08/05/2016
Life Lesson number 23 - I tell my students it's not what you make but what you keep. Think about this for a moment. How much money passes through your hands daily, weekly, monthly or annually? At the end of the day how much do you get to keep? Think about taxes, spending for all the things that you spend money on. Do you consciously make an effort to stretch your dollars? Do you shop around or do you simply take the first offer that you get for whatever you are buying? Do you use coupons and try to get discounts. I consider myself to be frugal and learned the above captioned lesson early in my life - regardless of how much money I have I hate paying full price for stuff and yes, I am that guy who when buying a car - faxes the car dealers ahead of time, tells them what I am looking for (that 3 year old model that just came off lease with the low mileage and in pristine condition), and then negotiates hard for the best price and then pays all cash using my American Express Card for the payment so I can also get a bunch of mileage rewards points. Today, I was super excited to save 56% on my 5 day car rental through Enterprise. Check this out..I called around the car rental companies looking for a rental for our upcoming trip to Hawaii. The second best rate was Avis which offered me a full size car with unlimited mileage for the 5 days using AARP and AMEX discounts for $288.21 (including taxes). I also figured that I would redeem two American Express Rewards $75 car rental gift cards for 15,000 points that I had in my account bringing the total down to $138.21 (not bad). But wait. I was able to find a special discount at Enterprise for 15% of your car rental book now and use by September 10th. Plus the same full size car at Enterprise was offered at $240.57 v $288.21. Check this: $240.47(included taxes) - $25.50 brought my cost down to $210.90 subtract the $150 gift card and my final cost for the 5 day rental is $60.90 or a $77.31 (56%) savings over the Avis deal. . It only took about a half hour of work to figure this all out. enjoy!
