As hard economic times hit, I try to stave off the temptation to panic. I’m not about to build a bomb shelter in the basement. At least not for now. The basement is for home theater furniture & that’s it.
I do find myself saving a lot more money. I’m afraid to buy a pair of boots, even though I don’t own any & I live in Utah. I guess I’m finally feeling responsible & grown up. That, or I’m giving into panic on some level. It is not fun. What about you? Have your shopping habits changed from fear or need? Have they stayed the same?
This isn’t really a burning question seeing as I’m not engaged. However, I recently discovered craigslist. Yes, I know that I’m about a decade too late. I seem to spend all of my time at craigslist browsing, seeing what people are willing to give up.
A lot of people seem to sell their wedding dresses, which is fine. I can understand that a newly wed might need the money or closet space. Personally I’d trade a dress that I’d never wear again for a LCD TV. However, I’m shocked at the prices. Usually they are just like $50 off of retail prices. Plus, you probably have to have the dress dry cleaned & you really don’t have your choice of styles or sizes. I would consider buying or renting off of craigslist if it was actually a good deal, but it just doesn’t seem to be the case.
I’ve always dreamed of having a library like in Beauty & The Beast. It would come included with nice oak paneling, leather chairs & so many books that I have to have a ladder to reach them all. Although I’d skip the talking candlestick because that’s just creepy. About a year & a half ago I decided that I would start reading all of the books from Gilmore Girls. This turned out to be an expensive endeavor because my library didn’t have most of the 120 books that I needed. I decided it probably wasn’t the best move to spend more on books than I do on my car. I couldn’t find most of these titles at thrift stores because they are either bestsellers or fairly new.
I finally decided to try paperbackswap.com (All of the links are below) Basically the site works where you post some of the books you have in your house & then you receive a free credit for the first however many books. (This number varies for swapacd, paperbackswap & swapadvd. Swapadvd opened today & I’m a very happy camper). You can then use that credit to order a book & try out the site. For every book you send out you just pay the shipping & then you get a credit when the person receives it. When you request an item it’s free (the CD site charges like $.50 per cd).
I’ve also used their cd site & have been beta testing their new dvd trading site which just opened to the public today! (Again, yeah!!!!) It’s perfectly legal & tons of fun. I’ll have my Beauty & the Beast library yet! Wow I’ve used a lot of !!!’s I’m usually not so peppy, but these sites are really great. If anyone has questions about these trading sites I’d be happy to answer them.
Technorati : books, dvds, free, freebies, paperbackswap, swap, swapadvd, trade
