Saving money

Estate sale tips for buyers

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , ,

I talked earlier this week about garage sales, but what about estate sale tips for buyers? The overall strategy is similar, but there are definitely tips that apply specifically to estate sales. Simply put, shopping at estate sales can save you thousands of dollars if you do it right.

So what is an estate sale? Imagine an oversized garage sale. Essentially, the family is liquidating everything in the house. Of course you find a lot of the same things you’d find at a garage sale, but at a good estate sale, there will be high-dollar items too.

So, without further ado, here are my 18 hard-won estate sale tips for buyers.

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Garage sale tips and tricks for buyers

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , ,
Garage sale tips and tricks for buyers

I am a garage sale pro. Over the course of a decade, I attended thousands of garage sales, saved thousands of dollars buying things for my own use, and made tens of thousands of dollars reselling my loot (yes, I had a business license and declared it on my taxes). Here are my favorite garage sale tips and tricks for buyers.

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My Toyota says key battery low

Dave Farquhar Saving money , ,
My Toyota says key battery low

I got a scary message from my 2011 Toyota Camry. “Key battery low,” the message on the dashboard read. You can read that two ways. “Key” could mean they key fob that unlocks and starts the car. Or “key” could mean “critical.” Fortunately, when a Toyota says key battery low, it means the key that unlocks and starts the car. Or the key fob, if that’s what your car uses.

You can fix this yourself and you don’t have to find a Toyota dealer.

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A DVR without a subscription or monthly fees

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , ,

What if I told you that you could have a DVR without a subscription that worked with free over-the-air antenna-based TV, and it cost less than $35, saving those monthly subscription fees month after month?

It’s called the Mediasonic Homeworx HW180STB. If you want to record and time-shift television without loss of quality and without paying a fortune in subscription fees, it’s a tremendous value. You have to provide an antenna–which you can even make yourself–and USB-based storage, but it means you can get whatever capacity you want, and if you fill up a drive, just get another one.

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Why I bought a hybrid

Dave Farquhar Saving money ,

Gas is around $2 a gallon, and I just bought a hybrid. Why?

It makes sense and it doesn’t make sense. So let’s talk this through. I bought one, and if you’re thinking about getting one, I think it can be a very good idea.

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Save money on appliances

Dave Farquhar Landlording, Saving money , , , , , , ,
Save money on appliances

If you want to know how to save money on appliances, I have some unconventional advice: Buy used. Yes, really. Here’s how to buy used (or refurbished) appliances and save big money without getting ripped off.

I’ve had a number of friends get hit recently with appliance breakdowns they couldn’t afford, and since I’m a landlord, I’ve probably bought a lifetime’s worth of appliances in the last seven years. A dead appliance doesn’t have to turn into a financial catastrophe.

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Here’s a better laptop than the typical Black Friday specials

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Saving money , , ,

If you want a better laptop than the typical Black Friday special, I found just the thing: this Dell Latitude E6420 laptop from Newegg, for $225 (the price is good through Sunday, Nov. 22). It has several things going for it: it comes with Windows 7 Professional, so you can upgrade to Windows 10 when you want and you’ll get the better, more-feature-filled, easier-to-secure Professional version; you can upgrade the memory to 8 GB of RAM, and it comes with a 128GB SATA SSD, so you can drop in a bigger, faster SSD at a later date.

Note: When Newegg sells out of these, which happens occasionally, they’re fairly easy to find on Ebay, though some come with conventional hard drives rather than SSDs.

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Plywood floors for a hardwood look at around $1 per sqft

Dave Farquhar Landlording, Saving money , ,

A comment over at Lifehacker got me thinking about plywood as flooring, which led me to a blog post at Quarry Orchard. The author is one of many people who have had success making floors out of strips cut from ordinary 4×8 sheets of plywood, the variety that sell for around $14 at home improvement stores.

I’d be a bit concerned about durability but there’s a lot to like about the idea as well.

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How to test whether your TV has a digital HDTV tuner in it

Dave Farquhar Saving money ,

If you’re thinking about canceling your cable TV subscription to save money, you might be worried about buying an antenna, only to find your TV isn’t capable of receiving over-the-air broadcasts.

If you live near a major metro area though, you can test it with a one-cent paper clip.

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Twelve percent.

Dave Farquhar Saving money , ,

Last week, a former classmate shared a Dave Ramsey article about early savings. Ramsey stated a teenager could save a couple thousand a year, stop saving in their 20s, and still retire a multimillionaire. I agree with the sentiment completely, but I’m concerned that Ramsey overstates how rich that person can expect to become.

Ramsey’s favored investment vehicle is a mutual fund that tracks the S&P 500.

The problem with the article is that he assumed an annual return on investment of 12 percent, which is well above every reasonable historical estimate I’ve ever heard of S&P 500 rates of return. Forbes agrees. Ramsey is basing his number on a subset of history, not all available history.

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