Found money!!!

In the spirit of the month, I gathered up two video-tv-type cables my husband had purchased at Radio Shack to fix something on our tv/dvd/cable connection. After stepping over the two boxes for two weeks, I asked Robert if he didn't need them anymore, could I return them? Sure!

Well, in the past, I would have just taken them to his garage workshop and left them on the shelf. Instead, I schlepped up to Radio Shack (sans receipt, of course) and asked for my money back. After some hemming and hawing, the sales manager acknowledged the boxes indeed said Radio Shack on them and had obviously not been opened. So, he took them back and gave me a gift card for $48.05. Found money. Wahoo....that's me doing the happy dance all the way back to my car.

There is so much cash laying around our homes that we don't even notice. I am not including change jars and coin piles in this, though our family has, on occasion, rolled up its fair share of coins into a bank deposit worth a couple hundred bucks. I'm talking about all those things we don't return (like video cables) or the on-sale shorts we buy for the kids that don't fit and instead of taking them back, we give them away to a friend with a child smaller than ours. I'm talking about all those frequent buyer points we never redeem.

A department store I occasionally shop at offers Incircle points. They "last" for a year and if you don't redeem them, you lose them. Well, yesterday I decided to check my balance and see what I could get for points I normally ignore. Good thing I checked! They expire in the next 30 days and if I had simply ignored the situation as normal, I would have missed out on the chance to change those points into a $250 gift card...

Add that to the Radio Shack bonanza and it adds up to almost $300 in FOUND MONEY just this week...Tack that onto the money saved from all my bill trimming this week and I saved/earned almost $1,200. Not bad for a week's work.

Oh, and don't forget the CVS Extra Care Bucks program. Now that I finally figured that out, I will never throw another CVS receipt away without checking how much money the company wants to give me on my next purchase. ECB will be a whole column on itself later because I am having such a blast saving money with ECB and coupons. Not to brag, but yesterday a smart coupon/ECB combo allowed me to save $25 on a $42 purchase of OTC medicine and toiletries...including three items that I actually got for free!

Why didn't I learn any of this type information in my Economics class at Cornell??