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Archive for the ‘Newsletter’ Category


Posted on February 28, 2009 - by admin

Saving Money on your Cooling Bill - Food Spoilage OOG 30

Out of Gas Newsletter - Issue 30 Feb. 28, 2009

Saving Money on your Cooling Bill

++ News -

We would like to take a moment to thank those that have been with us for 30 issues - my how time flys…

Disaster preparation - Recap -

We talked some this past week on safety and planning.

Resources Preparing for disaster.

Creating a Disaster Plan - Preparing an Emergency kit.

Should you Buy a Generator?

During the storms this past week we lost over $200 of food because we would be afraid that it would spoil? So exactly how long does it take food to spoil?

An excellent article covering that can be found here. You can also find more good information on food safety at the usda site.

So should you buy a generator?

Here is an excellent resource for generators - click here.

Price checks on small generators - find them here.

So should you buy one? I would buy one if any of the following are true.
1. You loose power more than 2 times / year.
2. You have a large freezer filled with food.
3. You have small children (or elderly) that can’t withstand cold weather or being without electricity for more than a few hours.

++ Savings Tip of the Week

Saving Money on your Cooling Bill

The information that we gave you about Saving Money on your Heating bill will help to save money on cooling too.

Here are some Cooling specific tips.

1. Do a home energy audit - go to this site - http://hes.lbl.gov/

Enter your zip code in the area provided. Fill out the questions and it will give you specific answers on things you can do.

2. Make sure to close the drapes and curtains when you aren’t at home.
3. Just like we did in the winter you want to turn the temp for the AC up when you go to work or won’t be home for 3 or 4 hours.
4. Use Ceiling fans.
5. Get your air codition serviced - make sure it has freon and is working properly. As we’ve talked about many times before make sure to get several estimates and for work around your home get references, check them and check with the BBB… what may seem like a deal that is too good to be true, probably is!
6. Use your ceiling fans, if you don’t have one then think about installing one. If you like to DIY you can find some details on how to install a ceiling fan here. http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/how-to/intro/0,,453858,00.html

Next up:

We’ll start on Household Expenses and Supplies (not including Food)


Posted on February 21, 2009 - by admin

Saving Money on Electricity - OOG 29

Out of Gas Newsletter - Issue 29 February 22, 2009

Saving Money on Electricity

This issue brought to you by

Make your own electricity - click here for details.

++ News -

Gas Prices - Gas prices are trending a bit higher.

A good overview of the stimulus package can be found here.

Next week we’ll start our series on preparing for the unexpected.

++ Savings Tip of the Week

Many stores are going out of business these days. When they have an item priced 20, 30 or even 50% off, is that really a deal.

We were in Lexington shopping this past summer and I told my niece that a major department store was going out of business. They were having a huge sale, so we went in to check things out. After a few minutes she wanted to leave. She then informed me that last week (before the sale) the prices were actually lower.

This site will help you compare prices on the spot, by using your cell phone.

•    If your cellphone has Internet access, go to the mobile version of Google Product Search: m.google.com/products. Then enter the product name or model number.
•    If you are without Internet access but can text message, you can text the product’s ISBN or UPC (the number under the bar code) to save@mobsaver.com. The MobSaver service will send you a list of prices for the same item on Amazon and eBay. Find out more at www.mobsaver.com.

Saving Money The Nitty Gritty -

Saving Money on your Electricity

Electricity is something that we can’t do without. There are however many ways you can save on electricity.

Here are some links that will help you to learn more.

http://www.consumerenergycenter.org/

This is an excellent site - make sure you check out all the links. The appliance section is nice.

Here are a few more.

http://www.geedyup.com/2009/02/15/top-ten-ways-to-save-money-on-electricity/

http://electrical.about.com/od/appliances/tp/sevenwaystosave.htm

and my favorite.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/home_journal/how_to/4288639.html

Next up:

Saving Money on your Heating / Cooling

We’ll start on Household Expenses and Supplies (not including Food)


Posted on February 14, 2009 - by admin

Saving Money on your Telephone bill - OOG 28

Out of Gas Newsletter - Issue 28 February 15, 2009

Saving Money on your Telephone Bill

++ News -

We had a wild week as small tornadoes / high winds blew through our community on Weds. We were without power for several days and were really cold. Over the next few weeks we’ll talk some about being prepared when bad things happen and then we’ll continue on the saving money track. Because one thing I learned was we definitely weren’t prepared.

++

Saving Money The Nitty Gritty -

Saving Money on your telephone bill

The first thing you’ll want to do is drag out a copy of your last telephone bill. Sometimes I think the people that design these bills want to make it very difficult to figure out exactly what we’re paying for.

