By taking advantage of cash back and discount websites, you can receive good for tremendously low prices. As I am in the process of moving into a new apartment, I am in need for a moderately sized television for the living room of the new space. As the move is about a month away, I have recently started the process of searching the internet for deals that would be the most beneficial. The following is my step by step process to receive the best deal possible on an item.

1. Set Up Alert On Price Monitoring Site – Amount saved: $100

Process: This is a crucial part of the process, and is the reason why this process can’t be rushed. The purpose of using a price monitoring site is to find the best possible price of an item, not just at a given point in time, but for the life of the product. This would be very cumbersome if you had to do it manually, and I wouldn’t even know where to start. The site that I like to use for this process is slickdeals.net. This website allows you to set “deal alerts” for specific products or even categories of products and let you know of any deals that are occurring within that product or category. In addition, there is a ranking assigned to the deal, so that you can set up an alert so that only the best deals are noted. As deals are posted to the very extensive forum, you are alerted by email, text, or other forms of communication that the deal is going. Although this is an indirect form of price monitoring, the members of the forum do a great job of alerting the forum to deals as they occur, and I have come across some fantastic bargains through the site.

Example: In my case, as I was interested in flat screen televisions, I set up an alert on slickdeals that sent an email I’m any instance where a deal hit the front page related to HDTV’s. In this case, I set the alert to send deals with 4/5 thumbs up, which indicated a very good deal. For this particular tv, the usual selling price is in the 400+ range, but there is a special going on that brings the tv down to $299. This is where the real fun starts, as the cash back percentage is dependent upon this price.

2. Take advantage of any store specific rebates or discounts Amount saved $100

As mentioned in 10 Easy Ways You Can Save Money Today , one of the best ways you can save money is by taking advantage of coupon sites. Once you have figured out what site is going to give you the lowest price on the item, you need to take into account any discounts or rebates that are offered by the store. These can be percentage discounts off specific items or rebates that are given in the form of discounts in exchange for purchase, and will save you easy money for little effort. Some sites, like Amazon, will also offer free shipping . One of my favorite tools to discover these kinds of deal is retailmenot.com Befrugal is also a great resource. This is an online website but is also an iPhone and android app. You simply type in a store and it outputs the current deals that are ongoing. There have been numerous instances where I have been standing in line to purchase and item and have pulled up a 10% discount to be used at the register.

Example: For this purchase, dell, the site where I purchased the tv, was offering a rebate in the form of a gift card on purchases of televisions in the amount of $120. This was a great deal because even if I wasn’t in need of the gift card, I could sell it on various online gift card exchange sites that are abundant these days. My favorite gift card exchange site is : For this purchase, dell, the site where I purchased the tv, was offering a rebate in the form of a gift card on purchases of televisions in the amount of $120. This was a great deal because even if I wasn’t in need of the gift card, I could sell it on various online gift card exchange sites that are abundant these days. My favorite gift card exchange site is giftcardgranny.com , which is a gift card exchange site aggregator, which means that it rounds up deals from the various gift card sites. This allows you to get the most out of your mooney. Even if I am able to get 75% value for the gift car by selling on the site, this will result in $90 in my pocket.

3. Use payment specific discounts to receive additional cash back Amounts saved $30

Once you have taken advantage of the store specific discount to get the purchase price as low as possible, it is time to focus on how you are going to pay for the item. You may think that the choice is pretty simple, credit or debit card, right? That is not the case. There is an additional layer of savings that you can build onto your purchase, and that is lowering the actual cash outlay of your payment method. This can be accomplished many ways, including cash back portals, credit card reward sites, and even cash back from a credit card. The purchase can also go towards earning sign-up bonuses, for cards like the Chase Sapphire Preferred

Example: In my example, due to having multiple credit cards at any given time, there is usually an offer on the website that will yield a percentage back just by going through the cards’s website link to the store. In my case, you don’t even have to use the specific card that the website is for. It just so happens that Discover, of which I have the fabulous IT card, was offering 10% off any purchase at the Dell website. By going to the discover portal and clicking on the Dell store, I would recieve 10% cash back, just like that. This was is a tremendously easy way to get cash back with just a few seconds of work.

Summary: Overall, using the three ways noted above, setting up alerts on price monitoring sites, taking advantage of store specific discounts, and using payment specific discounts to receive additional cash back, I was able to lower the price of the HDTV that I purchased from a $400 to about $170 when all is said and done. Using these techniques can result in hundreds of dollars of savings on almost any item that you can imagine, and help you stay within your budgeting goals.