Saving Money on Bag-Checking

American Airlines has done it again.

Last month they (and most other airlines) reported that they would be charging $25 for the second bag checked by each passenger. Now, The Dallas Morning News reports that American will be charging for every bag checked, at $15 a pop. Traveling with two kids, all their crap, at least one carseat and one stroller - flying is quickly becoming an expensive activity for us. (As if it wasn’t expensive already!)

But wait! There are ways to save a little on checking your bags.

Pack light. You should already be doing this anyway. But just in case you’re not – think about what you REALLY need when you’re packing. Do you really need four pairs of shoes? If you’re trying to match your outfits, choose ones that will go with two or even just one pair of shoes. Pack, at most, three outfits per person and just plan to wash while you’re there. (If your trip is more than a week long, maybe you can pack five. Maybe.) If you’re visiting relatives, ask to use their washer and dryer. If no family is nearby, locate the closest laundromat, or drop it off at a local cleaner’s. (The charge for laundry is surprisingly low at most places. Check it out.)

Ship. Put the heaviest stuff, like sneakers, in your carry-on bag. (Leave room in the carry-on for those few necessities you might need if you were to be stranded at your layover. I’m talking about stuff like prescription medication and baby formula. Trust me on this. I’ve been there.) Pack the lighter stuff, like shirts, in a sturdy cardboard box – and MAIL IT to your destination using USPS’ Parcel Post service. It’s their most economical service, but it’s also one of their slowest. So plan ahead and send early. Use the USPS online postage calculator to estimate how long it will take, and add a day or two just to be sure. For example, the calculator says it would take five days to ship a box from my house in Texas to my mom’s place in Alabama. I’d mail mine 7 days ahead. A 5-pound box, which would hold most of the clothes my family would need, costs almost $9 to ship. If you take into consideration that three of us would be ticketed passengers – and thus have the right to a carry-on bag - the carry-ons plus the mailed box would be more than enough room for our stuff. If your final destination is a hotel, call the hotel ahead of time, tell them when you’re arriving, and let them know your boxes will be showing up. Ask them for the best mailing address to use – sometimes it’s not the one on the website.

Borrow and buy when you get there. Rather than larding down your carry-on with bottles of shampoo and lotion that will probably leak anyway, just wait till you get there to buy your toiletries. A 97-cent bottle of Suave and a single bar of soap, shared by the whole family, will probably last a week or more. Or, if you’re staying at someone’s house and you’re close to them, just ask to borrow what they have. Exceptions: toothbrushes, deodorant and (ahem) menstrual products. Buy or bring your own.

Perhaps if more people followed this advice and declined to pay American the $15 fee, they would retract it, or find other ways of cutting costs without dipping into their customers’ pocketbooks.

Update: A person on a message board that I belong to posited an unusual, yet logical, solution to help reduce the cost of luggage: Wear as many clothes as you can on the plane. Layer two tank tops, wear shorts under your jeans, et cetera. No, it won’t be as comfortable, especially in summer months, but if you’re on a short flight, it’s an option.

Walgreens EasySaver Deals: May

Stopped by Walgreens today and picked up my monthly stock of EasySaver items. They are:

4-pack of Walgreens light bulbs – free after rebate
Pack of Walgreens maxi pads – free after rebate
Oral-B CrossAction Toothbrush – free after rebate
Walgreens ibuprofen – 99 cents after $2 rebate

My total rebate will be approximately $11, including the 10 percent bonus that I get for having the rebate put on a Walgreens gift card.

There were also some other free-after-rebate items, like Kickers Energy Spray and some Earinse ear stuff, but I didn’t get it because we don’t use any of that.

In keeping with the advice in my last post, the rebate materials are already in an envelope and waiting for the mail carrier at the end of the driveway.

Avoiding the Expense of Forgetfulness

It’s happened to all of us. You find a “free after rebate” offer in the Sunday coupons, or at a store, and immediately snap up the product. It seems a bit overpriced, but once you get your rebate, it’ll totally be worth it. You go home, receipt in hand. You’ll put the materials in the mail tomorrow morning. Right now, you have to deal with the sink full of dirty dishes and the mountain of laundry in the hamper.

So you get busy, then busier. And days turn into weeks, until either the proofs of purchase get lost or the postmark deadline passes. In the end, you wasted money on a product that you probably wouldn’t have bought anyway. Sound familiar?

It’s happened to all of us. And it’s not just with rebates – it can happen with late fees from neglecting to mail bills, and with forgotten coupons that sit unused in your organizer. Forgetfulness is expensive. But there are ways to curb it – even if you’re completely scatterbrained, like me.

Here are some methods that I use to prevent the “it slipped my mind” phenomenon:

1. Don’t do it later. When I buy the free-after-rebate stuff from Walgreens, I go home and immediately fill out the paperwork, then stuff it into an envelope and put it in my mailbox. Even if the mail has already arrived that day. Setting the task aside for later only increases the chances of failure. The laundry can wait a few minutes while you assemble your envelope.

2. Put everything in one place. In our house, bills are corralled in a neato wall organizer and checked every Tuesday night. Even if we’re 100 percent sure there’s nothing to be paid, it gets checked anyway, because occasionally we find a bill or stub that slipped our minds.

3. Write it down. I never go grocery shopping without a list, even if I’m only going in to buy three things. But just as important as the shopping list is the “coupon list” – the notations I make beside items that I have coupons for. (This is a rare occurrence, as I usually only buy store brand items or items that don’t typically come with coupons. But you may use them more frequently.) This way, coupons don’t sit orphaned in the bottom of my vinyl pouch.

Pack Up the Kids, We’re Going….to the Park?

Looks like the summer travel season will be a somewhat sparser one this year. Today, Bloomberg News reported that the two largest airlines, American and United, had the biggest declines in air traffic last month. In fact, four out of the five major carriers reported such decreases. (Delta was the only one of the Big Five to report an increase. Low-fare carrier Southwest also posted a gain.)

We will not be doing a summer vacation in the SpendMiser household this year. Partially because we are only a few months off of our European vacation, and partially because we prefer to travel in the winter months anyhow. And partially because we have a 7-month-old and a 2-year-old. Traveling with young children is more work than staying at home.

Instead, our summer entertainment plan will comprise the following activities:

Park time. We happen to have a nice collection of parks in our smallish town, and plan to use them. Since it gets to be unbelievably hot here in the summers, we usually try to hit them before 9 a.m. or after 6 p.m.

Sprinklers and pools. We have an inflatable wading pool and plan to buy a cheap lawn sprinkler for our 2 year old to play under. The only downside: It will necessitate more frequent lawn-mowing.

Walks. One of our favorite things to do is load up the kids in the double stroller and go for a spin around the neighborhood. We get some family time, exercise and fun, all at the same time.

Zoo, aquarium, and kids’ events. Our town has one-time art classes and workshops for preschoolers; the Big City half an hour away has a zoo and the Even Bigger City an hour away has an aquarium. Of course, these are occasional treats, because of the relatively high cost of admission – but even at $10 per person plus $10 in fuel costs, our $50-70 tab for the day is far less than the cost of ONE plane ticket. Our town also has free Movie Nights in the park that we may attend.

Spring and summer cleaning and organization. I guess this one is more for me than anyone else. But I do regard cleaning as a form of entertainment. And it’s especially cool because you have something concrete after you’re done, like a neat pantry or a sparkly bathroom.

So there you have it. No, it’s not Disney World, but it’s easy on the pocketbook and it’s yet another way for us to reduce our consumption of those precious natural resources. I suspect this plan will not be as palatable to our kids when they are 7 and 8 years old. We’re taking advantage while we can…