Here are a few ideas to save you some money.

1. Do you really need more than one telephone line?
2. If you find yourself talking more on your cell phone than on the land line… maybe you could get rid of the land line. Just make sure that you notify everyone (Even aunt Susie) about the change.
3. Check for charges like wire maintenance… if you’ve had trouble with your phone in the last year or if your house is old you may want to keep this, otherwise get rid of it.
4. Call your phone company and ask for the best deal they can give you, explain to them that you’re looking on cutting expenses and you want to get their best deal possible.
5. Would it save you money to try out an internet phone service?

Here are some tips on saving money on your long distance service.

http://www.trac.org/consumer/top-ways-to-save-on-your-long-distance-bill.html

We’ll continue our series with the following topics.
Saving Money on your Electricity
Saving Money on your Heating / Cooling

We’ll start on Household Expenses and Supplies (not including Food)


Posted on February 7, 2009 - by admin

Saving Money on your Internet Access OOG 27

Out of Gas Newsletter - Issue 27 February 8, 2009

++ News -

We’re still working on completing the new design of our blog - so things still may be a bit out of ‘whack’. Hopefully this week we’ll be able to get everything cleaned up - then we’ll ask you for some suggestions on how to improve, and then we’ll get to a more frequent posting schedule. One of the things we’ll be working on will be adding more pictures and video.

++

Saving Money The Nitty Gritty -

Saving Money on your telephone bill and internet access.

We covered Saving money on your telephone bill.

We didn’t talk much about saving money on your internet access.

The biggest thing to do is shop around first, for providers that you aren’t currently using.

Make sure when you talk to them ask for their “best” deal.

Once you have the best deal call your current internet provider and let them know they need to lower their price to $x or you’re going with a different company. Nine times out of ten they will lower the price to at or near the rate you give them. If not then switch.

2-10 Valentine Ideas for the Cheap
2 - 14 Saving Money on your Telephone Bill
Saving Money on your Electricity
Saving Money on your Heating / Cooling

We’ll start on Household Expenses and Supplies (not including Food)


Posted on January 24, 2009 - by admin

Saving Money on your Garbage Bill — OOG 25

Out of Gas Newsletter - Issue 25 January 24, 2009

++ News -

Hope you had a great week. One thing I’ve been doing some research on is the ‘possible’ new tax cuts for the economic stimulus package. From what I’ve been reading it looks like the cuts will not come in the form of a check like they did last time but in some type of payroll reduction, so you would see a little bit more in your weekly pay check.

++

Saving Money The Nitty Gritty -

We talked on Tuesday about tracking your categories for spending. As promised we’ll take each of those categories, break them down and start talking about each of them. The big thing to remember is that a bunch of small changes will add up to big savings.

Saving Money on your Utilities.

Utilities are something that everyone needs, after all if we didn’t have them we would be back in the stone age hunting for sticks to build a fire.

Most of the Utility bills can be broken down into the following.

Heating / Cooling
Water
Electricity
Garbage
Telephone
Cable / TV
Internet (which could be combined with Telephone / Cable or be seperate).

Last week we talked about saving money on your Cable bill.

This week we’ll talk about Saving money on your Garbage.

Some of you may not have much of a choice when it comes to your Garbage bill. I know that we don’t. We have one vendor, and we get a bill every month. It doesn’t matter if we have one garbage bag for the week or we have 50, we are charged the same price.

Many people though are charged a flat rate for x number of bags and charged extra for any number after that. The goal for you should be to not have any extra added to the bill.

Here are a couple of links that will help you reduce your waste.

Here are some steps you can take to do a trash audit.

Here are 42 ways not to make trash. Some of them are pretty extreme, but some are easy to do.

Your city probably has a site that includes some tips on recycling.

Upcoming Tips
Tuesday we’ll talk about saving money on your Water Bill
1-31 Our next issue of OOC will cover saving money on your Heating / Cooling.
2-3 Then we’ll cover Electricity
2-7 The Telephone bill
2-10 We’ll start on Household Expenses and Supplies (not including Food)
-


Posted on December 13, 2008 - by admin

Researching Your Product - OOG 21

Out of Gas Newsletter - Issue 21 December 13, 2008

++ News -

Gas news - The good news for the economy is that gas is now about $1.66 / gallon. Over 80 or so days it has fallen more than $2.00.

Useful Information -

If you’re wondering when stores may be offering free shipping or need a coupon - make sure that you check this site out.

http://www.freeshipping.org/

++

Saving you Money - Below is a video - which we hope will help you a bit in your product research.

