In a controversial move, many leading retailers are opening earlier than the traditional 4 a.m. to 5 a.m. time on Friday morning. Many will be opening at midnight, and Wal Mart is going a step further and opening at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. This means that for all the die hards who wait in line to be among the first shoppers making a mad rush into the store to scramble for the very best low priced deals, they will have to now essentially stay up all night. Employees too are having to sacrifice family time, to show up for work in the middle of the night. So, instead of watching a football game with uncles they will have to take a nap to prepare for the all nighter.

Best Buy

Best Buy is offering a free Blu Ray player when you purchase a Sprint smart phone. Or how about this, a 55″ LCD tv for under a thousand bucks. Its top doorbuster sale is a 42-inch 1080p Sharp LCD TV for just $199.99. (Another doorbuster is a Toshiba Blu-ray player for a mere $39.99.) That beats the 40-inch Element LCD that Target is offering for $265.

Wal Mart/h2>

Walmart Kicks-off Three Black Friday Events starting at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving. Today on Thursday, November 10, 2011 the Walmart Black Friday flier was released on Facebook and Walmart.com. It is supposed to help families with their Christmas shopping and to save them money. There are three special-shopping events. The first one is for toys, home, and apparel starting at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day(November 24th). The second event starts at midnight on Black Friday(November 25th). This second event is for electronics. The third event starts at 8 a.m. on November 25th through the weekend. It is for presents for the entire family and electronics. These events are good while supplies last. You can get the hot new Xbox release Batman, Arkham City for under $30, a 50% discount.

Target

Target seems to have Best Buy and Walmart beat n base models of video game consoles. It’s offering a 4GB Xbox 360 for a mere $139.99 and a 160GB PlayStation 3 for $199. only one other Black Friday TV deal: the 32-inch Samsung LN32D403 for $277.99, which is about $50 less than what Amazon is selling it for now.

Amazon

Amazon knows when you are looking for its Black Friday deals, because when you Google it and hit an Amazon page, it actually lists early Black Friday deals tailor made for you, based on your previous browsing history. Of course, Amazon offers some nice deals in Electronics, such as 30% savings on a Leap Pad Leapster. Or $3.99 for the latest Harry Potter DVD. You can also sign up for the daily deal of the day delivered to you via email.

Black Friday Deals is a post from: MiCash Prepaid MasterCard

#1 Avoid the specials

Have you noticed that when wait staff tell you the day’s specials they fail to mention their price. That’s because specials are usually priced higher than the menu items. Often, they are 50% higher. The wait staff is encouraged to “push the specials.” They are meant to entice you with special ingredients–”reduction of this” and “compote of that.” The wait staff is counting on the natural response of not wanting to sound like a cheapskate by asking about the price.

#2 Ask for extra bread

Most restaurants try to fill you up with baskets of bread before your first course arrives. Don’t be shy about asking the wait staff to bring you more bread so you can eat copious quantities of it while eating your soup or salad or main entree. Sometime restaurants can be stingy about the complimentary bread.

#3 Go easy on the appetizers

Some waiters trick you into ordering too many appetizers by prompting you to order more than one appetizer. You might order one appetizer, and they raise their eyebrow and ask, “Is that all?” Or they say that another appetizer is also good, implying that each person at the table should eat their own appetizer. Some restaurants also offer appetizer samplers which combine two or more appetizers on the menu, but these samplers inevitably are priced higher, sometimes three times higher than any one appetizer. Unless you are making a meal of just appetizers, save room for the main course.

#4 Or make it a meal of appetizers

It’s perfectly acceptable to just order from the soup, salad, and appetizer sections of a menu and not get a main entree. Don’t let the wait staff make you feel bad. It’s your meal, not theirs. Spanish tapas restaurants, which give you a bunch of small appetizer plates by design, are paving the way for this trend.

#5 Split plates with a friend

Again, don’t be shy about asking to split a salad before the main course, or to split a main course. Just tell the waiter with a straight face, “we’re grazing.”

#6 Skip dessert

Do you really need that $7 piece of pie or scoop of ice cream on a brownie? Hold off on desert until you get home, where if you want to splurge, split a pint of Ben and Jerry’s with your date.

#7 Drink water

Drinks are pure profit for restaurants. Often, you can be perfectly content having a fine meal, and washing everything down with ice water, instead of iced tea. Ordering a bottle of wine or beer can increase your restaurant tab by 30%-40%, so don’t do it unless you want to. Waiters hate it when everyone around a table orders water instead of iced tea, cokes, or beer, because they just see a lower bill and a smaller tip.

