Author Archives: BetCrooks

It’s Time to Start Shopping for Christmas. Seriously! At Least if You Like to Give

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I agree that there should be some sort of rule that prohibits stores from putting up trees and playing carols before Remembrance Day. However, I’ve already started part of the shopping I do before each Christmas and I encourage you to do the same. This shopping, though, is all about giving.

Big Bargains on Every Day Items in the Lead Up to Thanksgiving and the Back to School Frenzy

Many of the grocery stores and department stores in my area put household staples on sale in September and October. They’re often offering good loss-leaders to get customers in the stores. For example, this week one department store has 16 double rolls of toilet paper on for $5.27, regularly $12.98. (An acceptable regular “sale” price is 50 cents per roll, by the way.)

And each year, we donate a trunk-full-sized “hamper” to a local family who isn’t having an easy year.

So for $10.54 (before tax) I can get 32 double rolls of tp for that hamper and still save money. That’s the kind of shopping I’m doing these days.

My kids, who agree it’s a good idea but still manage to send several eye rolls a week in its direction, always look a little oddly at the mountain of stuff that builds from now till December in a corner of the living room. It’s hardly a pile of iPods after all. But they get that Christmas is about giving and if you can give more by shopping the sales, then it’s even better.

So already toothpaste, shampoo, soap, tissues and Ziploc bags are neatly stacked, all at a significant discount. And this week, many of the traditional food items that go into a Thanksgiving or a Christmas dinner will also be added as they too come on at deep discounts. Think: rice, cranberry sauce, foil roasting pans, cans of fruit and vegetables, and home baking ingredients.

Giving to Charity is Great: Giving More for the Same (or Lower) Price is Even Better

So if you participate in charitable giving “in kind” consider picking up stuff ahead of time on sale. You could easily give twice as many canned goods, for example, to a Hallowe’en for Hunger food drive if you buy them when they are loss leaders.

[And yes, because someone always asks, the hampers do not go only to Christian families. In fact, most of the families do not belong to any faith group.]

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Do you try to maximize your gifts through economizing? Please share your tips and tricks to help others with a comment.

How To Look at Your Cashed Cheques for Free! Using Tangerine (ING Direct)

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When you share a chequing account with someone else, sooner or later you’re going to end up with a cheque coming out of the account and neither of you remembering who it was paid to. In the olden days when I used to have to pay my bank to retrieve the cheque, I would have just ignored the cheque and hoped it was legit. Now with our Tangerine (formerly ING Direct THRIVE) chequing account, I can look at who cashed my cheque online for free.

Looking at the Image of your Cheque Written on a Tangerine Chequing Account

  1. Login to your Tangerine chequing account.
  2. From the list of your accounts, click on your chequing account.
  3. From the Transaction History, find the cheque about which you are curious.
  4. Click on the link for the cheque.
    For example, I clicked on: Cheque Withdrawal – 001
  5. You will see a PDF of the cheque. There will be an image of both the front and back of the cheque. In my case, the organization who endorsed the cheque used a stamp which is clearly legible on the reverse.
  6. You can save the PDF to keep an online record of the payment, or you can print it if you need the information to include in a letter or statement.
  7. If you have no other banking to attend to,
    1. click on: Log me out.
    2. Empty your cache.
    3. For added security close your browser session.

Why It’s Very Important to Guard Your Online Banking Password and User ID

This is another example of why it’s so important to guard your password and ID for online banking. If someone can get into your chequing account, they can obtain an electronic photo of your signature from your cheque images. Imagine the havoc someone could create with your finances if they could get into your bank accounts and could create an extremely passable copy of your signature. Guard your login information and be sure to clear your cache and close your browser session when you finish banking, please!

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Do you use the fee cheque viewing service to update your cheque book once a month? Do you save the images of your cheques? If so, how do you protect your hard drive, stick or disk? Please share your experiences with a comment.
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