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Posts Tagged "LifeTips"
In classical economics, price discrimination is when an identical product is sold for different prices to different customer segments. Of course, theoretically this should not happen, but we see it all the time! A Sweet Talk bubble tea sold at a busy MRT station can be $1.80, whereas a location slightly further away from the same MRT station can be sold for $1.50. A dress sold at a pushcart can cost $20, while the exact same dress (since most pushcarts and blogshops tend to get it from the same manufacturer) can be sold for $16 online. Likewise, airlines practice price discrimination in order to maximise their profit. People who are willing to book tickets 9 months in advance can get tickets as low as $1 (not including taxes that is), whereas people booking tickets 3 days before a flight would have to pay a premium. However, there is yet another form of price discrimination that people don’t usually know about. The booking of 2 single trips VS a return trip! Take a look at the fares above. I got the screen shots within 5minutes of each other. At this point of time according to XE, the THB to SGD rate is 0.0403021. So, a return fare is S$246.90, whereas 2 single trips booked is S$114.95 + THB2699.00*0.0403021 (S$108.78)= S$223.73! A savings of S$23.17 with just 5 to 10 minutes of additional effort! Of course, your credit companies might charge you a lousier rate for the exchange, but they would typically not charge more than 1% spread. I use Mustafa Forex as a typical money changer indication, and they are currently quoting 0.040/0.0409. Based on Visa’s rate and a administrative fee rate of 2.5%, I got 0.0416. That means at worst, you would be charged S$112.28 for the BKK to SG single trip. That’s still a saving of S$20 or so. Likewise for another airline, A return fare costs S$222.87, whereas 2 single trips costs S$80 + THB3570 * 0.0403021 (S$143.88) = S$223.88. In this case, there is...
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I had a shock this morning while checking my emails when I saw an order delivery email from iHerb since I didn’t order anything from them recently. However, after reading through the rest of the emails, I realized that there is a social media department in iHerb and they saw my blog entry on iHerb where I talked about where you can get supplements cheap and fast. One of my most commonly ordered product is the Omega 3 fishoils which I think everybody should be taking and iHerb actually sent me a bottle for free! So a big shout out to Abby and the rest of you guys at iHerb for the pleasant surprise! Till date, I have did numerous orders with iHerb and all the experiences have been pleasant. Hassle free ordering process, cheap shipping starting from US$4 to Singapore, and relatively quick delivery times. Using express delivery which costs more but would make sense for big orders takes only 3-5 working days, and international airmail takes slightly less than 2 weeks. Most of the time, the supplements available are at least 20-50% cheaper than retail shops in Singapore, and thats including shipping to your doorstep! Even some of the weird supplements like those used in the Tim Ferriss Slow Carb Diet (The 4 Horsemen of Fat Loss) can be found there cheaply! Besides those points mentioned above, go check out the 10 reasons to make iHerb your number 1...
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Group deal sites have been around for the longest time, and I actually signed up to receive updates for quite a few. However, I have not found any deals attractive enough to buy them. Mostly, the deals just didn’t seem all that attractive. Some of the deals are discounted off retail price, such that when you compare it to prices you can get at the shops, it’s only marginally cheaper. In other cases, the locations are not exactly the most convenient, so you usually won’t go or do that event on a wimp and would require a bit of schedule planning. I prefer a little bit of spontaneity in my life 🙂 But I finally did it! I bought the $35 for 1 Month Club Membership + 60 min Health Assessment + 4 VibroGym Sessions at Lifestyle Fitness (Worth $645) deal from groupon.sg. Essentially, this is not significantly cheaper than most commercial gyms. At some point of time, California Fitness or True Fitness were going at around $30-45/month for a 1-2 years plan. So at $35, its within that range. The main reason why I did buy it is because of 2 main reasons. 1) I’m on a diet/fitness regime now, and 2) the location is right opposite my office! Best deal ever 🙂 Will I buy more groupon deals? Perhaps. Deals like, $6 for 1 Manhattan Fish ‘n Chips at The Manhattan FISH MARKET (Worth $13.90), $3.25 for Any 6-Inch Sub (Worth up to $6.50) at 7 Subway Outlets or $5 for 1 Main Ramen or Rice at RamenPlay (Worth $10.80) does seem cheap and worth it. But seeing how 10,000 to 30,000 coupons for each has been bought, I wonder how the shops can cope with it and also if QC will drop. For 30,000 coupons, and with a typical validity of 6 months, that means they would have to serve additional 5000 purchases at a heavily discounted price. Do note, groupon does take a cut of the coupon price, which means more retailers might suffer...
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I Finally did it! I applied for EZ-Reload for my ezlink card. Before the new CEPAS compliant cards came out, auto top ups were actually very common. You basically go to the ticketing machines, link it up to your bank account via giro, and they will do the transfer every time the fare card goes below a certain amount. However, EZlink got greedy, and they started charging a $0.25 ‘convenience’ fee for this service. Seriously, is it necessary? Then, we migrated to the new CEPAS system adopted by the Singapore Government to allow for more players in the industry. In comes NETS Flash Pay. Essentially, it is a competitor product by NETS into the contactless micropayment space. But given the way things are in Singapore, it’s probably not going to change much for a duopoly. In any case, I found out that the POSB Everyday Card has a 2% rebate for EZ-Reload. So basically what this means is that if you top up $50, you get $1 in rebate. Deducting off the convenience fee of $0.25, you would actually earn $0.75! Applying for EZ-Reload actually took me less than 5 mins of my time: 1) Go to the EZ-Reload website and apply for EZ-Reload by card. 2) Enter in your details, in particular, your credit card number and your EZlink card number. 3) Wait for an acknowledgement email or sms (This takes 2-3 business days however) 4) Go to a General Ticketing Machine in the MRT stations to activate the EZ-Reload. 5) Tada! You’re done! Pretty simple stuff. So why wouldn’t you use auto top up?...
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