#8 Order the cheapest bottle of wine

OK, let’s say you see five bottles of white wine starting at $18 and ending up at $60. Somewhere in the mix is a $27 bottle of wine which is the most popular seller, because the restaurant knows that you won’t splurge on the $60 bottle unless you are trying to impress someone, and you won’t order the $18 for not wanting to look cheap. Don’t worry about it. Get the $18, because it’s really a $9 if you were to get it at the grocery store.

#9 Eat at a restaurant that lets you bring your own bottle of wine

Often, new ethnic restaurants that don’t have a liquor license, like that cute Vietnamese place off the main drag, encourage you to bring your own bottle of wine. Find those places and frequent those places.

#10 Wash dishes

As crazy as this sounds, sometimes you can set up a deal ahead of time with a restaurant owner to trade a meal for a service. If you literally don’t want to wash dishes, and you have a skill like marketing, you might offer to design a flyer for the restaurant or set up a Facebook page in exchange for a meal.

#11 Complain about anything that was wrong with the meal.

Meal too salty? Let the waiter know and odds are the chef will want to make you happy so you will come back. Sometimes you can get a complimentary dessert out of it.

#12 Ask for a take out box for any leftovers

If you can’t finish your meal, sometimes you can eat the leftovers for lunch, saving money by not buying that lunch.

So there are 12 money saving tips to consider the next time you eat out. Know that MiCash MaserCard is accepted at any restaurant that accepts MasterCard debit cards. Just look for the MasterCard logo.

If you really want to save money, try to recreate your favorite restaurant meal at home.

Save Money When Eating Out is a post from: MiCash Prepaid MasterCard

“Mall giant Simon Property Group last summer scored the biggest real estate deal of the year when it announced it was buying Prime Outlets’ 21 properties for a whopping $2.5 billion,” writes the Washington Examiner. Other discount mall developers are also buying up land out in the countryside, typically right off an interstate.

But are outlet malls worth the drive?

It depends. One complaint about these malls is that they are located far from major metropolitan areas. Typically an outlet mail might be 30 or 50 miles drive from a major city. Thus, if you live in one of those cities, you may find it inconvenient to drive an hour (or two!) to get to the mall. Factor in the price of gasoline, and you are already in the hole before you even begin shopping. On the other hand, just as many people live far from the city and have a long commute to get to the city to work. So the reality might be that the outlet mall isn’t that far of a drive. Also, parking is typically free, contrasted with the costs of metered parking or parking garages in cities.

Also, at an outlet mall you can visit many different kinds of stores in one place, versus possibly driving around town, or to different towns to try and duplicate the shopping excursion. That’s more costs in gas and time.

Quality or Not?

Depending on the retailer, the quality of merchandise may not be as good as what you would find in the retailer’s regular stores. Retailers often delegate overstock, discontinued items, and otherwise cast off items to their outlets. Imagine a rack of clothes that nobody wanted in the regular stores. Or imagine a rack full of seconds, XXL, SM, but nothing in your size. Also, some retailers make items that are only for the outlets, sometimes of lesser quality (thinner material for instance). If the label is marked F, that may mean “factory” not for regular retail consumption.

On the other hand, many retailers sell the very same items that you would find in regular retail environments for a major discount. This is because they are cutting out the middle man and selling direct to the public. Retailers aren’t happy about direct competition with the factory, but given Internet sales these days, it’s a fact of life that they have come to accept.

Question Steep Discounts off Retail

Sometimes a 60% off is a great deal, and sometimes it means that the original price was inflated, and not something you would have ever paid. It’s inflated, to make the discount look better. The Federal Trade Commission has published guidelines to prevent these kinds of shenanigans, but buyer beware.

Of course, clothing retailers often do provide great discounts for clothing that they have to liquidate, do to changes in fashion trends or seasons. So, for instance at Banana Republic you can find a shirt that was originally priced at $55 selling for $8 in July because it’s thick and long sleeved and has buttons that are no longer quite hip.

Nice Shopping Experience

One nice thing about discount malls is that many are outdoor malls. This is great in the summer time and less so in January in northern climates. A good outlet mall will include a food court so you can walk around with a drink in your hand. It may also include a mix of retailers, such as a book store, a furniture store, a kitchen wares store, a toy store, and of course clothes and shoes retailers.

So, if you haven’t been to an outlet mall in a while, check it out and let us know what you think.

Are Outlet Malls Worth the Drive? is a post from: MiCash Prepaid MasterCard

Save money with front loader washers.

