Airline Tickets: Do the Extra Research, Save Extra Cash

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Wren and I just purchased two international airline tickets for two adults at the absolute cheapest price we could find. About $270 apiece roundtrip. You might already know how to find budget airline tickets online on the cheap, but we thought we did too. Read on.

When shopping online, the overall idea is to REFINE and then REDEFINE your flight search until you find the lowest price. The following are tips on how to refine your online search. And it’s a compilation of things we'd been overlooking until now.

• Open many browser windows. A simple idea, but this is the easiest way to compare prices. Nearly all airline sites and ticket aggregator sites use the same type of ticket search, so it’s easy to refine your search. If you start to get confused by so many browser tabs, print out each window and compare the hardcopies.
  
  
• Try Vayama, a site that was new to us, and where we found our best price and saved an additional $30 with a coupon. Vayama often offers such coupons for same-day booking. No booking fee.

• Search airline sites, booking agency sites (like Expedia or Orbitz), AND aggregator sites (like Kayak or Vayama). Many booking agencies charge fees, and most aggregator sites do not. Once you’ve found the lowest fare, go directly to that airline’s site and compare prices. Sometimes booking directly through the airline can save you a few dollars. Hint: if you use Kayak, you can have it search Vayama, Priceline, and a few other aggregators as well.

• Try making one transaction/purchase per passenger in your group. For example, if two people are traveling together, don’t assume that you have to purchase two tickets with one credit card transaction. Instead, compare that price with the cost of purchasing two tickets separately. We found that, for some reason, booking flights separately saved us $15 each. Note: This might not be worth it if the flight is near full, and if there’s any doubt that all persons in your group can get a seat on the flight!

• Try departing from a major hub. But take all costs into consideration. We found that we could save quite a lot by departing from O’Hare, instead of from our local hub. The savings—while considering the time and gas spent driving to Chicago, lodging, and even parking—were well worth it. This option is especially applicable to international flights.

• Is your schedule flexible? Then experiment with departing on different days of the week. It is not always the case, but we found that departing on a Wednesday saved us more than departing on a Friday.

• Use cheap airlines? Not always. “Discount” airlines like Spirit and JetBlue often post astronomically low fares. But we found that, after taxes and fees, or after the price of membership, the total price of a discount airline flight can actually be more than the price of a similar major airline flight.

• Keep an eye on flight lengths and layover lengths. We could have saved $50 by choosing another airline, but the overnight layover wasn’t even close to worth it.
  

• Check the airline’s baggage policies before purchasing your tickets. Many airlines, such as Continental and U.S. Airways, are now charging for all checked bags, often $15 for the first checked bag, $25 for the second, and $100 for every bag after that. A few airlines, like American, however, still allow one or two free checked bags for some flights (in American’s case, you can check two bags for free on certain international flights). Estimate the number of bags you’ll need to bring, and factor their costs into the flight prices when comparing. The same goes for traveling with pets or other special needs. Find out the airline’s policy before you purchase tickets and factor in any additional costs.

Good luck and happy travels!

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First Guest Post

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Happy Spring! Wren's first guest post is up at Converting a Spendthrift. Head over and check it out, leave a comment, and show Shai some love. You can follow us both on Twitter for updates and Freebie/Deal Alerts.

Reviews: Online Money Mgmt Tools: Mint, Quicken, and Rudder

A couple weeks ago I reviewed Mint.com, but I've recently been trying out two other free online money management tools, Rudder and Quicken.

Here's the rundown:


Speed
Of the three sites, Rudder loads and updates the quickest, and it's also the fastest at adding new accounts. (Mint is the slowest--it's kind of a pain.)

Account support
As I mentioned in my review of Mint, I can't for the life of me add my Dollar Savings account, even though their support team says it's been fixed. It must be something with the DS login system because Quicken doesn't support it either. Rudder technically does support it, much like Mint, and it even found and added my account. The problem? None of the info loads. Obviously, not very helpful.

As for types of accounts supported, Mint still comes out on top. Mint and Quicken both support various types of bank accounts, credit cards, and even PayPal! Very cool. But Mint is the only one that supports my Nelnet student loans. Rudder again, falls short as it only supports bank and credit card accounts. I did manage to add my Nelnet account, but it shows up all wacky because Rudder categorizes it as a credit card.

Interface
Rudder's interface is the least intuitive, and incidentally, the least functional. It offers no budgeting capabilities, which is my favorite thing about Mint. Quicken has good budgeting features, but they don't display as nicely as Mint--you can't see all your categories at the same time. Also, the Trends section of Quicken seems to be off--at least in my case, the graphs are highly inaccurate.

My verdict: I'm sticking with Mint, at least for now. It's definitely the most functional. And I like the interface a lot more than Quicken.

