If you want to use a credit card to pay online but don’t fancy your credit card number and other personal details with every passing web site operator, your options until recently have been limited to using PayPal (assuming the site supports it) or getting yourself a disposable one-time credit card. Visa’s new payclick service is aiming at that gap, allowing secure payment for transactions from an account that can be funded by a credit card or bank account.
eBay has changed the deadlines for sellers to lodge complaints about items that haven’t been paid for, a move which might help reduce friction when it comes to deadbeat bidders.
Telstra’s never had much of a reputation for billing efficiency (it took the better part of this millennium for it to offer single bills to customers), but despite investing billions in the process, it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.
They’re the duelling giants of shopper reward schemes — but just who is in and who is out with Everyday Rewards and FlyBuys isn’t always obvious.
The first Saturday in May is Free Comic Book day, when participating retailers offer a free copy of selected titles as a comics-boosting measure. And while the initiative is pretty US-centric, Australian retailers are taking part on May 2.
Big W is currently selling iTunes Cards at 15% off face value — an even better deal than its sibling supermarket’s recent 10% reduction offer. As we’ve pointed out before, these are always a good option to stock up with as emergency.gifts for iPod-loving friends and family. [via OzBargain]
Airfares might still be pretty cheap, but parking your car can be an expensive exercise. Is there any way out of the bind?
If you’re running your own web site, or planning to, you probably know exactly what kind of space, bandwidth, and features you’ll need, along with a price point. HostMonk finds web hosts based on those preferences. The site boasts of pricing and listing more than 2,500 hosting packages from a wide variety of companies, and it does offer up the nitty-gritty details on each one, including their server and headquarters locations, managed or unmanaged status, processor types, Linux or Windows, and all the basic numbers and prices. It seems to tend away from the big names in hosting, but could also net you a pretty sweet deal on data pricing, if you’re willing to shop around. It doesn’t offer point-by-point comparison selection or comparison, unfortunately, but otherwise delivers the numerical goods without your having to endlessly Google around. Free to use, though many links are connected to affiliate systems.
HostMonk [via MakeUseOf.com]For anyone trying to get their finances under control, identifying and then eliminating debts is a vital task. But are we always rigorous enough when we make that assessment?
The Green Cheapskate Blog cites studies showing that the American grocery shopper wastes 25 percent of their purchased food—if not more. Switch to an every-other-week shopping regiment, and you might start throwing less money away. While weekly grocery shopping is a habit most of us probably learned from our parents, the Green Cheapskate suggests being a bit more realistic about what you’re going to eat, and being ruthless on how you eat it: Cook two or three meals’ worth of each recipe at the beginning of the two-week period, and immediately freeze the extra portions for the second week. Freeze any meat that you won’t be eating within the next 48 hours.< Use up fresh fruits and vegetables first, and then supplement them with just-as-healthy frozen (foods) as you get into the second week. Check expiration dates on dairy products before you buy them; in most cases you can find products that will remain fresh for two weeks or longer. The idea is to always USE UP what you buy before you shop again.
Then again, the weekly trip to the grocery/co-op/farmer’s market can be a relaxing ritual for some, so trying out these tips as a kind of food-buying reboot, or just keeping to a stricter food-use cycle, might suffice. Hit the link below for more food-saving tips, and tell us how you avoid the gone-bad garbage guilt in the comments. Photo by lu_lu. Learn to cut your food bill 25% [Yahoo! Green via Get Rich Slowly]