With gas prices rising fast, and the cost of electricity also rising, saving money within the household is a top priority for many of us. One of the biggest contributors to a household’s monthly bills is washers and driers. Electric appliances are the most costly, and gas or propane driers are right behind. There are a range of things you can do to save money washing clothes.

• A whopping 90 percent of the energy used by a washer is used just to heat the water. There is tremendous savings to be had simply by washing all of your clothes using cold water exclusively. You’ll save about $150 a year this way. To put in perspective how wasteful hot water is, washing your clothes in hot instead of cold for a year, wastes more electricity than leaving the refrigerator door open 24 hours a day for a year. If you feel that warm water doesn’t clean as well for you as hot, then just use a warm pre-soak. Soaking clothes in warm water is usually just as good or better as hot water with no soak.
• Top-loading washers use far more water than front loading washers. So, for an initial investment up front in a front loader (which will cost less if you buy it used from a used appliance dealer) you can save big by using this increasingly popular technology. The reason they use less water is that the tumbler design is a much more efficient way to clean clothes. Did you know that front loaders can spin much faster, wringing more water out of the clothes before you stick them in a dryer. Dryers use far more energy on the wetter clothes that come out of top loading machines versus the front loaders. In fact, clothes coming out of front loaders are spun so dry that they hardly need much drying action at all.
• Be sure to use coupons to find deals on detergents, or buy the largest containers of detergent because odds are the per ounce price will cost less. Also, generic detergents use the same key ingredients as the name brand, so why pay more just for a brand name? If your clothes are only very lightly soiled, why not try a load using one-half the normal amount of detergent. Most detergents today are just as effective with less amounts being used. In fact studies have shown that clothes contain a lot of residual detergent that can take two or three cycles of just rinsing to get out. So the bottom line is use less than the amount recommended by the detergent manufacturers.
• Consider the technology made popular by your grandmother: clothes lines. If you by-pass the dryer altogether you will save 100% on the cost of drying clothes. It’s easy to find lightweight retractable lines that you can hang almost anywhere, from your front or back porch, or from your kitchen back door to the nearest tree. As long as your neighbors or HOA doesn’t mind seeing clothes hanging in your yard, it’s the most economical way to go. An added benefit is that the sun will help bleach your whites and clothes just smell cleaner and fresher after the wind has blown through them.

Save Money Washing Clothes is a post from: MiCash Prepaid MasterCard

Hotels

When traveling by car, pull into rest areas and pick up the local hotel guide. They are chocked full of coupons for discounts on hotel rooms. You’ll save 10% or sometimes more on the cost of an advertised room. The discounts can be even greater than the lowest available one at the check in desk, such as the AAA discount.

Book online ahead of time for exclusive online savings. Use sites like Priceline.com, Hotels.com, or go straight to the chain hotel’s website to see what deals are available.

Consider staying at a KOA campground in one of their cabins. While this is not a hotel, it is a way to camp without having to bring a tent or camping gear. But you will have to bring your own bedding. Many KOA campgrounds have all of the amenities of a hotel, such as a swimming pool, restaurants, and even movie theaters!

Food

Stay with friends or family and you will hopefully eat out less. Stay at hotels that offer continental breakfasts. Don’t buy anything from the hotel mini-fridge because the food and drinks are way overpriced.  Do you tend to buy drinks and snacks at gas stations? Why not pack a cooler with snacks such as fruit, trail mix, and water bottles that you fill at home instead of buying? If you aren’t in a rush to get there, order pizza, which is less expensive that even fast food places. Or pack some paper plates and plastic silverware and buy food at grocery stores that you can whip together, like bagged salads and cold sandwich fixings.

Car Travel

Have your tire inflated and you’ll see at least a 5% improvement on your mileage. Drive the speed limit. The faster you go, the worse your gas mileage. Don’t try to save by not running the airconditioning and rolling down the windows, because you will reduce the car’s aerodynamics and cancel out any gas savings, so you might as well stay cool.

While You Are Way

• Turn off your air conditioning or raise the thermostat before it kicks in.
• Put your lights on timers. They are cheap and available at hardware stores.
• Unplug large appliances like TV’s and computers. You’d be surprised how much energy they waste while off. In fact, it’s a good idea to buy those plug strips that you can turn off every night even when you are at home.

