of getting only our items, we get our items plus $weet $weet ca$h!
Nearly every store I’ve ever heard of participates.
For new customers, Rakuten currently is giving a bonus $30 cash back after $30 in purchases.
Discount Gift Cards
Every year millions of people receive gift cards for birthdays and holidays, and promptly think, “What the hell am I going to do with this?!”
The answer for many is to sell them to a Gift Card exchange, which connects buyers and sellers. This means we can buy Gift Cards at a significant discount! 10% off is like buying a dollar for 90 cents.
There are even sites to help figure out which exchange offers the best deal.
I’m predominantly a buyer. I’ve mostly settled on Raise.com since they have a large assortment of my most used GC (hotels.com) and regularly have sales for additional % off.
This link will get you $5 off your first purchase at Raise.com
(We will also get $5.)
Stack Bonuses for Max Discounts!
We can use a combination of cash back shopping portals and discount gift cards to get significant savings.
Hotels.com
By stacking a cash back shopping portal, a discount gift card, and the hotels.com Stay 10 Get 1 Free program, we can save 20%+ on hotels.
For example:
Buy $1,000 hotels.com GC on Raise.com for $933.38 (~$67 off)
Use 1.5% cash back credit card ($14 back)
Book 10 nights at $100 each using GC (tax additional) ($100 off future stay)
Book hotels.com via Rakuten.com ($30 cash back)
Total savings: ~$211 (~21% off)
Clothing
Every once in a great while we end up in a clothing store like Old Navy or Gap, usually when they are having an end of season clearance sale.
Old Navy GCs and Gap GCs are pretty popular, and can often be had at great discount (at this moment they are 13.6% and 13.5% off, respectively.)
Since this is greater than the Rakuten in-store cash back offer (currently 4%) I would choose the discount GC. If we were to purchase online, I would be able to stack the offers.
For example:
Buy 4 $25 Old Navy GCs for $86.40 ($13.6 off)
$5 off 1st Purchase ($5 off)
Use 1.5% cash back credit card ($1.22 back)
Buy $200 clothes discounted to $100 (clearance) ($100 off)
Total savings: $119.82
(Purchase online via Rakuten for additional ~$4 cash back.)
Everyday Purchases
Even the most frugal household has regular purchases. Discounted Gift Cards can be a great way to reduce the price of things we were going to buy anyway. Here are a few favorites:
CVS Drug Store: currently 6.1% off
Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf: currently 21.5% off
Home Depot: currently 5.1% off
iTunes: currently 6.5% off
And by planning in advance, we can use these discounted GCs to meet minimum spend requirements on new rewards credit cards for even bigger rewards.
Never Pay Retail Again
By the power of the Internet, shopping for discounts is easy and efficient.
Thanks to Craigslist for used items, Rakuten.com for cash back, and Raise.com for discount Gift Cards, everything is on sale. By stacking discounts we can get even greater savings.
Discounted Gift Cards are also a great tool to meet minimum spend requirements on new credit cards, which provide even greater rewards.
If this sounds like fun, these (affiliate/referral) links can get you started:
$10 off $25 purchase at Rakuten.com (Now $30 off purchase of $30!!!)
$5 off 1st Purchase at Raise.com
Cash back and travel rewards credit cards
Join the movement to Never Pay Retail Again!
* “bargains” ;)
Of course, the best way to avoid paying retail is to not purchase anything! :)
That’s not always practical of course.
When it comes to electronic gadgets the single best way to save money is to buy last year’s model. The year old model will typically be deeply discounted by retailers and have 95% of the functionality of the current year’s model. Great way to save a bundle if you don’t need this year’s new features.
Yeah, too bad it isn’t practical more often. (And a lot of people could do with a little less buying, too ;) )
Last year’s electronics (and sporting equipment) are usually great deals. And those sales stack with a shopping portal and discount GC too. Win win win!
I seek to buy REFURBISHED last year’s model to boot.
