Adventures in REBATEland

This goes back to last year, but it's worth the short history. A friend of mine told me about a way to get a FREE IPOD. I thought, "right" - "free" there has to be a catch. Well it turns out the catch is you have to be extremely dilegent about tracking purchases and cancelling products at the right time. And you have to have a credit card and manage it well. I'll cut to the point. It worked and it cost about $60 worth of "trial" services. Not bad huh? So the next jump went for a free Ibook (1st MAC in our family). It would have gone real smooth except I didn't follow the instructions to the EXACT detail specified. This is where most people mess up. I had to buy $25 worth of pet stuff from an online pet product store. My total was $24.95 without the tax - with tax it was easily over the $25. It didn't go through because the "purchase" was not over $25! Get it. It took me months (because you are on your own) to figure out what happened. I went back online with the pet place ordered a few more bucks worth of pet stuff and BHAM - it went through. You should have seen the celebration when we received our Mac Ibook in November 2005. So you want to know how much I spent. It was about $150 after the pet fiasco. BUT, the major purchase in their required that I switched our Satellite TV off Dish and over to Direct TV - that was a little tough on everyone in the family.

I am currently looking for a way to get a free HDTV Plasma TV. We also received free Razor phones through a broker in Arizona. It cost $450 up front and it took a full 8 MONTHS for the rebate to come back to us - but June 1, 2006 we received the $450 check. And we bought this really nice Samsung Laser Printer Brand new, with rebate it ended up costing $50.