Summer Travel Savings is a post from: MiCash Prepaid MasterCard

• Save a McDonald’s paper coffee cup to run into any McDonald’s restaurant and get a “free” refill. Another way to think about this is “stealing.”
• Reuse trash bags–they wait for the garbage man, dump the contents of the garbage bag into the truck and bring the empty bag back inside the house to do it again. Another way to think about this is “gross.”

Reader’s Digest invited readers to share their own extreme money saving tips and here is what some of them shared:

• Bring your own Tupperware to parties to bring home left over hors d’oeuvres.
• Reusing: toothpicks, paper towels, floss, plastic sandwich bags, tinfoil, and other things that are meant to be used once and disposed of.
• Retrieving toilet paper from the trees after someone’s house gets “TP’d.”
• Diluting shampoo, household cleaners, and liquor.
• Bring loved ones to the store and read out loud the greeting cards you “would have bought them” if you weren’t so cheap.
• Bring your own slice of cheese to fast food restaurants to make your own cheeseburgers.
• Swing by the recycle center or check neighbor’s recycle bins for magazines and the Sunday paper.
• Walk through fast food drive thrus and pick up the change that people have dropped but not bothered picking up.
• Look for food that is out of date at the grocery store–including dairy–and get it for half price.
• When traveling, bring an empty bottle and fill it at a water fountain after you go through airport security.
• Only put one bulb in a multi-bulb light fixture like a chandelier.
• Mail out Christmas cards without postage but put the recipient’s address in the return address spot, so the post office will deliver the card to that address stamped “insufficient postage.” (this too is stealing).
• Bathing only once a week to save water or saving your shower or tub water to flush the toilet or water your garden.

How Low Will You Go to Save Money? is a post from: MiCash Prepaid MasterCard

Flickr photo by Sunfrog1

Here at MiCash several of the staff sometimes bike to work. This is only possible because Washington DC and Northern Virginia have a robust network of dedicated bike paths. In urban areas with reliable and extensive public transportation, including bike paths, subways, and buses, now more than ever it is possible to consider eliminating the need for a car all together, or at the very least, downsizing from two cars to one.

We’re not suggesting everyone can do this, but with some lifestyle adjustments, eliminating a car in your life can benefit you financially.

Cost Savings without a Car

In 2010, The average cost for a typical auto insurance policy, including collision and comprehensive coverage, is $1,031, reports AAA. This figure compared average rates for the top five best selling vehicles averaged nationwide. Of course, insurance rates also depend on the driver’s age, driving record, miles driver per year, and location. Insurance his generally higher in the city and higher for younger drivers who can least afford the costs of a car.

When factoring in other costs, such as car payments, maintenance, and gas, AAA found that the average annual cost to own and operate a sedan is $8,487 . That comes out to $707 a month.  Of course, that number could be much less if you drive a beater, or you only drive a few miles a week.

Still, there’s no escaping the fact that having a car is one of the biggest expenses for an individual after housing and food.

I Can’t Ditch My Car Because…

• I need it to get to work.
• I need it to go grocery shopping.
• I need it to go out on dates.
• I need it on the weekends to run errands or take trips.
• I need it to feel good about myself.

What are the Alternatives?

• Ride a bicycle…use one month of car expenses to buy yourself a really nice bike. Did you know you can even order one on the Web and it will be delivered to your house? Check your local area for bicycling information. Here’s a good information website to get you started.
• If you are the adventurous type, consider a motorcycle or Vespa instead of a car. The insurance is cheaper and you’ll pay only a fraction in gas costs. Also your cool factor will go up. If you’re single, your date can ride behind you, or just use her/his car when going out. Don’t think this will work? Listen how actor LA-based Tim Coyne has adjusted to life without a car on the Hollywood Podcast.
• Rent a car (or pickup) those few times a year you really need one. Companies like Enterprise maintain rental locations all across America that are not confined to the area around your local airport but actually in neighborhoods. Increasingly in many cities, like Washington DC, San Francisco, and Montreal, bike rental companies let you rent bikes that you unlock from a public bike rack and re-lock when you arrive at your destination. The more extensive the fleet and pick up locations, the better this works. Montreal just rolled out a huge network of bike rental kiosks, and more and more people are getting by without a car.
• Modify your shopping behavior… some people, especially busy urbanites, swear by Peapod and other grocery delivery options. Instead of the big weekly excursion to the grocery story, shop farmer’s markets and buy a few items at a time on your way home from work. Shopping locally will likely prove healthier too.

So go ahead and give it a try. If it doesn’t work for you after a little while, you can always go out and get another car.