I just signed up for Ebates. For Amazon it saids “Special Terms: Cash Back is only available for select departments.”
How do I know if the item I buy will get cash back?
Thanks for the great tips!
Great! Enjoy that cash back!
Ebates has a page that outlines what qualifies for each store. The Amazon page is here. I believe the cash back departments change regularly, but I’m not certain of that.
They change on virtually a daily basis, so you need to check whenever you are thinking of a purchase.
I love all these tools, particularly Ebates and Raise. As you said, if you’re going to make the purchase anyway, it’s not much extra effort to see if a Gift Card is available. Raise is generally instantaneous as well (or 20-30 mins), so you can do it right away as you are contemplating the purchase.
@Andy – Download the Ebates plugin for your browser and you’ll never have to worry about it again. When you visit a retailer, it’ll notify you if you can save money through Ebates. Click the button and it’ll do everything automatically to make sure you’re saving money. It probably only applies to Amazon in very limited circumstances.
Good point, the Ebates plugin is a great tool to make sure you always get the cash back. (Get it here.)
I’ve had pretty good luck with the Raise emails coming in almost immediately after purchase. For hotels, I’ll usually get the total booking price then buy a GC for that amount +/-. It only adds a minute or two to the booking process.
We use our Chase cards to get gift cards at some office supply stores at times (at 5X) and we always try to shop sales too. I have never used Ebates or bought gift cards at a discount. We need to really look into that now that our miles/points banks have a good stash. Do you ever consider that – the money vs. the points/miles? We have been looking for new cell phones for awhile and I found the exact one we were looking for yesterday on Overstock (new – not used) for almost $100 less (each) than anywhere else. I wished we could have got some cheaper (or 5X) Overstock gift cards but to save $200 – we didn’t bother thinking the deal might be gone today. I haven’t shopped there before – so we’ll see how it turns out. Great ideas in this post – I need to up my game!
I always (mostly always?) do the math on points vs $ and go with the more profitable of the two. 5X points is a pretty powerful payback, especially considering those are UR points.
Using Ebates for the Overstock purchase would have scored you some extra bucks, but $200 off is still a pretty sweet deal. Maybe next time ;)
Definitely – I saw that Overstock is on Ebates. We also use shopping portals in addition to the 5X to usually get 7 to 8X at places like Lowes/Home Depot. You can score mega miles that way ;)
I’ve been selling a lot of stuff on Craigslist, and when I am buying I always check there first. I’ve had several kayaks that I bought and sold on Craigslist for the same price making for free long term rentals. And thanks to travel hacking we just booked our next vacation entirely with rewards.
I’ll have to check out that gift card exchange, thanks for the tip!
That is awesome! Free kayaks and trips are the best kind of kayaks of trips.
I would prefer to buy everything used! It’s not always possible, but I try. The best part about buying used (which you pointed out already) is that you can often sell your used stuff for close to what you paid. I’ve done that with everything from used furniture to clothes. Nice kids clothes, for example, can be bought at a garage sale for $1 around here and sold again for $1 or more once the kids grow out of it. My kids aren’t old enough to care yet!
I’m right there with you. Jr grows out of clothes after only wearing them 3 times anyway, so what’s the point of buying stuff new?
We have a upscale resale shop benefiting the American Cancer Society. I find mall quality clothes, with the tags on occasionally, for a standard nine dollars. Wacky Wednesdays and Saturdays discounts them 50%, or about &4.50 each for high-end brands I normally could never afford. I love this for work clothes which can take a beating and after a significant weight loss when nothing fit!
That sounds like a great store! I would sometimes buy jeans at the Buffalo Exchange. You could find basically new stuff for 75% off. Then before we left the US we sold a bunch of our clothes there too.
We usually stack and combine these. Currently my wife is pursuing using swagbucks (Ebates competitor) to buy a gift card using a credit card. Then use the gift card with Ebates to buy something on sale. That works for the new stuff. This year in the used realm we found a local used book store with a trade in program.
Nicely done, sir!
