Life has been getting a little busy for blogging recently, but you really can’t get away from discussions of money–if that’s something that interests you.
I thought I’d note a few issues related to money-related that I’ve been dealing with recently.
When I was paying my bills last month, I noticed I was double-billed for a hotel stay. We had made a last minute reservation through Hotels.com while we were on the road. When we checked in, we were asked for a credit card–as one is, in case of damages or incidentals. Lo and behold, the hotel also charged us for the night; their charge was about $14 less, by the way.
Pleasant though the hotel was, it was not worth double the stated rate.
It turns out that Hotels.com has a very convenient chat function, which connected me to a live chat operator, who took care of things: called the hotel, confirmed they had charged me for the room, canceled the charge from their company. All during that time, I could surf the web and take care of balancing my check book; rather than sitting on the phone, tied to a desk, as might have been required 20 years ago.
I’m not quite sure what lesson to take home from this: book a last-minute rate directly with the hotel? (Though, in the past, they would usually quote a higher rate.). Stick with a large company, who has clout and an easy-to-navigate website?
I’ve started using Amazon lists to keep track of books I might be interested in, but which I don’t want to buy now.
A few weeks ago, I used that list to reserve a number of titles at my local library.
When I picked up the books, my receipt not only listed the due dates for my items, but at the bottom let me know that I had saved over $65 using the library.
I’m glad to see our library system reminding patrons how valuable it is to them.
As I’ve written about before, the PiN household is a one-car home, and over the years, this has saved us a ton of money.
However, as we approach a planned vacation–another road trip–our singular car is letting us know it may not be up to the job.
This has prompted a lot of web surfing, trying to figure out the best strategy:
- Rent a car in our city and make the long drive.
- Fly to my hometown, visit family, and rent a car there.
- Fly to our destination, rent a car there, possibly missing family, and fly back.
It turns out that option 1 was the best choice for us.
Now, we have to decide on more details:
- Who will we rent from?
- Do we have discounts? It turns out that my insurer has discounts, as does AAA, our credit card, and even my employer.
- What size car shall we rent? And how does the rising price of gas play into this? (A smaller car may mean paying more for the rental but less for gas. A larger car that would probably suit us better, and cost less to rent, but will require significantly more fuel, which is becoming more expensive by the day.)
- What will we do if they take our reservation but don’t actually have a car to provide??!!
It turns out that keeping a reservation primed–but not confirmed–works much the same as keeping clothes in an on-line shopping cart. I found that after considering options for a day or so, the rental I was looking at had dropped in price by over $100.
Not bad!
I just hope that it’s there for us when we go to pick it up. And that we can afford the gas.
What’s going on in your financial life this week?