Coupons!!!

Any shopping I do while I’m at school is usually done over the Internet. With the exception of books, I pretty much buy most of what I need online (I think we can all agree the mall in Ithaca is nothing to brag about). I also do not like to pay full price for much of anything. So on a recent online-shopping trip I googled “Forever 21 coupons” and got sent to this site. Wow!

The gist is, people submit coupon codes they’ve gotten via emails and other coupons, then rate how successful they were in an order. My coupon code worked just fine and was from an email I otherwise wouldn’t have known about since I try to avoid store emails like the plague. Now shop away everyone, knowing you’re not paying full price!

Go give your two cents

If you’re free tomorrow at 5 p.m., head over to the other hill for “The Great Financial Crisis: What Caused it? What is Next?” in Call Auditorium in Kennedy Hall.

Robert Kuttner (Co-Editor of The American Prospect; Senior Fellow at Demos), Barry Eichengreen (Professor, University of California, Berkeley), and Eswar Prasad (Professor, Cornell University; Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution) will participate in the debate and address necessary reforms and consequences of the current recession.

For more information, follow this link.

Where’d all my money go? And word of the week

A very bad thing happened to me recently involving my debit card, a few slow to process transactions and a very angry bank. A while back I had made a few purchases for the start of school and for whatever reason, they all took a very long time to show up on my account. They started slow — maybe one a day — then suddenly BAM! They all processed, and I had no idea. So I went about my business and bought a coffee for $1.89. Long story short, that coffee actually cost me $31.89. I had overdrafted on my account.

Wonderful.

After a few angry calls with my bank concerning the notifications I’m supposed to get if my account falls below a certain amount, I got some good advice: step up a cash reserve account (money set aside to keep you from going in debt (overdrafting for instance) in the case of an unexpected expense). Sounds like a no-brainer to me. One blog suggested keeping 6 months worth of living expenses in a reserve account, but said the downside of this is you could make interest if you put it elsewhere.

But for those of us in college, a reserve account with a hundred bucks or so should suffice. Needless to say, I set up a reserve account, because I’m never spending $30 for coffee ever again.

I’m moving to Texas

In this economy, everyone is freaking out about what to do after graduation. So, I’m going to break it down for you thanks to some research and this handy chart.

Places Not to Go:

Detriot, MI; Riverside, C; Providence, RI; Charlotte, NC; Portland, OR.

Places to Go:

Oklahoma City, OK; San Antonio, TX; New Orleans, LA; Austin, TX; Washington, TX.

Interestingly enough, Texas was on the good side four times (out of 13 cities). Cities with the lowest unemployment rates are concentrated mostly in the Northeast and Midwest. Looks like I’m not returning to Upstate New York for a while.

Weekend recap

“In the context of a full-blooded recovery, this report is disappointing,” said Alan Ruskin, an economist with the Royal Bank of Scotland in Stamford, Conn. “We’re still clawing our way back.”

Taken from a New York Times article from the weekend after the Labor Department released August’s unemployment numbers. According to the report, unemployment went up to 9.7 percent and the net loss in jobs was 216,000 compared to 9.4 percent unemployment in July with a loss of 276,000 jobs.

Perhaps the most important thing to note was that while this month’s numbers are an improvement from earlier this year, they’re still indicating that while the economy may be expanding again, unemployment is going to continue to be a problem. A “jobless recovery” sounds pretty terrifying to say the least — especially for recent grads and seniors entering the workforce. What’s everyone in this position doing right now? Feel free to leave a comment!

The Wall Street Journal explains why this summer was a bore

The summer of 2009 was the summer when nothing positive happened. The stock market went up but it didn’t help the economy. The classic bear market “sucker rally,” which lifted stocks by 50%, still left the Dow 5,000 points short of its all time high. In other words, those who had lost 53% of their life’s savings had now only lost 38%. Golly! Pass me another Dos Equis! Toxic assets were still on the books, mortgage refinancings slowed to a trickle, no one could get a loan to start a business. Housing starts remained at apocalyptic lows, people kept getting laid off, people kept getting furloughed. The press kept writing stories about people getting laid off and furloughed. Then journalists started getting laid off, and those that had not been laid off started writing stories about how journalists getting laid off—or furloughed—was hurting the economy because now there would be even fewer people to write stories about people who had been laid off. Or furloughed.

Read the rest (not about the economy) here.

Don’t buy your books…

Rent them on Chegg!

I don’t know why I haven’t heard about this site until now. Or why I dropped $300 on books (13 books on Amazon. Used. Can you believe that?!)

But the gist of it is, you pay a pretty low price to use your books for the semester. From what I can tell too, the savings are pretty hefty. Then at the end of the semeter, you send them back for free. Chegg takes care of the shipping and their site promises to be really fast.

I was curious how much money I could have saved this semester had I found out about Chegg a few weeks ago. My most expensive book, “Law of Public Communication” cost me $100 (including shipping) because I had to buy the 2010 version. But on Chegg, it would have cost me $66.22. I’m guessing that when I try to resell this book on Amazon, I’m probably not going to get more than $50 if I’m lucky.

But for some of my books this semester, renting on Chegg wouldn’t have made that much difference. My “European Politics in Transition” book cost me $50 and on Chegg it would have been about $47 to rent. It’s definitely worth buying and reselling on this one.

Moral of the story: next semester, I’m Chegging.