There was a really old used book store near our place in Seattle. It had stacks and stacks of books, literally. The library was less claustrophobic so we went there instead.
For cyber monday, Raise.com is $10 off $100 using code CMRAISE
Still a few hours left!
Stacking those discounts is awesome. You can use Ebates to buy Raise gift cards to get another 1% cash back. And even if I can buy at a physical store, I will sometimes order online so that I can use the shopping portal (and paying with a discounted gift card). Stores like Home Depot and Target offer online shopping with in-store pick-up which is great since you get the extra cash back, you don’t have to pay for shipping, and you don’t even have to go find the item…just pick it up at the customer service counter!
I love the idea of the in-store pickup. That is definitely the way to go!
A couple of additional tools in the get-the-most-back toolkit:
1. Join your local Buy Nothing group. It is a great resource for gently used kid stuff doing the rounds of your community.
2. I use evreward.com to compare cash back and travel portal rewards. You enter the store you plan to shop at and it shows you all offers available to you.
Thanks for the tips! I’ve used Freecycle in the past, but haven’t been a member of a Buy Nothing group. It seems like a great community builder.
I was coming here to recommend local Buy Nothing groups. I’ve been purging lots of stuff and love giving items away to locals who want/will use them. Yes there’s a lot of kid stuff making the rounds, but there’s lots of other things, too. I got a microwave for my nephew’s first apartment just by asking. You’ll see pumpkins post-Halloween given to locals with chickens, people offering homemade bread or helping someone rake their leaves. I definitely recommend!
We’re kind of travel hacking amateurs (getting points from sign up bonuses, but not really stacking our everyday spending the way you describe). Maybe the juice is worth the squeeze though…
I’m definitely an amateur compared to most. For the hotels that we have to pay for, the discount stacking is pretty nice though.
Hey great post and I’ve have been doing this for a while now. I get 2% back with my fidelity card, and I used fat wallet in the past to get an upfront % off.(they got bought out by ebates). We will see if ebates is as good as fat wallet used to be.
The Fidelity card is a good one. I used to have it in the US, back when it was an Amex, but don’t carry it anymore because it charges Foreign Transaction Fees.
I never used fat wallet, so can’t compare the two. Ebates is an after the fact discount… you get cash back later.
It is pretty easy to save money these days. Dealing with gift cards and cash back portals can be annoying for relatively small savings, but buying used is almost always worth the hassle. I wrote a post about all the money we’ve saved by using Craigslist and the numbers are pretty impressive. You can check it out here: http://www.fiscallyfree.com/2016/05/how-we-saved-11000-on-various-purchases.html
I also wrote about all the stuff we’ve gotten for free here: http://www.fiscallyfree.com/2016/05/found-furniture-and-other-free-stuff.html
Now that I think about it, I need to update both of these posts with our latest acquisitions.
Very nice. I love free stuff. (except puppies)
Unfortunately I haven’t figured out a way to get used hotels, so for them I use discount GCs and cash back portals for 20%+ off.
I think Airbnb is the closes thing to a “used hotel,” which probably explains why I love it.
I’m a sucker, I buy too much and pay too much! This blog is good for me… I worry I’m setting a bad example for my son.
Only exception is flights, I haven’t paid for a flight in about 6 years. I used to collect Qantas points but they have been devalued, been collecting AMEX points the last few years.
Buying less stuff, paying less for the stuff you do buy, and flying for free sounds like being a great example. I know Jr has made me aspire to be better too.
Great post! Stacking savings is such a satisfying experience. Couple of additional tips to share:
Look for “Also Accepted at” for GCs. For example, Old Navy GCs can be used at Gap, and Banana Republic. So buy the most discounted GC and use it at any of the other stores that accept it.
Many stores have sign-up discounts for subscribing to their marketing emails/texts – I’ve often done this on multiple email accounts, then unsubscribe a little later. Usually I’ll get an email within minutes with a discount code which I show to the cashier at checkout.
