On Monday, I posted about how I bought a headset at Circuit City. What I didn’t mention, was that I ended up getting a better deal than I thought I would!

Over the weekend, I ordered the headset, and about 2 hours later went to Circuit City to pick it up. It was within an hour of closing time, and not very busy at all, so we were just going to go pick it up, and continue running a few other errands. Well, we get there, let them know we were there to pick up our purchase, and the person at customer service told us that they didn’t pick it up and bring it in the back, so they would send someone to go get it.

At that point, I was a little upset because what if there was only one or two left, and someone else bought it since it was still on the sales floor? Well, either way…we waited. A few minutes later, the guy came back, and gave it to the customer service representative. By then, she started helping someone else, so she told me to hold on…and I proceeded to wait another 5-10 minutes.

By now I was starting to get frustrated. I was only stopping in for a minute to pick up my purchase (already paid for and everything)…and yet I’d been standing there for over 20 minutes now.  So, since I had nothing better do do while I waited, I was reading their signs, one of which is a big sign that says “24-minute pick up. If your purchase isn’t behind the counter and ready for you 24 minutes after you make your purchase, you’ll get a free $24.00 gift card!”

So of course, when she finally got to me, I politely said that it had been more than 24-minutes since I ordered the item, and it wasn’t ready when I got there to pick it up, and per the 24-minute pick up they had, doesn’t that mean I get a free $24.00 gift card?

She had no idea what I was talking about, but found someone else who did. So, I left a few minutes later with my headset (a great deal at $29.99), along with a $24.00 Circuit City gift card! The funny thing was if she just gave it to me after the guy brought it up to her, I wouldn’t have said anything and would have left. I was just so frustrated after her making me wait even longer that I realized I would get a free gift card out of it.

I guess the moral of the story is, pay attention to all of the signs and deals that stores have!  If I didn’t notice the sign, I wouldn’t have gotten the free $24.00 gift card that I was entitled to, since they didn’t have the item waiting for me.  So I ended up getting an even better deal!

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Over the past few months, you have probably started to see ads crop up all over the place offering to buy your old gold. You might wonder if they’re real, and if you really can sell your old jewelry to make a little extra money. They are real, and many of them have been around for years - but it’s only been lately because of the economy and high gas prices that many people have started looking into them.

What happens with the above company (and many others), is that they send you a free bag to send your old or broken gold jewelry to them (some including the above are pre-paid, others you have to pay for shipping), and then they get the jewelry.

They will take a look at it, and tell you how much it is worth. If you’re happy with the number, you’ll get your check and will be on your way. If you’re not happy? No worries, they’ll send you back your jewelry.

It’s definitely something to look into if you have some old gold jewelry that is broken, or that you’ll never wear again. Why have it sit in your jewelry box if it’s something you’ll never use when you can get money for it?

One thing to note is that different places will offer you different amounts of money for your jewelry, so it might be worth shopping around to see how much you can get before agreeing to a price.

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I don’t know if you had a chance to read another one of our posts about making money, but at the end of June, we talked about how you could earn extra money making videos reviewing products you buy. It’s called ExpoTV, and they want to know what you think about all types of products, so they’ll pay you up to $10.00 per review you make, and each video only has to be 1-3 minutes long.

Well, I bring this up today because it turns out you can get more than just money from them! Whenever someone signs up that you refer, you not only get $5.00 added to your account. You also automatically get entered into a contest. Each month they give away $25.00 Amazon gift certificates to 5 people who referred others in that month. Well, Scott got an email this morning saying that he was one of the winners! Isn’t that great? So not only did he make money for his video, he also got an Amazon gift certificate out of it!

If you’re looking for an easy way to earn a little extra money this month (or any other month), I’d really suggest trying ExpoTV.  We use our digital camera, and it’s easy and doesn’t even take much time!

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Now through July 5th, you can get $10.00 off your $50.00 purchase at Toys “R” Us. This is good in store only, with the coupon.

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With rising gas prices (along with the price of everything else rising), you might be wondering how you can make a little extra money without getting a second job. It’s great to be able to save money, but sometimes you just need a little bit more, whether it’s to be able to go on that vacation you really want, or to get something else that you’ve been hoping to buy.

