Issue time 2:44 pm, by CTreit
Category:Bargain Shopping
How to find cheap airline tickets
June 10th, 2010Booking airline tickets can be a very frustrating experience. There are so many different pricing strategies among airlines that you never quite know how much the trip actually costs you until you read through a lot of fine print. Some airlines charge you extra for baggage, others charge for carry-on items. How then do you get the best price? Ho can you save money when you book tickets?
For a start, open up multiple browser windows so that you can compare the final cost among different airlines on different websites. When we’re searching for tickets for the family, my wife and I each do searches (at the same time) on our own computers, opening up multiple windows and comparing notes as we find different fares. This doubles our efforts, but it usually leads to good results since we employ slightly different search methods. There is one thing that I don’t get though. Even when we are searching on the same site at just about the same time, sometimes I can find a cheaper flight than my wife. This happened to us just yesterday!
Aside from an airline’s own website, you can use other sites which show you fares for many different airlines on one page. Many scan through a lot of airlines to find you the cheaper route from one place to another. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check directly an airline’s own site. One good reason is this: some budget airlines like airtran.com or jetblue.com don’t offer their flights through all the big discounters, but they still have great prices!
1. orbitz.com is the grand-daddy of booking sites, but I have found that it has not been able to give me good rates recently. I booked my last flight on orbitz.com about two years ago. I still visit the site regularly out of habit, but also to get an idea about the general price level of a ticket.
2. cheapoair.com works similar to orbitz.com. Yesterday was the first time that I used the site and it worked out well. It was here that I found the cheapest fare of my and my wife’s comparative search. It was offered by an airline that I didn’t even expect would fly the route I was looking for! cheaptickets.com, and vayama.com are another of the same kind of site. I always use it when I search for flights.
3. lowfare.com allows you to search some of the sites I mentioned above and others as well, simultaneously. You enter your travel plans and lowfare.com uses the data to search other jumbo airfare search sites like kayak.com, sidestep.com, and travelocity.com. Lowfare.com opens up additional browser windows for each one of the sites you want to access.
4. Lastly, I regularly check expedia.com, hotwire.com (a site I think is great for last minute hotel bookings and car rental reservations), and priceline.com.
Keep in mind that you can also use these sites to find low prices for hotels, car rentals, things-to-do, airport parking, airport transfers etc.
My wife and I searched yesterday for about half an hour to find a ticket that was $150 cheaper than the next cheapest ticket in the search. I’d say that the time we spent searching for tickets was well worth the effort. It usually is.
What strategies do you employ to book your travel? What experiences do you have with these travel sites?
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Issue time 7:46 am, by CTreit
Category:setting up a budget
Setting up a budget is the easy part
June 8th, 2010You know the drill when setting up a budget. You write down how much income you have and then you decide how it gets split up. You can use various techniques like a zero based budget, an envelope system, or you go through each budget item step by step tweaking your projected expenses to make them fit your income. At the end of this exercise you know how much of your income is spent on necessary expenses like housing and transportation, how much is spent on less necessary expenses like entertainment and traveling, and how much you plan to put into savings.
It may seem like this is an involved process, but deciding how to spend the money is really the easy part. Ok, it does take some time to split up your income so that you have a realistic budget, but a budget tells you only how you think you should spend your money. It does not tell you how you are actually spending your money.
The hard part comes after you have set up your budget. When you have decided how you should spend your money, you must make sure that you actually spend your money according to your plans. How do you do that?
1. Write down all your expenses. Personally, I think this is the hardest part of all. Why? It’s best if you write down every dollar you spend so that you know what you really spend it on. It is not good if too many dollars end up in the category “various” or “miscellaneous”. So you have to be diligent, and really account for every dollar to make this work. If you are married, you also need a spouse who writes down every dollar spent. In other words, you need discipline to really keep track of your spending.
2. Check during the month to see how you are doing. Make sure that you have enough dollars to spend in each category and overall to last you for the month. Cut back if you are spending your money too quickly and you might relax a little if you are starting out a little too tight with your money.
3. At the end of the month, add up your expenses, compare your expenses with your budget in each category, and compare your overall spending with your income and savings plans. This may sound complicated, but it just takes a bit of time to sit down and check out the results of your hard work over the last month.
4. When you know how you actually spend your money, you can then decide whether you need to change your budget so that your plans match your actual spending better. Of course, you can also decide that you have to adjust your spending so that your expenses fit your plans.
After doing all this, you will have some valuable information that helps you plan your expenses better. You know how you actually spend your money. Be aware that you only gain that knowledge if you do the hard part of living by a budget, that is, if you record your expenses dollar for dollar.
How far have you come with budgeting? How well have you done recording your expenses?
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Issue time 8:14 am, by CT VBT
Category:personal finance
A Thank You to Our Hosts
June 4th, 2010We are happy to report that our post “Statistics Schmamistics in Financial Planning” was listed in the “Best of Money Carnival” hosted by Free Money Finance.
FiveCentNickel also published a guest post “Our House is Worth a Ton of Money – No, Really, It Is!”
Thank you very much for hosting us at your sites!
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