The nearest chain drugstore, RiteAid, finally has a savings card program. Last week I broke a pair of reading glasses, so went in to get a replacement. Buy one, get one half off, so I got two pairs for $15 – and got a $5 coupon on the receipt. Went in yesterday to spend my $5 coupon before it expired: Vitamins were buy one, get one free, so I got $18 worth of vitamins for $4.
The other way to look at it: two pairs of glasses plus two bottles of vitamins for $19.
I’m cool with their knowing what I buy there if they give me savings like that.
I love one of my area’s thrift shops. I’m slowly upgrading my furniture. I got a nice computer desk for $35, and an Ethan Allen dining table with two leaves and five chairs for $225. The table has drop leaves on either side, as well as the two leaves, so it can seat anywhere from two to about ten people. It has one spot on a drop leaf where I think that an overly hot dish was placed, and I’ll bet that it originally came with six chairs. But it would have cost at least a couple of grand, new, and I put the blemished drop leaf down, and put it against the wall. And otherwise, it’s in wonderful condition.
Rite-Aid, I don’t think it was last week but the week before, had the Fusion power Proglide razor for $10. They had a $5 UP’s reward (register coupon) and the paper had a $4 coupon itself, so the whole thing was $1. We use a Mach3 Power and are pleased, I figured for $1 how could it go wrong?
The blades are marketed as “thinner” than the regular Fusion (which translated into a shitty shave because they were less sturdy). 5 blades is too many for the bikini line and underarms, too. I don’t think we’ll be getting replacement blades. But it was only $1, and the upside is the “trimmer” single blade on the back is perfect for trimming the SO’s very small neck beard.
We both had colds and wiped out our Dayquill stash. 24 brand name Dayquill caps (we usually get generic) were normally like $7, on sale for $5, with a $3 UP’s, so $2 total.
My mom got 12 boxes of my dad’s Post Great Grains cereal for $1.50 a pop. They run for $3.50 each, but Rite Aid had 'em for $2 and she had several “buy 3, get $1.50 off” Post coupons.
My clothing one is from the Jcrew factory outlet. Jcrew jeans run from $75-100. But at the outlet they run about $40, which is very fairly priced for very good quality denim. Jeans were on sale for $30, 15% off with student ID, so $25. I don’t think you can even buy Target jeans for $25.
Zennioptical.com is still the pinnacle of money-saving glee, for us. We both have $8.95 prescription eyeglasses, and wear and love them every day. Yay cheap Chinese eyeglasses. We’re really looking forward to not forking over hundreds and hundreds of dollars for the glasses that our sprogling will inevitably need, and break or lose regularly. When she’s old enough to take to the pool I’m going to get myself some prescription sunglasses, even!
Sattua, is that place…for real? Essentially for $7+ $5 shipping + $5 anti glare you have a real pair of glasses, with anti glare, thin n lite lenses, anti scratch, a case, etc. Do you just guesstimate what looks good on you? How do they determine S, M and Large sized lenses? I already know my pupil distance, but how do I know what size frame I’d need? I’m 5’4" with a fairly normal, oval-shaped face.
I signed up for automatic draft to pay my electric bill months ago because I had a tendency to forget and they don’t give you any warnings they just turn off your power and charge you $60 bucks to turn it back on. This always annoyed me because when I moved in over 13 years ago I put a $200 deposit down that they never use at least as a credit when you’re late. Well, after several months of the on-time perfect payments they credited that $200 to my account and I now have a credit which means I won’t have to pay that bill for a couple more months. Granted this was all my money so I haven’t really saved anything but it feels like I did. If I had known I’d finally get that money back, I’d have signed up for the automatic drafts sooner.
I bought my wedding dress at a trunk show. Apparently it had been used in a commercial shoot. I picked it out because it was pretty and fit well, but I’d never heard of the designer on the label - I just thought it was an awfully nice wedding dress for $200. It was missing a few beads, but I had it fixed for $5.00.
Turns out that dress was by some fancy boutique designer, and retailed for over $2500. I resold it a year later on eBay. Got $575.
Refinanced my mortgage and my payments will be $300/mo less than before, even with $100/mo extra to the principle. The extra principle will save me $30,000 and the $300/mo less will be $79k over the life of the loan.
When I changed jobs we lost vision insurance, and my glasses got broken two weeks later playing basketball. I glued them back together, taped them, and even lit them on fire and shoved the plastic back together. I finally ordered a pair from zenni after my sister told me about it and I’ve bought two pair now and am ordering more in a few days (smaller frames and then some sunglasses for bike riding) but all mine still are great. I would definitely recommend them…
Another place to check on for reading glasses is your local thrift store. They usually put all the glasses people donate into a bin somewhere in back and when there are enough to display, put them out. I’ve watched readers get snatched up for $1, no matter what level they were. People who use readers always know people who need to use them.
We bought an econoline that had 160k on it for $900 a few years ago. We put another 100k on it, it ran really well. ( It helps it was my FIL’s first. ) Sold it to some Mexicans from Detroit for $500. We always expected to get phone calls at 3am about it being a POS, but they never came.
I’m wearing the glasses right now, so yes, they’re for real. The base prices are for fairly low-power prescriptions; anyone with higher diopters will need to pay for lens upgrades. Bifocals cost more too.
Size is determined by having someone else measure your interpupillary distance. Each pair of frames has an ideal range of IPDs that it will fit.
Ahh, I need 1.67 high index, so I’m looking at $60 instead of out the door with $20. Still, insanely impressive, given that I ordered just lenses with anti scratch and reflective coating for my current glasses and the cheapest I’d found was $95 for lenses alone. Out the door in $60 would be $300 retail. That’s 20% of brick and mortar stores.
ZipperJJ may have won the thread, but this thread overall is great!
Back in the days when my husband and I were nearly broke, we bought living room furniture for some ridiculously low price, like $20 for the set, from a family who was moving to Europe. The furniture was very heavy and obviously would cost more to ship than it was worth. We used it for about four years and eventually sold it for $20 to someone who was equally glad to have it for that price, even though it had suffered inevitable wear and tear.
Ditto with a refrigerator – we bought one used for $80. Years later we moved into an apartment that came with one, and we had several offers, including one woman who begged us to please save it for her as she absolutely needed it for her insulin and $80 was all the welfare agency would allow her to spend. We told her the first person who showed up at the door with $80 could have it. After all, suppose we saved it for her and she never bought it after all? She was there with a friend, a pickup truck and $80 within the hour.
So we mostly furnished our home for 3 - 4 years for free.
My dad bought a dilapidated '66 Rambler American in 1974 for $100. He and my sisters (then in college) drove it 100K miles, until eventually he sold it to a junkyard for $50.
My husband did something similar with a used Toyota Corolla… bought it, drove it for three years, then sold it for more than he’d originally paid for it.
I use goggles4u.com myself, but yes - awesome. I only need them to drive at night and to see TVs and such (I had LASIK ten years ago) and I kept finding myself stuck without glasses because I’d left them somewhere, so I ordered five pairs. Cost me less than a hundred bucks and now I’ll never want for glasses again. They’re nice, too.
Yeah, you have to guess what looks good on you. Of course, they’re so cheap it hardly matters, but I covered my bases by getting a bunch of different styles. You measure a pair of glasses that fit and order some that are that wide or wider.