My wife knows how to do so many things well. One of her (and my daughter's) favorite activities is drawing and coloring. For a five-year-old she colors quite well. (Ariel is her favorite subject.)
She called me at work to ask if she could splurge on some Prismacolor art pencils. (She's also very good at discussing purchases before going ahead.) These are top-drawer colored pencils: high color saturation, smooth blending, the whole nine. She looked around and found a set of 72 pencils for $58 that was a good deal (less than $1 per pencil is good for this kind of pencil). I agreed it was a good deal, and she went to check out.
Right before we hung up I remembered that I had some Amazon gift certificates that I had redeemed from Swagbucks. So she found the certificate numbers, began logging them in, and then ended the call.
Five minutes later I get another call.
Her: “Uh, hun? Can I get the 120-pencil set? You had $40 worth of gift certificates in there!” (I could hear her smiling on the other end.)
Me: “Eh, sure. The 120-pencil set would cost less than the 72-pencil set would have without the codes, and I agreed to it before I remembered the codes.”
I maintain that the $5 Amazon codes are the best deal on Swagbucks. There are all sorts of things you can redeem your Swag Bucks for (which you can earn for searching the web, doing polls, taking surveys, and so forth). They don't cost quite as much as a $5 PayPal deposit and there are only about two bajillion things you can buy on Amazon. 😉
So, thanks Swagbucks! Without you, we'd have an inferior art pencil supply in our household.
(Thanks to The Financial Blogger for including this post in the Carnival of Money Stories!)
I wholeheartedly agree. $5 Amazon codes are THE best thing in the Swagbucks rewards catalog. The point values they set are sometimes bizarre. Regardless, I’ve taken great joy in spending their money at Amazon for the last 6 months or so, about $70 so far.
I keep telling people to join Swagbucks (preferably, from the widget on my site!) and start saving up for the Amazon codes for Cyber Monday.
Favorite things I’ve ever bought with these:
A jar of Horlick’s powder for a friend who loves malt sprinkled on her ice cream
A set of 100 assorted Pokemon cards for my nephew
A book on ADHD for a relative whose son was recently diagnosed
Powdered milk, for my oatmeal
But maybe what I really need is a set of 120 colored pencils?
We use the Amazon.com codes and save them the entire year. Then we use them to purchase
Christmas presents. This allows us to ship them directly to family and then no one is upset you didn’t wrap them :-).
that’s great that partners disucss big purchases, but if a wife has to ask her husband if she can buy colored pencils, something is wrong.
@SavingFreak: Neat idea! I’m always a little afraid that the SB’s will be “devalued” if I hold on to them for too long.
@Beth: I didn’t _have_ to ask permission of my husband to buy the pencils. But I try to be a good steward of the money he brings home, and felt the respectful thing to do was let him know that I wanted to buy 87 dollars worth of colored pencils to goof around with 🙂
@mbhunter: Redeem the SBs for Amazon codes and then simply hang on to them until Cyber Monday. I’m not an Amazon savant, but isn’t it possible to add the codes to your account and store them there?