Anyone born in the 80’s or later will remember when gas prices hovered between 39 and 49 cents per liter. Unfortunately those days are a thing of the past, and for many people, gas has become one of their biggest monthly expenses! This article isn’t going to tip you off to places where you can buy gas at the historical prices I mentioned, but I will try to cover some ways that you can be a little smarter at the pump and save some money in the process.

Here are my 15 tips to save you money on gas:

1) Acceleration: Cars burn through the most gas during the acceleration process. The harder you accelerate, the more gas you will use. To save money, try to accelerate easier and anticipate things on the road well in advance. By anticipating the traffic you will use your brakes less and simply decelerate by taking your foot off the gas. Keeping a moving car going requires much less fuel than a car that is constantly stopping and going. (Side Note: One thing I love about using Car2Go is they keep an eco score based on your driving patterns. This is a great way to see how your acceleration and braking patterns can impact your fuel usage).

2) Reduce Weight: If you drive around with a trunk full of heavy items, this will make your car work harder to accelerate. As mentioned above, the harder the car needs to work during the acceleration process means it will need to burn more fuel. Continue Reading »

A while back I asked on Twitter what people wanted to save money on, and one of the most popular responses was alcohol. Since then I have been experimenting a lot more with cheaper alcohol options and have decided to start doing regular posts on cheap booze options. This week I am writing about cheap beer, and the beer I recently discovered is James Ready 5.5.

After tweeting about trying the beer, I quickly learned that James Ready was a popular beer for University students. Either I am older than these people, or maybe because I went to College instead of University, I had never heard of James Ready beer until a few weeks ago!

My girlfriend and I were at our local beer store trying to find some beer for a night of board games and drinking. It basically came down to trying to decide on a tasty craft beer, or to get a more generic beer (ie. Coor’s Light or something like that). That was until we spotted the James Ready cases tucked in the corner of the “cheap beer” section. The green box seemed to call to me, and at 5.5% alcohol I figured how bad could it be for about $30 for a 24 pack! At worst I figured it would be similar to Molson Canadian but with more alcohol so I decided to give it a shot.

James Ready 5.5

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Just over a month ago, I was tipped off by my friend Jo about a clothing store where you can go to buy high-end designer clothing for dirt cheap! The ironic thing about this trip was that I went to high school right next door to this place, but had never even heard of it and they have been in operation since 1993!

Off The Cuff is located in a building tucked in from the street at Broadway and Yonge (5 Broadway Ave. to be exact). They specialize in high-end consignment menswear (though they occasionally get some women’s clothing) that has been lightly used and is looking for a new home. The shop has everything for your clothing needs, including suits, dress shirts, jackets, pants, shoes and all sorts of accessories. Though, instead of paying the crazy original retail prices you can get some great finds for a fraction of the cost!

Rack of Spring Clothing at Off The Cuff

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One of the things I find most annoying about buying tickets to a sporting event or concert is scalpers who want to charge double the original cost of a ticket. Attending live events can be quite costly considering most ticket prices for events start around $50 and go up from there!

I am a huge fan of attending live events and try to make it out to many throughout the year. Because of this, I have learned some tricks and tips to save money on tickets so you don’t have to pay those crazy inflated prices. In some cases, I have even managed to get into popular events for FREE and I will show you how below.

Ticketmaster Tricks

If the event you want to see is selling tickets through Ticketmaster, there are a couple of tricks to getting tickets to sold-out or expected to sell-out events:

Pre-Sale Codes: If you are fortunate enough to find the event a week or two before the tickets go on sale, quite often you will notice several pre-sale options. These are typically limited releases of tickets for corporate partners of a show or concert. Continue Reading »

(The following article is a guest blog post submitted by Erika Komori. Erika has won near $45,000 in contests and writes about her contest adventures on her blog: Free and Fabulous Life. If you are on Twitter, follow her at @erikakomori.)

Win a new car! Win a free trip! Win dinner and a movie!

Have you ever seen giveaways such as these and then ignored them? Not me! As I like to say, “You can’t win if you don’t enter!”

My story begins back in 2010 when I was an MBA graduate, without the MBA salary. After reading an article in the local newspaper about a person who had won a BBQ package, I thought contests would be a genius method to save money on my entertainment expense. With over 400 contest wins thus far, worth almost $45,000 and counting, my expectations have definitely been surpassed!

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