Ditch Your Car and Save Money is a post from: MiCash Prepaid MasterCard

A contrasting school of thought holds that you should always start with your highest interest debt, such as high interest credit card debt. If you want to experiment with how this would work, download and use the free Debt Reduction Calculator, in Excel format, by Vertex42.

How to Curb Your Spending

Less discussed is the Spending Reduction Snowball. It was Ben Franklin who coined the phrase, “watch your pennies, and the dollars will take care of themselves.” Rather than cut out the big spending items–either because you can’t (e.g., mortgage payment, car payment) or you can’t bring yourself to do it (e.g., that trip to Hawaii), snowballing your spending habits in the downwards direction might mean passing up Starbucks in favor of brewing your own, darning your socks instead of throwing them out and buying new ones. Knocking back your cable subscription to basic.

Of course, unlike debt, you may not have an easy way to add up all of your spending. But just as the spreadsheet above works, you can easily calculate these small savings by projecting the savings out a month or a year. For instance, if you cut your cable bill by $15 a month, project your savings out a year $15 x 12 months = $180, and you’ll rightly multiply the effect of the sacrifice to put it in its proper perspective.

Or bring a notepad with you and jot down every penny you save per item when you reach for your usual brand, and then either go generic or pass it up all together. Who wouldn’t bask in the glow of passing through the check out and then realizing that you just saved $34 by shopping more frugally?

What else can you “snowball?” How about your e-mail in-box? We’ll save that for another post.

Snowball Spending Reduction is a post from: MiCash Prepaid MasterCard

Once upon a time, when people were less transient and you really got to know your neighbors, you might be able to walk down the street and borrow your neighbor’s extension ladder to retrieve a frisbee on the roof or clean the gutters. Or, for you kid’s annual Cub Scout’s Pinewood Derby you might get away with borrowing a buddy’s Dremel rotary sander thingy to shape your boy’s dream car from a block of pine. Now, with so much made in China and seemingly “affordable” instead you buy the tools, the gadgets, the electronics, and store them on shelves, in cupboards, and in the garage (if you have a garage), for that rare event when you may need them. Sometimes years go by before these things are touched. Sometimes you even rent a monthly storage unit to keep all this stuff. And eventually, maybe you offload it between moves in a garage sale for nickles on the dollar.

“The old paradigm of buy and use it once and store it forever is shifting to an economy based on usage and accessibility,” said Jeff Boudier, co-founder of Zilok. (From the Washington Post)

Zilok is a “peer-to-peer” social media rental site founded by a couple in France who figured out that the average power drill is used a total of only 12 minutes during its lifetime. Another is iRent2U.com. Here’s how it works. People post stuff they are willing to rent and users can rate the reputation and quality of the owners much like E-Bay merchants are rated. Renters meet the owners, sign contracts, perhaps put down a security deposit, pay a rental fee, and hopefully use and return the item in the same condition they found it.

Of course, trust is a big concern, but these sites are growing fast and features like the rating system help build trust.

What do you own that you think you might make some extra income from by renting it out? Or what might you consider renting as needed rather than buying?

Rent Instead of Buy is a post from: MiCash Prepaid MasterCard

If you have money taken out of your paycheck before it hits your bank account, you’ll never miss it. Once you’ve done that, increasing your savings by another percentage point probably won’t hurt a bit. But over time, it could add up to six figures in additional savings.

Flickr image by TheTruthAbout...

Fact is, every year earlier in your life that you start saving for your retirement you will see a greater return on your savings, due to the magic of compounding interest. A person in their early 20s has to save  a fraction of what someone in their 40s has to save to reach the same goal. Suppose you save just one thousand dollars when you’re 20 and don’t touch it until you are 65. If you averaged of 10 percent interest on your savings per year (not an unreasonable figure) that thousand would become nearly $73,000 by the time you reach 65. Saving $1,000 when you’re 50 would only grow to $4,200 by age 65.

The one percent rule can apply to just about everything. Got some money in your wallet, take out 1% and put it in a jar. Do that for a few weeks, and you’ll have an unexpected windfall. Grocery shopping? Put something back and don’t buy it to the tune of at least 1%. Over the course of a year, that’s real savings. Driving down the road? Go just 1% slower and you’ll be saving both gas and the environment and you won’t even notice the difference in your time of arrival. Filling your bath with water? That’s right, fill it just a little less.

You get the idea. Being part of the 1% club means you will keep savings top of mind. The result is that you will probably save more than 1%. How much farther is up to you.

Savings Idea: Join the 1% Club is a post from: MiCash Prepaid MasterCard