I have a friend whose main purpose in life is to find deals and bargains and cut costs.
He once spent several weeks filling out an insane number of really long forms and processing rebate information, for a mail-in rebate promotion for a laptop. And he purchased that crappy, low-end laptop because that was the only one which had a mail-in rebate promotion available.
On top of that, he then wasted hundreds of hours in lost productivity because of the terrible performance of the low-end crappy machine which was very slow and kept crashing because it didn’t have enough memory and other resources.
He spends at least an hour a day looking at how else he can save money.
Switching his Phone, TV and Internet services from Cable Co. to Phone Co. when the former has a new customer promo. Then 6 months later, when the promo expires, switch back all of his services – Phone, TV and Internet – back from Phone Co. to Cable Co.
He is on the phone several hours a week, asking companies for discounts, looking for deals, filling out rebate forms, browsing online for deals, clipping coupons, driving tens of miles because some store somewhere is selling something for less, spending several hours during the weekend picking up used free stuff that people would rather give away (than trash them) on Craigslist.
He is the ultimate money-saving-machine. And he probably saved about $3,000 by being on top of his game.
The Flip Side
And during that same time, I have created 3 new products, tripled the size of my mailing list, wrote blog posts which brought me new paying clients and business contacts, improved several of my existing products, re-wrote and optimized multiple sales pages, launched 2 new membership sites with paying members, gave away my book for free online and still ended up selling several hundred digital copies, and made thousands in profits, and primed my business to make several tens of thousands more within the next few months. You could say roughly about $20,000 in profits in the same time frame.
$3,000 SAVING money.
– OR –
$20,000 MAKING money.
Doh!
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