Chegg

Buying textbooks for college (or for really lucky people high school and college) is a huge expense.  Lets say you buy a book from the bookstore for $200.   If you are lucky, they will buy it back from you at $100, then turn around and resell it for $175 and repeat.  Someone's taking advantage of you to the tune of a ton of money.

Recently I was told about textbook rentals.  Basically someone really clever bought a ton of textbooks for the full price and rents them out at around 25% of full price.  If the publisher can manage not to put out a new version every year, then the people renting the books make good money.  Sure you still are being taken advantage of, but you are also saving a ton of money by not getting screwed by the bookstores.


Chegg is the rental site I recommend, since they buy back any books that you may have sitting around (Which makes me think I might be able to convert junk to money at home).  They also apparently plant a tree if you rent from them.  And that keeps teenagers and strange blue skinned, green haired superheros off your back.  


Finally, I managed to find you a coupon for the site:
This coupon saves you 5% off a rental, and gives you $5 when you sell them books.
Coupon Code:  CC135316


Hopefully this post can help someone, somewhere.

Woot!

If you are like me, and I know I am, then you like getting a good deal on everything you do.  There are many places online to get good deals, although some take time and effort to sort through all the deals they offer.  Since time is money, we don't have time for things that take time.

That's where Woot!  really shines.  The site's motto is "one day, one deal" and that's exactly how the site works.  Everyday at midnight Central time a new item is listed.  The item stays on the site until it sells out.  The exact number that they have is not stated, but they usually do not sell out until late in the day if at all.  Woot usually has a very good price, although sometimes the electronics are refurbished.  If this is the case it will be stated right below the price.

Woot typically sells electronics, but I've seen good deals on all sorts of things from ladders, tool sets and cooking gear to bags of crap.  In addition to the main site they have three main side sites, selling wine, shirts, kids stuff, and random stuff.  The shirts are user created and can be pretty creative.  I never really checked out the wine or kids sites, but I've drank some of the wine and I can endorse the quality if not the price.

If you use the Google chrome browser, there is a very nice add-in called Woot! Watcher that will pull pictures and prices of the items for sale at the five main sites.  It also tells you if they are sold out and allows you to buy through the add-in.  There is a feature that will also auto-buy a bag of crap, although I haven't had any success with that yet.  There is a similar add in for Firefox, if that is the browser you choose.

Bags of Crap are very rare items that sell for very cheap (I think around $5), and usually contains 5-20x the value of what you paid for it of random crap.  It is the most sought-after item on the sites.

Finally, there is a deals site on Woot with hundreds of user submitted deals, but wading through that can be much more time consuming, so I usually don't venture in there.

Woot is a lot fun to use, just remember that your loved ones will make fun of you when you buy hundreds of Christmas cards.  Time will tell on that one, though; I doubt the holiday is going anywhere.  My grandchildren will thank me for not having to buy their own Christmas cards.