WATCH THIS AT LAST THEY DISCOVER THAT
MERMAID EXIST
Sunday, 17 November 2013
Black Friday 'Princess' Shares Tips On How To Save Big
Black Friday 'Princess' Shares Tips On How To Save Big
By Mandi Woodruff
November 15, 2013 4:51 PM
Image courtesy of Katherine Cauley
Katherine Cauley, 33, has become something of a local shopping guru in her hometown of Rochester, N.H.
The mother of two heads up a popular couponing seminar
several days each year, teaching locals how to squeeze the most savings
out of Black Friday sales. For 5 bucks and a donation to a local
charity, attendees get 90 minutes of tutelage from Cauley and her best
friend, Renee Jerram. The pair has been couponing together for four
years.
Cauley got the idea for the seminar after years of
mastering the art of extreme couponing. She became so good at scoring
household goods like paper towels and toilet paper for free that she
earned the nickname "Princess of Paper Products."
"People had no
idea, you know, in a small town that you could coupon like that and save
so much money," she says. "When we started teaching classes, we had a
huge amount of people who were interested in learning how."
But racking up discounts at the grocery store is little league stuff for Cauley these days. Black Friday is her Super Bowl.
“I’ve
been shopping on Black Friday since I was a teenager, when I started
doing it with a couple of friends,” she says. “It’s the one night you
look forward to going out with friends and shopping all night. It’s an
adrenaline rush to see how many items off your list you can get.”
Each
year poses a bigger challenge than the last, and since Cauley will be
spending the holiday with her family in Georgia this year, she’s been
planning for weeks already.
We asked her to offer up some of her
favorite tips and tricks to get the most out of the Black Friday rush —
and make it home in one piece.
1. Check your expectations at the door.
“Not everybody goes out on Black Friday shopping for Christmas. If you
are, you are probably not going to be able to get your whole Christmas
shopping done that night. When we teach our seminars, we tell people the
first thing is that you need to be patient. You need to be organized.
Start with one store and work it from there. Obviously, you’re not gonna
build up a stockpile like mine overnight. “
2. Leave the little ones at home.
“I personally won’t take my kids out to go shopping on Black Friday.
It’s the busiest shopping day of the year, besides the fact that you see
people getting trampled. I have an 8-year-old and a 4-year-old and
they’ve never gone out with me. Usually, that’s because I’m shopping at
midnight or 1 a.m. and it’s pretty cold. You could be standing out there
six to eight hours in the cold.”
3. Make the wait as comfortable as possible.
“I waited in line at least five hours for a TV at Target once and we
were one of the first 10 people through the door. You have to dress
appropriately for the weather. We bring a lawn chair or something that
we can stow in the car. They give you plenty of time before doors open
so a half hour before, you can get rid of everything you don’t need and
put it back in the car.”
Katherine usually packs her SUV on Black Friday. Here's her haul from last year.
4. Don’t bother carpooling.
“I usually end up going with a group of people but it’s hard to carpool
on Black Friday. Depending on what you’re getting, that car can fill up
fast. Usually, I take my SUV because it has more room in the back.”
5. Keep your eye on hot items that will go quickly. “We’re in need of a TV for our house and TVs are always a big-ticket item. But with Walmart’s new in-stock guarantee,
that will make it a lot easier. My husband loves to cook, too, so I’ll
be looking for small kitchen appliances, like a crockpot and a griddle,
probably at Kohl’s. Appliances always have deep discounts on Black
Friday.”
6. Don’t sleep on Black Friday ads.
“All the store ads are being released now so it gives you time to look
and plan. You’ve got to do your homework ahead of time. I check on BFads.net and Blackfriday.com, but there are a lot of other sites and they all have the same ads."
7. Don’t trust everything you read online.
“Ads can change, too, so get newspapers on Thanksgiving day for sales
fliers. [Since some stores are opening early] that’ll be another
interesting thing this year to see whether newspapers come out with
Black Friday fliers on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving or on Thursday
like usual.
8. Go mobile. “I think it’s silly
to be printing coupons and carrying paper ads around. I take full
advantage of mobile coupons. I still have a coupon binder for everyday
shopping, but on Black Friday that’s the last thing you’re going to want
to carry around. You may have a laptop in one arm and a TV in the other
and you don’t need to worry about that.”
9. But don’t leave store ads at home.
“I carry some store ads and I keep them folded up in my pocket. That
way, you know what you’re getting and where you’re getting it from and
you have the ad with you so there’s no question about it.”
10. Approach Walmart with caution.
“Before they started breaking up their store deals to run at 6 p.m. and
8 p.m. instead of all at once, I’d say Walmart was the craziest on
Black Friday. I was pregnant with my son one year and I had gone out
shopping for a Power Wheels and it was the worst experience. People were
pushing carriages over and one person pushed a carriage right into my
stomach. I think that’s why Walmart has changed the way they do things.