Review: Credit Karma

CreditKarma.com is a site that lets you check your credit score instantly for free--no strings attached. You don't get to see your actual report, but you can track your credit score over time by checking it as often as you'd like.

And no, contrary to rumor, checking your own credit score does not affect your credit score or negatively affect your credit in any way. No worries.

I for one can see no downside to using CreditKarma. It's quick, easy, completely free, and totally useful. I highly recommend it.

After you receive your score, they'll display a list of offers from various partner companies: credit cards, banks, internet service providers, etc. None of the offers are exclusive--you can find them elsewhere, but many of them are worth checking out. For instance, there's an offer from Comcast for cable i-net @ $19.99/month for the first six months. This is a great deal. I've done it before (it's ongoing), and it's totally worth it, especially if Comcast is the only cable company in your area. (I wouldn't recommend them otherwise. They've got lousy customer service and their normal rates are ridiculous. But if you don't have an alternative anyway and want a fat discount, there you go. My roommates and I rotate the bill into each of our names every six months to keep the deal going. This is somewhat cheating, yes, but we certainly don't feel bad.

CreditKarma's site also has some helpful credit-related articles that are worth checking out. Head on over, get educated, and keep an eye on your credit score.

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Review: Mint.com, free online personal finance service

If you haven’t heard of it yet, Mint.com is a free, online personal finance service (and according to their "About" page, “#1 in America”) that organizes all your bank accounts, loans, and investments—including retirement plans, brokerage accounts, vehicles, and real estate—in a place where you can view them all together. You can’t actually conduct transactions through Mint, but it allows you to use one login to view all the transactions, balances, etc. of all your accounts and to categorize your transactions for budgeting purposes. It can make organizing your tax deductions a hell of a lot easier, too, since you can tag your transactions as tax-related so that when you’re ready to file, you can easily find and list them all. And did I mention it’s totally free (and without any annoying ads or pop-ups)? I’ve been using it since November, and for the most part, I’m a fan.

Services
The most valuable service Mint offers is its highly visual budgeting features. It’s quick and easy to set up your own categories and specify spending limits for each category. Once you’ve done that (providing you do a good job of categorizing your transactions), Mint creates a bar graph of your spending for each month and even a date marker so you can see how much of your budget you’ve spent proportional to the time length of the budget. I find this very helpful in preventing the easy trap of overspending early in the month that leaves you without enough budget to get through the rest of the month. If you want, you can also have Mint send you alerts when, for example, you’ve gone over budget, your credit card bill is due, or one of your accounts has a low balance.

There’s also a Flash-powered pie chart you can view under the “Trends” tab that shows how much you’ve spent in each category (even in ones you didn’t list in your budget) relative to the total amount you’ve spent. This is a helpful feature, but it can be misleading because it doesn’t account for returns, refunds, or other income that specifically offsets your spending in a certain area. I’ll talk more about this towards the end of the article.

How can it be free?
Mint makes its money from referrals to banks, investments brokers, and credit card companies through the “Your Ways to Save” bar, which is unobtrusively placed at the bottom of the overview screen. If you’re interested, click on it and see what kind of deals Mint is advocating; they only suggest accounts that are “better” than your current accounts of that type in interest rate, cash rewards, etc. Of course, if you’ve already done your homework and gotten accounts with the best deals for you¹, Mint’s sponsored suggestions might not offer much improvement. Personally, I check the suggestions every once in a while, just in case they’ve found something I haven’t, but for the most part I ignore them.

Room for Improvement
I only have a few complaints about Mint’s services. First and most importantly, there are a few banks/investment companies they don’t connect with. They’re constantly adding connectivity, so hopefully this won’t be a problem for much longer, but at the moment it’s quite frustrating. I have my savings account with Dollar Savings Direct, and while Mint has recently added a link and form with which to add accounts from that bank, the link doesn’t work. (The error seems to have something to do with the way the Dollar Savings login page works, which is fairly complicated.) Not being able to add one of your accounts to Mint really screws up its functionality because you’re missing a big part of the equation.

There are two other malfunctions on Mint that are troubling as well. One is that, in my experience at least, sometimes the category labels you attach to individual transactions revert to default. I don’t know why this happens, and it doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s definitely aggravating. The second is that there seems to be a fairly sizable delay in the display of transactions; transactions will show up on the online banking pages of my account institutions as much as two days before they show up on my Mint page.

This last complaint is more of a suggestion for added functionality than a gripe about existing malfunctions. As I mentioned earlier, several factors can throw off the pie chart, including returns and refunds. This problem could be solved easily by offering an option to factor in categorized “income” (or have it done automatically). It would also be nice to have an option to view a pie chart of average monthly spending by category and to be able to view or exclude selected categories from the mix.



[1] See the specific suggestions and how-to’s for each type of account on TiredofBeingPoor.net