Great idea, signing up for mailing lists (temporarily.) Those x% off coupons come in handy.
The reason I used Gap and Old Navy in the example is because both can be used at either store. Thanks for mentioning that, I forgot to state it in the post.
I always feel like you Americans have so many more opportunities to buy things online below value some of a discounts you are getting are unheard of in Europe. Nevertheless I 100% agree with you that thanks to internet now more than ever we can find great sales.
I am also great fan of using 2nd hand items as a temporary lease. Buy a bike for summer time for £50 sell it in October for £50 so you don’t have to store it in garage or shed and buy again in May. Works great for winter jackets and other items too.
While in the US, I used Craigslist almost as my storage locker. I could just sell whatever I wasn’t using presently, and buy something of equal or better value back later.
That sounds like what you are doing. Very nicely done!
Asia also has less opportunity than the US, I think. Craigslist in Taiwan is very limited, and we aren’t aware of a good local alternative. There seems to be an almost cultural aversion to “used” stuff. Used = bad or dirty, I guess.
But overall, I think the US market has done a better job than elsewhere of making it easy to find discounts, trade 2nd hand stuff, and even invest with low costs.
Wife and I save save 20% on all gift cards.
For a simple example, let’s say we’ll spend $250 on amazon.com in the near future. We:
1. Go to local grocery store and buy $250 in Amazon cards when they’re having a 4X fuel point promo (happens every month). This generates $15 cashback on the Amex Blue Cash Preferred card and 1000 fuel points.
2. Use the fuel points to save $35 on gas ($1 per gallon x 35 gallon limit). Who cares if your car has a 16 gallon tank and you look like a maniac filling up 4 five-gallon cans after the car is full? It works great for those of use who still commute.
Now you’ve paid only $200 for the $250 in Amazon credit.
This works equally well for any retailer’s gift cards. And even figuring the $106 price (with $6 fee) of a $100 prepaid Visa/MC/Amex card, after 20% cash back (via Amex and fuel points) the card costs less than $85. That’s a 15% savings on anything you can buy with it!
When you stack these savings with rebate sites, discount gift card sites etc, you really do wonder why anyone would pay retail.
*I made some assumptions like a) no fuel points will go unused, b) you’ll fill up 35 gallons at a time. With a little practice it becomes easy. There’s a fee on the Amex card but we usually make most of it back throughout the year through other cashback promotions.
Read this to my wife and until the 16 gallon capacity came up, she thought I wrote it. The only difference between us is I drive an F150. Have 50 gals in spare fuel gas capacity. Best I ever did was this past January I had to use up 5000 gas points (35 gals x 5 occurrences) saved me $175. Got every last drop. Love Kroger’s.
This is fantastic. I am applauding your top notch discounting skills.
Not sure if this helps but raise.com can be purchased through the Ebates portal (currently 1%) which adds another layer to the stack for the gift card example in the post. If someone can come up with a portal that leads to ebates then our entire monetary system might collapse ;)
If bringing about the collapse of the monetary system is wrong, I don’t want to be right ;)
I love the subjects that you’ve been writing about, which were very helpful to our daily lives. This is what makes your blog stand out from the rest of financial blogs. thanks for making me smarter and more savvy consumer each day.
Thanks Young, you just made my day :)
I just gave Raise a try last week and it was a pretty slick way to get an immediate discount. Thanks for the write-up about it.
Another Ebates alternative is topcashback which I’ve used a few times and works pretty well. They had a cashback offer at one point that was 16% back on hotels through some online booking portal.
Great, glad it worked out for you! It definitely does pay to shop around… the cash back portals compete with each other too.
Cool. I wasn’t familiar with these ways of saving money until your post. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for the info. I used your affiliate links for ebates and raise as a small thank you for all the info I’ve gleaned from you.