They don’t want the mad rush.”
11. There's always Cyber Monday.
“We were just talking about this at home and I don’t feel like there
are as many good deals this year. They just don’t seem to be
over-the-top good. So, if you’re only looking for one or two items and
are just saving a few dollars, it’s probably not worth going and being
in line for hours out in the cold. There’s always Cyber Monday... Not
everyone’s going be out on Black Friday so a lot of toys and things like
that will go on sale the week after Cyber Monday. Sometimes prices will
drop even lower than Black Friday.”
The takeaway:
Even if you haven’t drunk the Black Friday Kool-aid, you can still find
great deals on holiday buys in early and mid-December. Retailers
generally wait until the first week of December to slash prices on toys,
brand-name TVs and winter duds, according to the experts at Dealnews.com. And thanks to Free Shipping Day (Dec. 18), you’ve got an excuse to ditch the mall altogether.
Obama struggles to save his cherished health law
Obama struggles to save his cherished health law
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama's health care law risks coming
unglued because of his administration's bungles and his own inflated
promises.
To avoid that fate, Obama needs breakthroughs on three fronts: the
cancellations mess, technology troubles and a crisis in confidence among
his own supporters.
Working in his favor are pent-up demands for the program's benefits and an unlikely collaborator in the insurance industry.
But
even after Obama gets the enrollment website working, count on new
controversies. On the horizon is the law's potential impact on job-based
insurance. Its mandate that larger employers offer coverage will take
effect in 2015.
For now, odds still favor the Affordable Care
Act's survival. But after making it through the Supreme Court, a
presidential election, numerous congressional repeal votes and a
government shutdown, the law has yet to win broad acceptance.
"There's
been nothing normal about this law from the start," said Larry Levitt,
an insurance expert with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
"There's been no period of smooth sailing."
Other
government mandates have taken root in American culture after initial
resistance. It may be a simplistic comparison, but most people
automatically fasten their seat belts nowadays when they get in the car.
Few question government-required safety features such as air bags, even
if those add to vehicle costs.
Levitt says the ACA may yet have
that kind of influence on how health insurance is viewed. "An
expectation that everybody should have health insurance is now a topic
of conversation in families," he says.
That conversation was
interrupted by news that the HealthCare.gov website didn't work and that
people with coverage were getting cancellation notices despite Obama's
promise that you can keep your insurance.
Obama maneuvered this past week to extricate Democrats from the cancellations fallout.
The
president offered a one-year extension to more than 4.2 million people
whose current individual policies are being canceled by insurers to make
way for more comprehensive coverage under the law. This move by the
White House was intended to smooth a disruption for which his
administration completely failed to plan.
But it also invited unintended consequences, showing how easily the law's complicated framework can start to come loose.
State
insurance commissioners warned that the president's solution would
undermine a central goal of the law, the creation of one big insurance
pool in each state for people who don't have access to coverage on their
jobs. Fracturing that market could lead to higher future premiums for
people buying coverage through the law's new insurance exchanges, which
offer government-subsidized private insurance.
That Obama is willing to take such a gamble could make it harder for him to beat back demands for other changes down the line.
On the cancellations front, the president seems unlikely to break through. He may yet battle to a political draw.
Obama
realizes it's on him to try to turn things around, and quickly. In the
first couple of weeks after the website debacle, Obama played the
sidelines role of "Reassurer-in-Chief." Now he's on the field, trying to
redeem himself.
"I'm
somebody who, if I fumbled the ball, I'm going to wait until I get the
next play, and then I'm going to try to run as hard as I can and do
right by the team," Obama said Thursday at a news conference.
Making sure the website is running a lot better by the end of the month may be his best chance for a game-changing play.
Although
only 26,794 people signed up in health plans through the federal site
the first month of open enrollment, 993,635 applied for coverage and
were waiting to finalize decisions. For many it took hours of
persistence, dealing with frozen screens and error messages. When states
running their own sites are included, a total of 1.5 million
individuals have applied.
The law's supporters believe that's
evidence of pent-up demand, and so far the insurance industry agrees.
Public criticism of the administration by industry leaders has been
minimal, even though insurers also have been on the receiving end of the
website problems. Compounding the lower-than-expected sign-ups, much of
the customer data they got was incomplete, duplicative or garbled.
Insurers,
eager for the new business expanded coverage would bring, are pressing
the administration to clear a route for them to sign up customers
directly. Such workarounds may put Obama back on track toward his goal
of signing up 7 million people for 2014. Medicaid expansion, the other
arm of the law's push to cover the uninsured, signed up 396,000 people
last month, a promising start.
With
the website troubles, a national effort to promote insurance
enrollments has been dialed down. Groups ranging from liberal activists
and civic clubs to health promoters were mobilized and waiting. But
there was little they could do. Advertising campaigns have been
postponed. As the year-end holidays approach, both volunteers and the
people they would be trying to reach have other priorities.
