top 3 referrals

I have just signed up to Google Analytics, mostly as to see what they are about. My previous way, and very simple way, of analysing any traffic into my blog is via sitemeter, and I initially used sitemeter as a glorify hit counter.

So what has Google Analytics told me. It told me that my top three source of traffic are crazyjimsmith.blogspot.com, eliminate-my-debt.blogspot.com and debtdieter.blogspot.com.

Let's have quick tour of these three sites.

crazyjimsmith.blogspot.com

crazyjimsmith.blogspot.com can best be summed by its by-line on the blog. It quotes...

This blog provides commentary on stocks listed on the ASX, most things to do with investing in the sharemarket, politics, the economy, and anything else that may take my fancy or infuriate me!

This blog has plenty of comment and analysis on various stocks listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. Personally, I am not interested in stocks, only as a casual bystander. However, if I was, I would be very active reader and participation of the blog and its accompanying forum.

eliminate-my-debt.blogspot.com

eliminate-my-debt.blogspot.com is a PF blog. The by-line on the blog reads..

My goal is to pay my $152,377 mortgage in 5 years: 30th June 2012. I started this blog to stay motivated and I would love to hear from other pf bloggers out there!

It is certainly provides an insight into an average Australian family on their day-to-day living, particularly from a personal finance perspective. I especially like her articles on money and relationships. Some of her comments are very enlightening.

debtdieter.blogspot.com

debdieter.blogspot.com is a blog about the reduction of a debt, and the juggles of a hectic city lifestyle. The byline of the blog quotes..

Working hard to eliminate $56,722 of consumer debt and become debt free by May 2010...

The series of articles on her work perks are a fantastic read. It definitely shows what, and how work can be used not only to produce an income, but also use to reduce spending. The recent article on work assisted education is a great article, and instigated some thoughts on how my work can assist in my education.

cheap on-line photo printing

One of the family's favourite past time is to snap away at photos. When the digital camera revolution arrived about 4-5 years ago, the number of photos that we took seem to have tripled. Most of them ending up on the PC, and only a small selection of them ever made on to printed media as we have found that it is quite expensive to print out the photos.

We have tried the two popular options, either printing the photo out ourselves, or using one of a photo kiosks.

Printing the photo has its benefits. It gives me some satisfaction that I have hand crafted a photo worth putting in a album, but it also ends to be about $0.45 per print. We did all the frugal things like cutting up an A4 photo paper in a four A6 paper, and also using non-genuine inks. We have never managed to get below $0.30 per print. We even switched to an Epson printer where each colour has its own cartridge so only the empty cartridge is replaced, not the whole cartridge.

The photo kiosks are quite cheap, but they are rather inconvenient. Our closes photo kiosk is a five minute drive away, and using it frustrates my wife endlessly as it is badly designed. She usually get a couple of of the details wrong and the whole batch is ruin. It is something we try to avoid. The cheapest photo kiosk that we have found cost $0.19 per print.

Recently, one of our friends from our ante-natal classes pointed us to www.getdigital.com.au. For standard 10cm x 15cm, it cost $0.10 per print, and there isn't any minimum quantity! You can order 1 print if you wish. They will usually turn your photos around 1 one working day, definitely in two working days. You also have a choice of picking it up at a shop for a service fee of $2.00 or have it delivered to you for $8.50.

We tried it and send across 67 photos to be printed and be picked up at our local pharmacy. The results were pretty good, definitely good enough for putting into a photo album. It cost a total of $8.70 for 67 prints , sweet!

One word of warning, the website does not appear to be compatible with the Firefox browser. However it works pretty well with Internet Explorer. We discovered this after spending 1 hour uploading the photos!

Using www.getdigital.com.au has certainly help us the printing cost of photos and have saved us many dollars since we have discovered them.

photo credit: V Fouche

SIDS and Kids VIC

A couple of blog post ago, I wrote about how SIDS and Kids VIC was promoting a discount coupons books run by the Citibook. Since then, I was contacted by Lisa Kennewell to highlight some inconsistency in my post. She indicated the following

1. The link to SIDS and Kids VIC was incorrectly pointed to the national group. The link to the Victorian group is here.
2. The link that I provided does not download a Citibook that would donate some money to SIDS and Kids VIC. The correct link is here. Citibook does not have any link to SIDS and Kids VIC version of their discount coupons. The link is to the SIDS and Kids VIC version of the Citibook is also available from this webpage as well.
   

