Cyber Monday Shopping Tips

[AndreaWright]

Holiday Budgeting tips:

Look over your finances, and determine how much you can afford to spend on holiday related expenses.  Set this figure as your overall holiday spending limit.  Some categories include:  food, gifts, decorations, activities. 

The food, decorations and activated are the easy ones.  But for gifts you have to do a little more work.  Make a list of everyone you want to give gifts to and break down the gift budget between those people (don't forget to include yourself!).   

Tweak your budgeting to cover any instances of overspending.  Don't panic if you overspend in one area, just scale back your spending in another to make up for it.  Same goes for people.  If you budgeted $25 for Nana, and spent $30, adjust Uncle Eddie's budget from $20 to $15.  Don't be afraid to change your budget details.  A good budget is always evolving; just stick to the bottom line.  And remember to keep a copy of your budget; it will be helpful in planning next year's budget. 

 

Cyber Monday Tips:

Track the Deals

Use www.CyberMonday.com and www.delio.com to stay on top of all of the Cyber Monday deals across the web, including information about free shipping offers and coupons.

Seek Out Coupon Codes

Head to www.currentcodes.com , www.retailmenot.com or one of the many other sites dedicated to finding and posting coupon codes.   You may just find a deal - free shipping, free merchandise, a percent off your order - to sweeten the pot.  Bookmark www.retailmenot.com then, the next time you're shopping online, just click on the link, and it'll display all the coupons for the site that you're on - now that's bargain shopping made easy!

 

Coupons + Rebates = Free

You can get some fantastic deals by combining online coupon codes and rebates. These sometimes result in freebies or cheapies worth $50, $100, or even more.

The world of online retailing is a very competitive place and there are always discounts and perks being offered to win customers. The brick and mortar stores rely on weekly sales to motivate buyers. The online merchants use discount codes in the same manner.

One problem is that these codes are not usually advertised on the online stores. The main purpose of the discounts is to get buyers to come to the sites, so normally they will not tell you about them if you are already there. You need a place to locate the codes before you go shopping. You need to check out the coupon code sites.

Although many of the discounts are for first time buyers, the online retailers have started to offer more deals for returning shoppers. Typically the codes can only be used once per customer. Some stores run multiple concurrent codes and allow each one to be used once.

You will find a wide range of discounts. Codes for $10 off $30, $30 off $150 and the like are quite common. While these are nice discounts, they certainly are not freebies. You will, however occasionally find a dollars off code with no minimum purchase.

Even better than the no minimum purchase are the real deals that can result from combining a coupon code with a big rebate. You can find these combinations yourself if you spend enough time searching. Often, the various coupon code sites will point out the best of these deals. You can also check Freebies Forum for posts about these deals or share the ones you have found. I've seen deals like a CD-ROM drive for free and a color printer for $11. These deals don't happen every day, but when they do they are sweet.

 

 

Tags: cyber monday, shopping, target, tips

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