If you like it please don’t hesitate to leave us a comment.

We want to make sure to bookmark things as we go along. First make sure that we have a folder created within our bookmarks – that will make finding things much easier. As you open new pages you will want to open the new page in a tab – again that will make things much easier.

The first step in doing any product research is going to Google. What I’m going to be looking for / researching are camcorders…

There are a few different ways to approach this. If I have plenty of time the first thing you want to do is to check out some forums.

So I would search for camcorder forums. If you’re short on time you can search for

Camcorder reviews (just remember to insert the product you’re researching where I’ve put Camcorder).

Camcorder buying guide.

One thing you’ll want to do as well is to change your search preferences so you get more results on the page. To do that you click on preferences – then make the number of results 50 or 100.

After visiting a few flops – I found one that I liked. If you had the time you would post something that would detail what you were looking for. Or you could ask in the forums what are some good sites to learn about the item you’re researching. BUT before you ask you want to make sure to use the search function.. after all nothing is as aggravating to frequent forum goers, and that is a repeated question of a few days ago. You can find the search box here. It is usually a link or a big box. Don’t forget that if you’re having trouble finding something you can use your browser search function. For firefox that is ctrl – F .One thing I can tell by the number of posts, is that Canon and Sony are big sellers.

Make sure to save good sites that you find in your favorites – otherwise you’ll just have to find them again.

I have subscriptions to a ton of different magazines. During the past few months they’ve had camera reviews. Clip those pages and put them into a folder where you can find them. Also the magazines listed some good review sites. One thing with review sites is many of them are spammy and only want to make money from advertising… so there views can be prejudiced.

We’re going to go back to Google and search for camcorder buyers guide.

You want to find two or three sites to help you with your research.

Couple of notes –

1. Especially if you’re wanting recent technology, you’ll want recent information.

2. A few sites I’ve had good luck with are about.com / Yahoo / CNET / Consumer Reports.

After you plunder around in these sites you should have an idea of the features that you want.

Go back to the spreadsheet that you made and include those features.

After much browsing I really like the camcorder.info site. Now you want to find at least two or three models that you like.

I like the Sony HDR-S12 and the Canon HF 11.

On Tuesday we’ll work on Finding some coupons.

Here are the tentative dates for the remaining articles.

3. Finding Coupons - December 16th
4. Comparison shopping online. - December 20th
5. Comparison shopping Off line. January 3rd
6. Buy it. January 10th

Fun with your family -

This is fun for the whole family - http://elfyourself.jibjab.com/

You get to turn you and whoever you happen to have a picture of into a group of crazy elfs.

You can even send the results to your friends and family.

You can make some really cool snowflakes - check them out here.

http://snowflakes.barkleyus.com/index.html

We hope you have a wonderful day!


Posted on December 6, 2008 - by admin

Holiday shopping and shipping Tips - Out of Gas 20

Out of Gas Newsletter - Issue 20 December 7, 2008

It is chilly here this morning with temps in the … teens. Go grab you a good cup of joe and relax a bit with us.
++ News -

Gas news -
Oil was down again Friday to $41 / barrel. It went down about $8 a barrel last week. Now if the people who make the products we use everyday would remove the increases (which they said were because of the oil prices). Do I think that will happen? Probably not.

Useful Information -

When you’ll need to order when you order online and the type of shipping you’ll need to use in order to get your presents by Christmas.

Post Office

http://www.usps.com/holiday/shippingcalendar.htm

UPS (this is a pdf file)

http://compass.ups.com/uploadedFiles/UPS_Calendar_PeakSeason_pw_1112.pdf

FedEx

http://www.fedex.com/us/holiday/shipping/lastdaystoship.html

Saving you Money - 6 Steps for finding a great deal online.

Below are six steps for finding great deals online. We’ll go in depth with each one in future issues.

1. Getting Ready - December 9th
2. Product Research - we’ll include a video - December 13th
3. Finding Coupons - December 16th
4. Comparison shopping online. - December 20th
5. Comparison shopping Off line. December 30th
6. Buy it. January 3rd

Fun with your family -

Below are some sites that you and your family we enjoy as we approach the holidays.

http://www.northpole.com/

Games - Birthday cards - Coloring — our favorite The Good Deed Calendar which you can print out.

http://blackdog.net/holiday/christmas/

The decoder games are my favorite at Black Dog. The Reindeer food recipe is a lot of fun as well.

Some fun elf games.

http://www.miniclip.com/games/adventure-elf/en/

We’ll include some more fun stuff for you to do as we get closer to the big day.

We hope you have a wonderful weekend. Stay warm and safe.