Whether
enthusiasm among the rank-and-file supporters of the law will come
surging back is one of the big unknowns for a president who has
acknowledged the need to restore his credibility on health care.
"I
think people have lost confidence in the ability of this working," said
Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger. "And we've still got the
anti-Obamacare folks out there taking full advantage." Praeger is a
Republican who believes her state should have helped implement the law.
Skittishness
among supporters was evident in the 39 House Democrats who Friday
bolted their party to vote for Republican legislation on cancellations,
ignoring Obama's veto threat.
Politics is not the only consideration.
The
people who are signing up now are likely to be those with unmet medical
needs. Younger, healthier customers probably don't see much reason to
spend their time tangling with the website. To hold down costs, the law
aims for a mix that includes a hefty proportion of younger enrollees
whose medical expenses are low.
"Everybody said the website would
be up and running the first day," said Praeger. "The longer it takes,
the more people are going to question whether this is going to work."
Questions to ask your mortgage broker
Questions to ask your mortgage broker
If you are going to see a broker about arranging your first mortgage, here is a list of questions you should ask.
Here's a list of things to bear in mind when meeting a mortgage broker for the first time:
1. How independent are you? Will you advise me on every product on the market or do you operate on the basis of a restricted panel of lenders?
2. Are you regulated by the Financial Services Authority and under what trading name? You can search the FSA website to find out if there have been any complaints or disciplinary action against registered
operators
3. What mortgage qualifications do you have?
4. What exactly will you be doing for me that I couldn’t do myself?
5. How do you charge for your advice? Is it on a fee basis or by earning commission from the lender whose mortgage you recommend?6. Will you tell me what the commission you earn from any lender whose mortgage you recommend? Will you recommend the right mortgage for me regardless of the commission you earn from lenders?
7. Will you be trying to earn more money by recommending other financial products for me, such as life insurance or similar protection?
8. If you are going to recommend other products, are you tied only to those of one company or a handful of companies? Or are you truly independent?
9. Are you also an independent financial adviser, able to help me with all other aspects of my financial planning such as investments and pensions, or do you only specialise in mortgages?
10. If you are an independent adviser, what qualifications do you have in non-mortgage related areas specific to my financial needs? Do you have special pensions and investment qualifications?
Useful links
Compare mortgage rates
Compare quotes on home insurance
Find a financial adviser
Does exercise really help you to lose weight?
Does exercise really help you to lose weight?
The
entire fitness industry hangs on the premise that exercise and weight
loss go hand in hand. But there is a growing body of research that says
that exercise won’t make you thinner – just fitter. Two writers share
very different views
"When it comes to losing weight, there’s one simple question we should ask – and don’t. It’s so simple that it often gets dismissed in favour of unsustainably terrifying exercise regimes (no really, it’s a good burn), complicated meal plans or the distinctly smug, no-fun approach of eating nothing but cabbage soup. (Sorry, I can’t possibly socialise, but I feel soooo amazing!)
Of course, there’s exercise and there’s exercise...
"The question is this: how does the amount of exercise you do compare to the amount of food you eat? If you work off more than you eat, you will lose weight. Unless there’s a medical reason why not. It may be dull, but I think that just about covers it.
Olivia Mackinder is a writer, life coach and lover of wide-open spaces.
"Working out, hitting the gym, getting our sweat on – however you
describe it, exercise is good for us and helps to lose weight, right?
Not necessarily. And don’t just take my word for it. Sure, we should all
do our best to follow government guidelines and aim to work out for 30
minutes a day five times a week (at least), but don’t be fooled into
thinking that exercise is the answer to all your weight-loss problems."Diet and fitness experts agree that your exercise regime is worth nada if you aren’t eating well".
"For
one thing, most of us aren’t doing it right. That gentle plod
around the running track is doing very little for your waistline.
Intensity is the key, and in fact a very short, high-impact session that
lasts as little as 15 minutes will do more for your metabolic rate (and
subsequently how you look in a bikini) than an hour doing boring, slow
cardio. I’d be wise to remember that myself…
"And anyway, all diet and fitness experts agree that your exercise
regime is worth nada if you aren’t eating well. Trainer and fat-loss
expert Gavin Walsh has repeatedly told me that the balance is about
70/30, in favour of diet. So unless you clean up your shopping trolley,
those skinny jeans will become a permanent fixture at the back of the
closet.
"It also doesn’t help that many of us use exercise as an
excuse to stuff our faces with an extra-large pizza as a reward for
sweating it out in the gym. A recent University of Washington study
claims that regular exercise has actually led to many Americans piling
on pounds, rather than losing them, for this very reason. Again,
something I’d be wise to take note of myself.
"As my old gym
teacher used to say, it’s not practice makes perfect, it’s perfect
practice makes perfect. And there’s a lesson in there for all of us.
Thanks Teach."