By the way, it is very poor form of Citibook to enter into a promotion with SIDS and Kids VIC but don't do anything to promote it. You can't even find a link to it anywhere on Citibook's website! The only version of Citibook that it offers to download is GOLD104.3 version. I wonder if Citibook gets a bigger cut from this version?

I have also edited the inconsistency out of the blog.

Many thanks to Lisa Kennewell to pointing out the errors.

citibook

Just a quick post to note that I came across citibook today. I read about it in the SIDS and Kids VIC newsletter.

It is essentially a website full of resuable discount coupons that you can print whenever you want. You can either browse through the affiliated business online or download the book which allows you to browse through it offline.

Citibook have two levels of discounts. The free discounts are usually between 5% to 50% off. The next level is the VIP discounts which will usually give your double amount discounts.

They appears to have a large range of businesses offering many discounts, from restaurants to car services.

By the way, if you are looking for a charity to support, consider the SIDS and kids VIC foundation.

Updated: Lisa Kennewell left a comment and posted the correct url that allow the downloading of the citibook that supports the SIDS and Kids VIC foundation. Link is found at http://www.sidsandkids.org/vic

Apologies to SIDS and Kids VIC foundation for not posting this link before.

The small costs of shifting house adds up to a large expense

We are now in the full swing of packing our house into many, many boxes and preparing ourselves for the move. I have shifted a number of times, and each time I am amazed how much it cost to shift. I have previously written about moving houses, outlining a few options. I think it is the little things that that adds up to a large amount. Let see what we have been hit for so far.

1. $30 - Fee at the local rubbish tip for disposing of items that we haven't used in a number of years.
2. $300 - Removalist to help shift the furniture. I previously wrote that we might be doing the removalist thing ourself, but we really ran out of time as our son became quite ill during the last week of packing. So to play it safe, we thought of hiring some removalist to do the shifting.
3. $570 - Renting our old house for three weeks while we wait for the our new house to be settled. This worked out quite well as there isn't a high pressure to shift out as soon as our house is sold. But I think that three weeks is too long. Next time, I will go for one week instead.
   
4. $30 - The cost of redirecting our mail to the new address. Although we will tell everyone necessary that we have moved and what our new address is, there will always be someone who misses out. So a mail redirection service is essential. We have opted for the three month service. This should be long enough to capture all mail.
5. $50 - Insurance for the transport of our belongings to the new house. The removalist that we are using only has insurance if he has accident and is the truck is write-off. My wife and I though that some of stuff could be damage with a small accident. So we are getting some insurance for the delivery.
6. $75 - boxes, tape and packing paper. The boxes are not cheap. We have tried many source of boxes, and have found the cheapest one to be about $3 per box. We have also managed to get some boxes from friends, the local shop and have some boxes left from the previous move. We need about 30 boxes of various sizes.
7. $75 - eating out and take away. Since we are trying to eat all the food in the fridge before moving, we have also eating quite a few take away.
   

So far that is a total of $1460. There will be more expenses to come as we move into the house, such as cutting the new keys, migrating our ADSL internet service to the new phone line and connecting fee for all the utilities. I am not looking forward towards these fees coming in.

photo credit: Ove Tøpfer

Long pick up for eBay winners.

My wife and I are taking the opportunity of shifting house to do a bit of a cleaning, (or junk ridding session), of the house. We have started the process some months ago by having a yard sale. Now, we have put some old furniture up for auction on eBay.

One of these items is a bedroom suite that we inherited from my in-laws. They have updated their bedroom suite and passed it on to us. Since we did not have any cupboards or bedside tables at that stage, and be a pair of frugalist, we accepted them. Now it is time to get rid of them and update it. The bedroom suite is from the 70s, and my estimated value for it is about $60 to $70.

The auction just finished last weekend and was won by an eBayer. I was actually surprised that it got sold as we never got a bid until the last 30minutes of the auction. We started the auction at $65 and it got sold at $102.50. It was certainly much higher than anticipated.

The winner was from a town that is about 7 hours returned drive. The winner showed up at hour house this morning in a 4WD. I estimate that it would cost at least $90-$100 as it would have used about 80 litres @ $1.25 per litre.