A question about your hotels.com stacking example. As I understood it, you said you buy the discounted gift card from raise using a cash back rewards card, then receive the 10th night free as a standard hotels.com feature. I follow those 3 parts. But it sounded like you were saying you also use ebates as a 4th part to the stack. I saw this in their terms and it made me think a purchase through ebates using a gift card wouldn’t earn cashback. The old Navy example seemed to recognize an either or scenario, so I’m just looking for clarification. Thanks!
Do gift certificates qualify for cash back rewards?
Ebates cannot give cash back for the portion of a purchase that is made with gift cards or certificates
Thanks Bill, much appreciated.
Great observation. At some point, cash back terms on the Ebates/hotels.com page changed. Specifically, it now states: “Cash Back is not available on airfare, and on the purchase or redemption of gift cards.”
I have done this successfully, but I don’t know when the new language first appeared or if it is enforced. I’ve seen people recently report that they’ve also had success with this approach. I think we’ll need more data points to say for sure.
My impression is that ebates itself doesn’t give cashback on any gift card redemption, regardless of store. https://www.ebates.com/help/exclusions.htm
However, I bought a discounted gift card for gnc on raise.com and purchased something from gnc through ebates anyway. There was no indication it triggered cashback until about a week later it showed up in my ebates account. If it stays and I get a deposit, I’ll follow up once more.
I’m not advocating breaking terms, I’m just surprised they don’t enforce their own plainly listed exclusion
thanks Bill, let us know how it pans out.
I used hotels.com gc’s with Ebates yesterday. Works just fine. :)
Many credit cards actually have the same language in their T&C, but purchases of GC’s still work in many cases….
Great article. I’ve been using the 2% cash back credit card for years now and was quite excited when I learned of raise.com and their discounted gift cards. Thanks to you I signed up to Ebates now and I’m going to enjoy the compounding effect of all these venues.
Can you repost your link to the hotels.com? Its expired in the article. I’d like to earn that credit too :-)
As far as I can tell, nobody has been able to get the hotels.com referral stuff to work. Perhaps by design, I dunno. But still my fav hotel portal.
Thanks for sharing all these great saving methods. One thing I found lately is that the online “Live Chat” window can be helpful on getting discount when you shop online. I recently got a $50 off by placing the order right then with the “chat” representative at sears.com when buying a cooking range for my rental. And when the delivery was delayed, I had no success asking for some compensation on the customer service on the phone. But tried the “chat” again, and I got $65 cash back to my credit card! I think these “chat” representatives have more capability to give our rebate or discount. In the end, they asked if I would like free home modleing estimate or sears credit card, which is probably the purpose of giving out these discounts. I simply said no politely.
I also use the Honey and WikiBuy Chrome Extensions when I am shopping online as they allow for autofill of “discount codes” that people crowdsource on a shopping website! Lots of times I receive 10-20% and sometimes more off of stuff I’m buying online! Great perk and best of all? Honey also offers cash back, or a percentage of what you buy regardless of whether you use their discount codes… you get a gift card in the mail from them that you can cash out for $50 and $100 increments.
I will usually stack the Ebates, Wikibuy/Honey discount codes, AND Honey cash back all in one purchase. It’s awesome :)
I’ve never used Raise before so I thought I’d give it a try. My transaction got canceled. When I called them about it they said it was because I used a VPN. They are U.S. based only and won’t complete transactions oversees, or so I was told. I’m out of the U.S. slow traveling similar to GCC. How do you complete your overseas purchases?
Ahh yes, this was a problem for me last month. I ended up having my brother help.
are we able to stack up .rakuten.com with GC purchase? I thought only credit purchase counts? if GC works, that’s great news to know.
I avoid buying higher cost applicants (big/small) with GC due to the extended warranty coverage. Recently, I’m able to claim extended warranty after my dyson vacuum brush heads went bad after 6 mo. out of manufacture warranty, which is 1/3 of the original price. It took me some time to fill out the paperwork but glad that it works out.
read the small print on the rakuten purchases, some stack some don’t. For hotels.com, for example, they will typically stack with a GC but with a lower payout (1% vs 3%.)