Posts Tagged ‘Saving Money’

How To Save Money With Your Office Supplies

A few months ago I bought some Pilot G2 pens to use around the office. These ones are supposedly the “best” ones to use, because of their “security” feature: you can’t wash out anything written with one of them. This is a useful feature when signing those cheques or anything else with your signature. The document cannot be used fraudulently. I know this isn’t a big concern for most people, but still, I thought it was a nice feature.

Plus I’m just a sucker for a great writing pen, and these are definitely fun to use.

I had bought a three-pack for around $10 or $12, and I was a little sad to see that they seemed to be disposable pens. Until yesterday.

I finished off the blue one last week, and threw it out. I’m not a huge environmentalist, but I was a little annoyed that such a well-made pen was disposable.

Then yesterday I was in my local discount department store, and saw that they DO make refills for the G2 pen! Hot diggity! So I immediately picked up a 2-pack of refills for $4, not a bad deal. But of course on the drive home I had to remember if I still had the empty pen. Luckily due to my lazy housekeeping skills this week I hadn’t actually emptied out the trashcan in my office, so this morning I fished around in there and found it! I discarded the empty cartridge, put in the new one, and voila! I’m good to go.

What’s the lesson here? Well, it’s that you can save money by buying refillable pens. Sure, they might be a little more expensive for the initial outlay, but in the end you save money with the refills that could be up to one-third cheaper than an entirely new pen.

How have you been saving on your office supplies? Buying printer paper in bulk? Leave a comment and let me know.

How I Got Free Long Distance on My Cell Phone

As some of you may know, when I moved to my apartment last year, I got rid of my landline and use my cell phone as my main phone.  I’ve been on a pay-as-you go plan simply because I liked the flexibility of being more in control of my monthly payments. If I didn’t use the phone a lot, I didn’t feel cheated about paying for service I didn’t use. If I used it a bit more, then I was happy to pay the extra, simply because I knew it wasn’t every month.

Recently though I was investigating moving to a monthly plan that would give me more minutes in the evenings, so I started looking this week. Turns out my provider (Virgin Mobile Canada) also had these “extra” packs you could add to your monthly plan that would give you extra things, like unlimited texting and calling to certain phone numbers, or let me choose when my unlimited calling block occurs every day (instead of only in the evening), and so on. I spoke to a very nice customer service rep who explained all the details to me, and I decided to go for it. The main selling point was simply that I would get unlimited calling and texting to 5 phone numbers I could add to a list. This means that I can now call my sister in Kingston whenever I want, for no extra long distance charges! Or my friend in Vancouver, with no extra long distance charges. What’s even better is that I can actually change who’s in my list once a month, so if I know I’m going to call somebody in particular frequently, I can change the numbers on the list and be done with it. Isn’t that great? I’m excited.

But what’s even better is that this whole new plan only costs me $2 more a month than I’m paying now. Yep, you heard me right, for $2 more a month, I get unlimited texting and calling across Canada to 5 numbers. That’s definitely worth the extra $2 in my opinion. Yippie!

The DIY Car Wash

In anticipation of my road trip this weekend, I went out to clean out my car tonight. This will be the inaugural road trip for my new car, so I’m excited. I thought I’d take advantage of the $2 car wash in my building’s parking garage. It’s one of those insert-your-coin-and-grab-the-wand-and-go type things, which I’m always happy to use. They’re so much fun. (yes, I’m that strange.)

I was excited to see that the washer had some rince/soap and wax options, as I’ve developed an appreciation for waxing the car. Living in Canada, it definitely comes in handy in the winter time, since it keeps the salt and snow from sticking to the car. I know, we’re in spring/almost summer right now, but the wax is good at this time of year to keep off all the bugs.

At any rate, I popped in my toonie, selected Rinse, and off I went. The building management had thoughtfully attached the hose on the ceiling with an arm that would keep it away from the car, and still allow enough slack and spin for you to walk around the whole car. Very nice. The one thing I wasn’t sure about was how long my toonie would last. Would it allow me to rinse, wash with soap, wax and then rinse again? Only time would tell.

I whipped around the car quickly to rinse it all off, and then started again with the Wash & Soap option. I pulled the trigger to use the high-pressure wash too, as I had some gunky mud near the wheel wells. I walked briskly around the car, spraying merrily away. I was having a blast, both literally and figuratively.

I switched it over to the Wax, and whipped around the car again, getting the wax on. And just as I got to the front, the timer ran out, and the water turned off. Nice timing indeed.

The total time was about 7 minutes, and the total cost was $2. Considering the super max car wash at a gas station is almost $10 these days, I thought $2 was a bargoon! I brought the car back to my parking spot and then pulled out my squeegee to clean off the front and back windshields. As I was walking around, I noticed that there was still dust on the side of the car (my car is black, which means it shows all the dirt quite nicely.) There was still dust on the car! And I even used the high-pressure wash trigger too!

*sigh* So the DIY car wash, while fun, wasn’t the best thing in the world. I will still have to wash my car at some point in order to get all the “dirt” off. Of course considering it’s supposed to be rainy & cloudy all week, I am not too upset about only losing $2, but it’s the principal, you know? *sigh and double sigh*

A Great Online Shopping Tool for Canadians Too

While cruising through my RSS feed list tonight, I came across an interesting post on WiseBread by Paul Michael. In it he talks about Retailmenot.com, which aggregates coupon codes for online shopping sites. What has me most intrigued is that there is a Canadian section. Yes, a Canadian section! Normally it’s difficult to find good deals online for Canadian shoppers, as most of the sites out there contain only American ones. I’m going to be sure to keep this site bookmarked next time I am looking for a deal.