Let do the maths.

Final price of the auction - $102.50
Fuel cost - $100
Total cost - $202.50

The thing that got me was the amount of travel that some eBayers would do. In this particular situation, I would have though that traveling 7 hours for something that is worth $102.50 is not a fair good outcome, at worse you probably could have spend that 7 hours searching on eBay for something in the similar price range that is located closer.

One thing that I failed to consider is personal financial situation of the purchaser. Spending $202.50 on a bedroom suite may have been a great purchase for them, and the time spent to pick it up is time well spent. A equivalent bedroom suite, brand new, would have been at least $500 to $600.

I have heard many stories of other traveling much further to pick up their auction wins, one of them includes an overnight stay.

If that was you, would you travel for 7 hours to pick up the bedroom suite?

Giving yourself a 50% discount

I was reading the usenet newsgroup misc.consumers.frugal-living the other day and came across a post that suggest that we can increase our saving by cutting our spending by half. Hmm, I thought that is an intriguing concept and how it would work in real life.

Among other things, the post suggest that instead of buying $40 pair of jeans, go for the $20 pair; instead of doing the $7 lunch, buy the $3.50 instead.

In someways, this is giving yourself a 50% discount on your purchases.

I experimented with this idea over the last few days and came upon the three major drawbacks.

1. Not for everything. This 50% rule is not applicable for all things that you purchased. It is usually only applicable for items that provide many choices across a wide price range.
   
2. Don't really like the options. Sometimes, I just don't like 50% cheaper option, usually for personal reasons. For example, my lunch usually cost me about $5. The $2.50 option is a couple of potato cakes and a drink. This just does not feel me up, and I end up purchasing my later on in the afternoon. At the end of the day, I end up spending the same amount for lunch.
3. Big ticker items. For items that would cost large amount of money such as insurance, housing, holidays, you are not going to get a 50% discount for the same product no matter how hard you look or how long you spend looking. I tried to use this strategy for some of the items that need to purchase in our house migration adventures.
   

Perhaps, aiming to give yourself a 50% discount may not that achievable. Perhaps, a 20% - 25% discount may be more realistic.

By using this strategy to save money, it creates a different mindset when purchasing items. Typically, I would draw up a list of item's characteristics, then I would shop around to get the best deal for it. With this strategy, you have to determine how much you have to spend initially, then pick an item to fit that that budget. This strategy would mostly work for incidental items.

Freecycle it.

Nothing is better than free, except maybe, free with no strings attached. Many, many free things are offered to you except you have to give something back, especially on the net. Who remembers the free ipod give away.

I came across freecycle on the net the other day, and took a look. It is actually quite an innovative system where it uses the internet infrastructure to spread the word around, sort of like a community bulletin board.

freecycle would not really work unless there is a local chapter in your area, so I searched for one in my area. Not only have I found one, but two. There is one for Frankston, which is a really localise version of it, but there is also one for Melbourne. A list of other freecycle chapters are also shown on the Australian site.

Interestingly, the Melbourne chapter is the second largest chapter outside of the North America. Only London is bigger.

The one golden rule for freecyclers is that "We don't allow any trades, and no money can change hands".

One good tip is that freecycle is a a good source of free household items for when you first moved out of home. For the young ones who have just left home to begin their big life adventure, freecycle is a great source for things like cutlery, pre-loved sofa, kitchen tables and clothes.

Freebies on the net

You can't get any cheaper than free, but in the world of the internet, small quantities can be obtained for free. I mean, as an individual, small quantity of some things is still very usable. Every now and then, a pen get send out from Stablio or some new soap gets delivered. It all gets used up, saves me buying it in the future.

After a quick search on the net, I found many websites promising a free plasma TV or a obligatory iPod. As they said there is not such thing as a free lunch, well a free banquet anyway. The guys giving away the TV or iPod requires you to recommend 10 other email addresses, and also for you to sign up on at least one service like a credit card or DVD rental service. No thanks!

Here are my top 2 places where I found the most reliable information on free stuff on the net.

1. The Freebies Blog - An Australian blog on what's free
   
2. A Whirlpool thread on freebie.

The whirlpool thread is a surprise as the wealth of information on just from a thread.

Of course, you could also try google to find some of the freebies on the net, good luck on shifting through which one is the real freebie.