You might think there are no “easy” ways to make money online, but I guess that depends on how you define “easy”. Yes, you will not get money online for doing nothing. BUT, there are things you can do to make money that don’t take a lot of time, and are even fun!

One of these ways is ExpoTV. How does this work? Well, you take a video of yourself reviewing a product, and they’ll pay you for that video!

The videos only have to be 1-3 minutes long, so you don’t have to worry about how to say THAT much about a product. What can you review? Almost anything you want that is still sold in stores today! How awesome is that? They just want you to be honest about what you thought about the product.

How much will you get paid per video? Well, I must start by saying that does vary month to month. As of right now, they pay $10.00 per video for good quality videos, and you can do up to 20 videos this month, meaning you can earn up to $200 this month from them.  You’ll even get an extra penny each time someone watches your video!  Oh, and if both you and your spouse want to do this?  No problem.  You can each have your own account and do your own 20 videos a month.  In this case, you’ll make $400 a month together!  The only issue?  You can’t both review the same products.  But that’s not a big deal.  Think about all the stuff you have in your home…it shouldn’t be an issue to find more products to review.

If you’re saying to yourself, “Oh, I don’t have a video camera, I guess I can’t do this…”, you might still be in luck. Take a look at your digital camera. Most digital cameras can take short videos. This is how I do my ExpoTV videos. I put my Panasonic TZ3 camera on a tripod, and then take the video.

It only takes a few minutes to do the video, and then to upload it! I’ve made about $150 so far, but I haven’t done that many videos yet. Between setting up the digital camera, taking the video, and then uploading it, I’d say I spent about 5-7 minutes per video.

If you’re doing the videos by yourself, you can even easily edit out the beginning and end (where you get up to turn the camera on and off) with free software that most likely came with your computer.  Microsoft Windows Movier Maker comes for free on almost all computers, and will make it easy for you to take out the beginning or end (or edit any part) of your video.

If you’re wondering what they do with the videos, well so far they have them on their website so that others can watch them (and when they do, you’ll earn a penny each time), but they also have them on Buy.com.   If you’ve been shopping at Buy.com lately, you might notice that they have videos with reviews of some of the products.  This is where the videos come from.  So if you make a video, you might see yourself on the website!

Another nice thing is that I, along with many, many others have already received money from them.  So you know it’s not a scam or that you won’t get paid.  If you still don’t feel too comfortable, do one or two videos, and then wait until you get paid before you do any more.  I know a lot of people who did that, just so that they could see for themselves that they got paid.

Personally, I think this is a great way to make a little extra money.  You can also look at it this way.  If both you and your spouse each do 20 videos a month (that’s $200 a month each), in just 3 months you’ll have $1,200, which can pay for a really nice vacation!  If you have any questions about ExpoTV or about creating videos, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help answer them.

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Here is a great deal if you’re looking to get 4GB SD Cards. Going through Amazon’s website, they have a SanDisk 4 GB Extreme III SDHC Card with MicroMate USB 2.0 Reader sold through Beach Camera for $42.50 each.

With this rebate you can get $30.00 back when you buy 1, $70.00 back when you buy 2, and $110.00 back when you buy 3 of these cards from a list of retailers, Beach Camera being one of them.

Shipping is free, so when you buy 3 (the best deal of all), you’ll spend $127.50, and get $110.00 back. The total you will have spent for the 3 4GB Sandisk SD Cards is $17.50, or just $5.83 per card. You really can’t beat that!

NOTE: Make sure you buy it through one of the approved vendors. When you go through Amazon, sometimes they have other vendors (including Amazon themselves) as the main “Buy it now” supplier. So make sure you choose Beach Camera or another approved vendor from the rebate. This is good through June 29th.

We just took advantage of the deal today, and I am really excited at the great price! Now we’ll have plenty of SD cards for our digital camera, and won’t have to worry about not having enough room to take all of the pictures we want to when on vacation.

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If you’re looking for an easy way to make a little extra money, consider joining Inbox Dollars. They are a company that will pay you to do certain things, most of them only taking a short time, and are fun to do.

