Book Reviews and Money Saving Tips

Gift cards are an easy and often thoughtful gift. What fries me is that the retailers act as if they are doing you a favor by selling them to you. Well over 10% of gift cards are never used. That works out to about an $80 billion dollar gift to the retailers. You would think they would be more interested in selling them to you, knowing that 10% of them will never be used. I went online last night to purchase a couple of restaurant gift cards. I got all the way to check out for an Outback gift card when they added in their fee. FEE! They were charging me a fee to buy a gift card and charging me to mail it as well. I have no objection to any business making a profit. However charging a fee and shipping on a plastic card that 10% of will never be redeemed seems WRONG. After much searching through many restaurant sites, I found that Olive Garden is waiving shipping for the holiday. Their card can be used at the Red Lobster, Bahama Breeze, Seasons 52 or any other Darden ...

Online Purchase Protection I’m a geek, I can’t hide it, in fact I revel in it. I love technology, learning new technology and yes, buying new technology. Much of my buying of technology occurs online. I am skeptical of online security. Daily you read of someone else’s database or web site being compromised. Up until recently I dedicated a single credit card as my online card and used only it for online purchases. Then the credit card company bumped up my credit limit significantly due to my paying the bills on time and not carrying a balance. Now the low limit credit card that I purposely kept low is now much higher than I am comfortable with for online purchases. I have ignored the opportunity to get the one time use credit card numbers as offered by many of the credit card companies. It seemed like it would be more trouble than it was worth. I finally took the time to read through the procedure and discovered I could download a software package to my computer th...