When to buy

I came across this helpful blog post about when to buy things. Some highlights:

• Airline tickets—For domestic nonholiday travel, look for the lowest fares 21 days from your departure. Fares are updated at 10 a.m., 12:30 p.m., and 8 p.m. on weekdays, and airlines file one update on Saturday and Sunday. Lowest fares are filed on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and occasionally on Saturdays. Wednesday is generally the cheapest day to fly and Sunday the most expensive. (Exception: the Wednesday before Thanksgiving—the busiest travel day of the year.) For holiday travel, start looking in September to get a good price. Fares can change quickly, and much depends on the carrier and the market.
• Coupons—While coupons are available throughout the year, the most coupons appear in the Sunday paper during November and December. The best deals on turkeys can be found two weeks before Thanksgiving to Christmas. In spring, you’ll find coupons on seasonal produce, ham, and frozen food (apparently March is National Frozen Food Month—who knew?). Summer coupons offer discounts on grilling items and ice cream. Autumn brings coupons on soup and other canned items.
• Champagne—With steep competition to be your New Year’s Eve bubbly, Champagne houses drop prices during the holidays.

Vegan/vegetarian food shopping note

If you subsist mostly on almond milk, organic yogurt, and vegan fake meat products, you are better off (on average $1/per item) shopping at places like Harvard Organic Co-op than Star Market, which kind of rips you off on these things (and has far worse selection). The fruit is actually comparably priced as well.

Deal hunting with RSS

A cool thing in life involves adding RSS feeds from deal sites (for instance, monitor deals from Ben's Bargains) to Google Reader. You can just add the URL directly as a subscription. <3

Some more things I learned about saving money

I would like to thank everyone who gave me financial advice!

My friend Jie recommended the following blogs:

• http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/
• http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/
• http://www.5dollardinners.com/
  

From these blogs I learned that there are many online coupons.

I also came up with some more ideas for saving money*:

• Subsist mainly on free food, such as that broadcast over MIT's vultures mailing list for free leftovers in Stata. (I have friends who actually do this.)
• Befriend the admins in your building so that they text you about free food before they send out the free food announcements.
  
• To fill in other gaps, join as many research groups as possible. Many of these are likely to provide a free lunch or snack. Tangentially collaborating with research groups in other departments will keep the level of suspicion low.
  
• To fill in the rest of the gaps, meet a succession of older people with jobs to date on sites like OKCupid* and go on 1+ dates with each of them. Act very poor but charming during the whole dinner; if you are lucky they will pay. (This assumes that these sites contain a large number of people willing to take me to dinner, and that these people do not communicate with each other.)
• Invest in a sewing kit and a set of patterns. Attend corporate talks and get as many free t-shirts as possible. Stay after the talks to get the leftover XL's that nobody wanted to collect fabric for making pants, dresses, handbags, etc.
• Hang out in each T stop and befriend the T operators so that you can get free public transportation. ("Sorry, X--I can meet you in Porter Square, but I'll have to leave there between 9 and 12. If you want to stay later, we can meet at Government Center.")
  
• Sell your furniture and move out of your apartment. During the week, sleep on a cot in your office. On the weekends, spend the night with hard-partying friends who think you're staying over just because the T stopped running. If this is unsatisfying and you would like a bed to sleep on, date a couple of people at once and spend your time between their apartments. (Befriending some empty nesters with spare rooms/beds should also work.) Either that, or convince your advisor to buy a group bed for one of the offices.
  
• Become friends with freegans.
  

The conclusion is that living in the Stata Center cannot fail you, since it will also let you save on heat, hot water, and electric bills. :P

* Most of these are untested.
** Thanks to Eugene's peer pressure and my own curiosity I had an OKCupid account for 2-3 days (not for this reason!!), during which time I met some colorful people and decided it was best to leave the site.

My attempts at money management

I recently discovered that I have been bleeding money out of my ears every day. I have taken the following measures to stanch the flow of money/blood:

• Gotten an account at Mint.com, a website that syncs up with your bank and credit card accounts and shows you how you are doing with respect to your budgets. Thanks, Joe Near, for showing me this site!
• Started following the advice of the Tight Fist (thanks, Eugene), a great tongue-in-cheek blog about how to save money. (I have been thinking quite seriously about their advice about how using too much soap just makes you need other things more, like moisturizer... If you give a mouse a cookie...)
  
• Stopped shopping at Whole Foods/Harvest and started shopping at Star Market. This, combined with a reduction of variety in my diet to the staples of tofu sausage, eggs, noodles, vegetables, and fruits, saves me multiple 10's of dollars on groceries per week now.
• Stopped buying random things I don't use full price from the internet. The next step will be finding deals when I need them... (I am currently operating under the assumption that I will not require anything new--this is not sustainable.)

Next on my list: using the library instead of buying 10,000 books / year.

I am still not to good at this thing, so please give me tips! :)