They have been around for a while, and are a reputable company, you know that you will get paid when you request a check.  The nice thing too is that it’s easy to do, and is quick, so anyone can do it.  How will you make money with them? There are multiple ways including:

• Reading email they send you
• Play games
• Take surveys
• Complete offers
• Refer friends

While you’ll only make a little bit of money for each of the above, it does add up, and they will send you the money.  I personally have signed up, and while I read the email, and take some surveys, I haven’t completed many of the offers. They have some simple ones where you can get paid just to opt-in to a free newsletter, but others require buying something. I have never bought anything, but have done some of the free stuff.

While it’s not going to make you a fortune, many of these things take just seconds to do, and it’s an easy way to earn a little money every now and then.

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Sometimes, buying the floor model can save you a LOT of money. I can understand why for certain things you would want to make sure the item you buy is in the box, has all of the manuals, is brand new, and has no scratches or dents, but sometimes that just isn’t important.

Take for example a small stereo. We were looking to buy one for our house. Our house was built with speakers in the ceiling of each room, and was set up so that all we needed was a portable stereo that we could hook up, and we would get great music in each room.

The problem is, with the one we had since we moved into the house, you could only play the radio or 1 cd at a time. Since the stereo is kept high up in our laundry room, it was very inconvenient to get to, so we decided to get a new one that would play mp3’s, and have a better remote than ours did.

Since this was definitely a want, and not a need, we weren’t willing to spend more than $100.00 on it. So, we went to Best Buy to take a look at what they had. They had a few different choices, but one in particular caught our eye. The Panasonic SC-EN37 Micro System had side speakers that we could easily take off and connect the wires to our system, so that was most important to us. It plays mp3’s, so that was great as well. It even would play an iPod, so although we don’t have one now, if we got one in the future, it would be perfect.

What was even better, was that it was normally $129.99, but was on clearance for $79.99. That was a great price, so we were excited. Of course, because we like to shop around, we then went home and did some research online, finding out that first - it is a good product, and second - that WAS indeed the best price around. So this past weekend, we went back to Best Buy to pick it up.

Guess what? They were all sold out, and only had the floor model left. Since it looked in good shape, and we could see that it worked, that didn’t bother us. We did ask if we took the floor model, what kind of discount we could get off of it…and this is where I was shocked. The sales woman told us we would get it for $39.99. Talk about excited! We were told that there was no box or instructions, but let’s face it…it’s a simple stereo, we didn’t need instructions, and if we really did, I’m sure we could find them online. We didn’t care about not having a box. It was worth the $40.00 savings not to get a box!

So we ended up getting a really nice new sound system for our house for $39.99, regularly $129.99.

So while getting the floor model might not sound ideal, if you really want a certain model, but don’t want to pay the full price, it’s a great way to save a little bit of money! Usually the store will be willing to negotiate as well, so you might get an even better deal. It’s definitely worth checking out!

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Looking to make an “easy” $17,000? NASA is looking to pay you $17,000 if you’ll stay in bed for 90 days.

You don’t have to sleep the whole time. In fact, you can even play on your computer! You’ll also be able to watch tv…and sometimes they’ll roll the beds out to a common area so you can play cards or board games.  You can even have visitors.

To me, this is one of those things that just isn’t worth it. I couldn’t give up 3 months of my life for $17,000….I think I’d get board after the first day! But, I’m sure there are people out there who wouldn’t mind doing it…so if you’re one of them, you can find a link to the NASA application here.

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Are you looking for another way to earn a little extra cash? Selling your old electronics that you’ve replaced is a good way to get a little extra cash from something you no longer use. Of course there are many ways to sell your old electronics, but here is a quick and easy one.

If you go to Second Rotation, you’ll be able to look up the cell phone, digital camera, laptop, mp3 player, or other electronic device you are thinking about selling. You answer a few quick questions about the condition, and what parts you still have of it, and right away you’ll get a dollar amount of how much they’re willing to pay you for it!

If you like what you see, you can sell the item to them - they’ll even pay for shipping, as long as you live in the US. What if you don’t like the number you see? Then you don’t have to sell it to them.

It looks like a very easy way to get some cash (or at least find out what they think your product is worth) for something you don’t even use anymore!

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