Bargain Bastards

I apologize to any of you that ended up here thinking this was an article about using Installous on a jailbroken iPhone in order to pirate app store apps, but that’s not what we’re about here. I won’t deny that my iPhone is jailbroken, but I don’t use it for Installous. Pay the developers the money they deserve, if you can’t afford them don’t buy the games…. So now that that’s out of the way, lets talk about a way you can get some of those premium iPhone Apps for free!

Basically what it boils down to is patience, if you are patient enough there’s a good chance the game you want to buy in the iPhone App Store will eventually become free for at least a couple of days. Most developers will launch a special to either intro the game or to build some popularity when sales start to slump, but with tons of apps in the app store how do you know which apps have gone from paid to free? Well that’s where FreeAppAlert.com comes in.

Free App Alert updates daily with the apps that used to have a price tag, but are now free for download. The site maintains the previous days free apps as well so you can go back and see if those are still available for free. I’ve found some really cool games for free that I would have easily paid money for, so this is a great resource if you’re looking for some new apps but don’t want to pay for them.

Along the same lines as Free App Alert, there is also freeappaday.com which offers up the same kind of thing. So use these 2 resources to your advantage and save a few bucks here and there.

FreeAppAlert.com | FreeAppADay.com

A brand new video game is probably one of the dumbest things you can buy if you’re looking to save money. Sure there are games-by-mail places like GameFly™ and now Blockbuster online, but those are actually kind of expensive if you don’t play through games fast enough. Wouldn’t you rather play a game for a week for free?? I know I would, and I do, and here’s how.

If you have a GameStop in your area you can take advantage of this little trick, if not you may be able to find another store that sells used games that has a similar policy. All you have to do is find a game you want to play, buy the used version of the game, play it for 7 days and then return it. GameStop’s return policy on used games is that if you return it within 7 days of purchase, you get a full refund. So in other words you can basically give GameStop a small loan to borrow a video game, try it out, and return it without losing any money.

If you find yourself beating games really fast or getting bored of them really fast this is definitely the way to go. I can usually fly through a First Person Shooter in a couple days so buying them is a total waste of money unless I know I’m going to play the multiplayer a lot. For example, I know I’ll be buying Call of Duty: Black Ops because I’ll play it online for the next year, but something like Medal of Honor, which I don’t think I’ll play the multiplayer too much, I’ll just pick up used the week after it comes out and bust out the single player in a week and return it. There are no negatives here, especially since there’s a GameStop right near my work so I don’t have to go out of my way to return them.

I will say that the easiest way to do this is to make sure that you pay cash for your games. If you pay with a credit card and then return it, it can sometimes take a few days to get the money credited back. Also I guess if you’re paranoid about GameStop cutting you off, using cash would be a better way to prohibit them from having a record of your returns. I’ve never had a problem doing this although I do it at my girlfriend’s brother’s GameStop, but he’s told me before that they don’t care if you do it because that’s the company policy.

So stop wasting money on new games that you know you’re going to get sick of in a week. Buy them used at GameStop (even new games can be found used for $55 about a week after release) and play them for a week and get a full refund. If you don’t happen to finish the game in a week and still want to play it, return it and go buy it at a different GameStop. I guess you could try to rebuy it right then and there, but then you might start running into problems. I can’t tell you how much money this method has saved me, but I know I hate watching games pile up after I stop playing them…. huge waste of money.

I know some of you are lazy like me and well hate to go the extra mile if you don’t have to. Well there’s a fix to that problem and it goes by the name of Glyde. Basically this is a way for people to sell and buy media without really doing anything. Its really simple to use. First you have to make an account, as usual with anything today duh. Then after you do that you just goto your game box sitting in the dust and pick out the games you want to sell. To post your games you want to sell is pretty simple. There is a tab at the top that says “Organize”. All you have to do is Add the media you want to sell and it puts it in a really neat order, showing you the picture of the media you selected. After that’s done you just click on the picture and hit the tab Sell This Item. Now after that’s all done and you’re just cruising along, you will get an email that says CONGRATS on selling this item. Now most would think, oh man i need to go to the ups store or FedEx Kinko’s, BUT Glyde takes care of that chore for you. Yes you heard right. They send you a prepaid zip envelope that is all ready addressed to the recipient and boom you’re done.

Now i know you’re probably wondering how they can do that and make money, well they charge you a tiny fee for the shipping, BUT like a good friend of mine said, “Convenience is sometimes worth a little less money”, and he could not be any righter! So get on the intenets and sell that unwanted media!

Next time you head to your local electronics store to buy cables to hook up your new fancy HDTV or Blu-Ray Player, don’t! If you need them that day, then by all means buy them, but open the package carefully so you can return them in a few days because I’m going to point you to 2 sites that will change the way you buy cables.

Places like Best Buy will try to upsell you on Monster Cables or at the very least their own Rocket Fish brand, and they will be very pushy about it too, but stand your ground. For a 6 foot HDMI cable you’ll probably end up spending between $50-80 in the store if you give in to the pressure. Now if you wait and buy OEM cables online you will save yourself a lot of money… and I do mean a lot.

Monoprice and Firefold are the 2 sites that I use to buy all of my cables at and you should too. A 4-8 foot HDMI Rocket Fish cable will cost you anywhere from $59.99 to $79.99 in the store (Monster cable will be more expensive than that), but over at Monoprice.com you can pick up a 6 foot HDMI cable for $3.04 + shipping. The funny thing is shipping usually costs more than the actual cable itself and the combined price i still usually less than $10.

So if you need to purchase cables, that day, then go to Best Buy and buy the cheapest cables you can find. Once you get home go online and order the same cables from Monoprice or Firefold. Once the new cables come in the mail go back to Best Buy and return the cables you bought for a full refund. This way you can enjoy that nice new HDTV while you wait for the cheap cables to come in.

Monoprice.com | Firefold.com