SeeCalifornia.com

Being cheap can fund your ski trips to the Rocky Mountains, Sierra resorts or even San Bernardino mountains where you’ll find Big Bear Lake,  California. Travel weekday, off-season, and book 4-10 to a cabin. Look for discounts.

You can beat yourself to death, trying to find the cheapest prices. But for some of us it is a game we like to play–it somehow keeps us sane when money’s tight.  When I was in college working several jobs and squeezing out every penny, I remember a group of us formed a coop and began eating on less than a dollar a day. We bought a 50 pound bag of soybeans we cooked as soup, and ate chicken wings as our meat source.  By saving all that money, we funded our spring break ski trip to the Rocky Mountains-Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, Vail, Steamboat Springs, Keystone and Telluride–we did them all! There’s often pay-off in being cheap, and it is wise to have some sort of reward in sight for your efforts. Otherwise you start to feel worn down and lose that joy of waking up each day.

I got through college and my journalism degree never got me rich, so I have continued being cheap. In my current life building websites, I am ALL about cheap. My Toyota is 10 years old and running great, but I have a goal to get the fuel prices down so I can travel cheaper.  You see, when you think cheap, you always have goals and things to strive for! I am plotting to find the cheapest, fuel efficient (safe) car and any money I save up by being cheap will go to that project. When you travel cheap, you can travel more.

For my friends who are trying to find jobs and are cheap not by choice, they’ve mastered the FREE Facebook thing pretty well and that will certainly not hurt them, as long as they don’t post EVERYTHING about themselves.  They come to me with questions about websites, web names and those sorts of things so here’s a few observances I’ve discovered lately:

CHEAP WEB (DOMAIN) NAMES: Prices went up in 2012 and that wasn’t a good thing if you own 100 or more of them at around $12/each. Here are a few tips on saving money:

• Look for the cheapest price in Google search (I use Startingpage.com which pulls up Google search results, but keeps my privacy in tact).  Usually Godaddy will be among the cheapest, but there are many offering cheap deals.
• Look at the renewal price when you consider buying. You should either lock in a cheap price for more than a year, or beware if the price jumps to $15 the next year. At the price, you’ll want to transfer it to a cheaper company after your year is up–and transfers are OK, but not the most fun.
• Then do a search for “Godaddy coupon”, or whatever company you have found that has prices under $10.
• When you go to the checkout cart to buy your domain name, begin entering coupon codes. Many don’t work, so you have to try one after another till you get the magic.
• If the price isn’t cheap, don’t buy it there, but keep looking at other sites.
• Be sure to ask for “Total price” before you buy. If the price goes up as you checkout, empty your cart and don’t buy it.
• Look at customer service policies. Do they charge more for phone help? Do they offer only email support? Are they only open for phone support a few hours each day? These issues can be signs that you’ll be frustrated down the road, should you need assistance. Keep shopping!

RENEWALS: The renewal price of a domain name is almost always higher than the price you paid the first year. I’ve been doing a lot of research and found that the cheapest I could get on renewal was the CODE MTECH412 for $7.66 renewals at Godaddy.  It took over an hour of searching, but I saved more than $50 on my renewals. My bulk discount was about $50 higher than using this coupon. Go figure!

Seems cheap, but…I looked at DomainMonster.com, which has some of the cheapest renewal prices, especially on .TV domains. But when I went to the checkout to transfer my web names, I got an unexpected surprise! They tacked on 20% tax. That dollar you may have saved just went back up to the same price you were paying at other companies when they added 20% tax. I am not sure if it’s because the company is based in the UK. Rats! Keep shopping.

WEB HOSTING:

This is where being cheap sometimes pays off, but can also give you grief. I have tried so many cheap web hosting companies (where you build your website). Hostgator, Godaddy, Dreamhost, InMotionhosting and Hostway are a few I have used. The truth is, they all have down time, crashes, invasions by hackers and other issues. There is no 100% up time and when you go to see your site and it says it isn’t there, just be patient. It happens even on the expensive companies sometimes.  The issue becomes how much down time you are willing to live with, and how is the customer service that you encounter when problems happen.  If you find a great, cheap webhosting company, let me know! In 12 years of website building, I haven’t found one cheap company that I would recommend over another.