Posted on November 22, 2008 - by admin

Out of Gas Newsletter 19

Out of Gas Newsletter - Issue 19 November 22nd, 2008

++ News -

We hope you and your family have a wonderful ThanksGiving.

Gas news -

Gas prices now average less than $2.00 / gallon in many places. This is good news, especially for people that have to drive quite a bit.

Next week we’ll be taking some time off to spend with our friends and family. We hope you have more time to do that as well. So there won’t be any blog posts or newsletter next week.

The today show had an excellent segment on saving money on your Thanksgiving Dinner.

You can find it by clicking here. (note it’s a video)

Saving you Money - Some Final thoughts on Saving Money for Christmas

1. Make a budget and stick to it.
2. Remember that many times the cheapest present with the most thought behind it, is much better than an expensive gift.
3. Start saving now for next year. Figure out what you want to spend next year and start saving now. If you put $20 back each week in 50 weeks you would have $1,000.00.
4. If you do Black Friday - have a plan. You can find details of our plan here
5. Having fun with your friends and family is much better than spending tons of money. And you won’t have to worry about the bills you get in Jan.

In a couple of  weeks we’ll talk about some fun things you can do with your family around the holidays.


Posted on November 15, 2008 - by admin

Creative Christmas Gifts that Save you Money - OOG 18

Out of Gas Newsletter - Issue 18 November 15th, 2008

++ News -

Black Friday ads are starting to come out. We’ll have our guide on what to do - the steps you can take to get the best deal on Tuesday. Some details on what Wal-Mart may be offering is here.

Gas news -

Oil is now down to around $57 / barrel with the average price for a gallon of gas - $2.12.
We got quite a few suggestions on the new types of content to include here. We’re reviewing them and will pick the one we think will work the best.

Thanks again for submitting your opinions.

Fun with the Family -

We’ve been working hard on some new pages that will help you have fun with your family. We should have these pages complete early next week.

Saving you Money - Thinking Creatively for Your Christmas List

Think for a moment about your favorite Christmas present.. did it cost a lot. If you’re like most people probably not. Do your kids even remember what you got them last Christmas?

Really great gifts don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. I’ll give you a few ideas with things I’ve done and give you a few links that will give you some more information.

The Big Red Bag.

This is something that I did for my wife. First you’ll need a big bag to hold the presents in. When you go shopping you want to buy many, different small gifts for whoever the red bag is for. I bought my wife about 15 or so gifts (things for the kitchen, crochet hooks, books, etc.). The most I spent on a gift was about $5.00 I think. That was about ten years ago and she still talks about it. I might have to do that again.

The Scavenger Hunt.

Again buy small gifts, but create a scavengar hunt so the recepient will have to find each present and when they find it they’ll get the clue for the next gift.

Here are some links.

http://familyfun.go.com/arts-and-crafts/season/specialfeature/holiday_gifts_ms/

http://www.buynothingchristmas.org/alternatives/index.html

Here are some more ideas.

http://www.allthingsfrugal.com/r_frugalpresents.htm

And one more from me.

Last year I created a 12 days of Christmas list for Lisa.

Examples of what I included -

My wife hates to drive - so I included - Five trips I’ll drive for you.

Another was Eight back rubs - Seven nights off (I cook / clean / help kiddos with homework etc).

You get the idea - you don’t have to spend any money on that list if you don’t want to… just your time.

We hope you have a wonderful weekend.


Posted on November 8, 2008 - by admin

ThanksGiving Leftovers - Out of Gas 17

Out of Gas Newsletter - Issue 17 November 8th, 2008

This issue brought to you by

Prom 2009 - Everything you need to know about Prom and much more.

++ News -

We’ve started on new series on our blog post titled Saving Money for Christmas. New topics can be found on Tuesday and Saturday for the next few weeks.

++ The Oil Industry

Since the price of Gas has fallen below $2 / gallon in many places - we want to change the focus of the section of our newsletter a bit.
The goal of our site is to save you money. You can help us decide what you want us to put in this section. Just send us a note or leave us a comment after this post.

One overall saving tip is if you’re thinking of making a purchase, wait till closer to Christmas because I think everything will drop in price.

Saving you Money - ThanksGiving Leftovers

We have scoured the web for some great recipes for your leftover turkey. We’ve also included my favorite recipe below.

http://www.healthy-eating-made-easy.com/leftover-turkey-recipes.html
http://www.eatturkey.com/consumer/thanksleft.html
http://southernfood.about.com/cs/turkeyinformation/a/leftover_turkey.htm

Here is my favorite recipe - click this.


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