Like so much of the country, we’ve been sweating through a heat wave in Michigan over the last week.  Seems like it’s been in the 90s every day, and to be honest, we’ve been thinking a lot about what it would be like if only we had… central air.  Our house is definitely suited up for it — with duct work in place and all of that — but with new windows stealing the financial spotlight this year, we’re not seriously looking to plunk down a couple thousand more just for some summertime comfort.

Not to worry, though, as we think we’ve got things under control.  So, without further ado, here is our hotter-than-hot summertime cooling game plan:

• Vacancy.  Both of us work, so the house is nice and sealed up during the day.  No reason to run the central air we don’t have when no one’s here.  Now, when a baby comes along, that may be a different story [someday, not now, read nothing into that].  Cost: nothing + we’re making $ at work.
• Fan-tastic evenings.  When we want to relax in our living room, it’s warm, but we get along just fine with a ceiling fan, floor-standing oscillator, and the windows cranked open.  Cold beverage not included.  Cost: $30 + electricity.
• Underground.  Like most people, our basement is as cool as a cucumber (never actually written cucumber in a sentence before).  We’ve got a nice finished room down there, so we grab our current read (Linchpin [affiliate link] by Seth Godin for Andrew, and A Painted House [affiliate link] by John Grisham for Julie), head down there, and just chill.  Cost: $0.
• Window unit air conditioner.  We wouldn’t survive the night without it.  (Okay, maybe that was a little dramatic.)  The sun goes down and our cute ol’ house heats right up as the bundle of hot air sinks from our attic, descending upon our 2nd floor boudoir.  Makes the room blanket-worthy at about 2 AM, and that’s okay with us.  Cost: $100 + electricity.

There you have it, the ways in which we cope with the 8 days of warm weather Michigan gets each year. That’s not to say that we won’t ever be plugging into central air, but we’re pretty happy with what we’ve got.

One week ago today, Apple announced the 4th generation of their excellent mobile handset, the iPhone.  Now, this came as no shock to this Apple fan, as it had been a highly anticipated refresh of what has become Apple’s flagship device.  What did come as a surprise was that AT&T generously* moved up the upgrade dates of all customers who were due for an upgrade in 2010.  So, although I had been anticipating having to wait until December to get the new phone at its highest discount price ($199 for the 16 gig model), I suddenly became aware that I would be able to purchase the phone at launch (June 24, pre-orders starting on June 15).

Then comes the next question: how am I going to pay for this generous upgrade?  I had been planning to sell my current iPhone 3Gs on eBay when I became eligible for the phone, but to be honest, using eBay as a broker always makes me a little uneasy when it comes to something with a high resale value like an iPhone.  I’ve heard quite of few stories of winning bidders not being reliable in terms of actually paying, stuff like that.  eBay is great for a lot of things, but I was expecting it to be a hassle when it came to unloading my phone.

I quickly remembered the post we never wrote (I thought we had, but we hadn’t ) about Gazelle.com [referral link].  Gazelle is a really great site which allows you to sell back unwanted gadgets in a simple, hassle-free way:

1. You log on to Gazelle’s website and search for the item you’d like to sell.
2. If it’s in their catalog, Gazelle will ask you a few questions about the condition of the device and then make you an offer for it.
3. If the offer sounds good to you, Gazelle will send you a prepaid box for you to ship the item to them.
4. You choose the method of payment: by check, PayPal, or even an Amazon.com [referral link] gift card for a 5% bonus

So, I logged on to find out what Gazelle would offer me for my iPhone 3Gs.  I have to say, I wasn’t expecting much because I figured so many other people were probably on there doing the same thing.  But, lo and behold, Gazelle comes back with an offer of $201 for the phone!  So, already it’s a push between the current value of my phone and the cost of getting the iPhone 4.  Now to take care of that pesky $18 upgrade fee.  I could call AT&T and probably get them to waive the fee, but to me that seems like wanting to have your cake and eat it, too.  Then it occurred to me that my favorite podcast, Macbreak Weekly, has Gazelle as a sponsor.  I plugged in the promo code “macbreak” (no quotes), and there it was: a 10% bonus for my troubles.  That’s right, another $20.10, and suddenly the upgrade fee is merely a distant memory.

It’s important to note that I don’t have to send the phone in right away.  The quoted price is good for 30 days, and I’ll easily be able to get the new phone and send in my old phone within the appropriate window.  Sure, there would probably be a premium for going through the business of listing the phone on eBay, but this is a sure thing, and you can’t beat that!

Give Gazelle [referral link] a try, and let us know what you think!

I have been a fan of Woot! since the website opened for business in 2004.  It’s actually a really ingenious idea: every day at 11:59 PM central time, Woot! posts a new item for sale.  It’s typically some kind of electronic gadget, but it could be almost anything.  They’re typically refurbished items or overstocks, so they may not be the best quality, but Woot generally offers some pretty good stuff.  They don’t have an unlimited supply of each particular item, so when it sells out, it sells out.  If it doesn’t sell out by the time the new item goes that evening, than it’s gone for good.

It’s not the kind of shopping experience that most of us are used to.  We normally plan to order something online, or plan to head to the store to pick something up.  The brilliance of Woot is that is compels you to come back and check it each day.  You want to see what the new item is for the day.  I even have an app on my iPhone that shows what Woot has going for that day.

Not only that, but Woot has other sister sites as well, like sellout.woot, shirt.woot, wine.woot, and kids.woot.  They’re selling different categories of products but running the same exact show, and if you ask us, it’s a recipe for impulse purchases!

Okay, don’t get us wrong — we’re big Woot! fans.  My $25 computer speakers have been awesome since I picked them up from Woot! in 2005.  Julie’s sister and her husband swear buy the Sansa mp3 players they snagged for 3 bucks each.  There’s nothing foul about getting a good deal; we just think that this famous quote (from Julie’s mom) truly applies here:

“You’ll go broke saving money!”

The idea being that just because something’s a good price doesn’t mean you need it or should buy it.  Don’t worry — I’ll be checking the app every day to see what’s happening with our friends at Woot!, but we’re probably not going to buy anything on it, unless:

1. It’s something we were looking for a deal on and were planning to buy anyway, or,
2. It’s something for which we think we might have reasonable need in the future, and it’s an amazing deal.

Okay, lecture over. Thanks for listening.

(Seriously, though, Woot!, you’re cool in our book.  Keep up the great work.)

We’ve been Flickr Pro account users for some time now (probably 3 years or something at this point), and we’ve generally been pretty happy with the service.  If you’re not aware, Flickr is basically a photo-sharing site, with some features that are geared toward the professional crowd (metadata, tags, etc.).  It costs about $25/year to store unlimited photos in their original resolution.

Most Flickr power users tend to share all of their photos with the world, and while we have no problem with that, we’re more interested in making albums available to just our friends and family.  Flickr has the privacy controls for this, but it doesn’t make it really easy to share your photos.  The other problem that I have personally is that I really don’t see a lot of innovation with Flickr at this point.  There were doing a lot before Yahoo picked them up in 2005, but since then the site has felt pretty stagnant to me.

By contrast, Google has been continually improving their competing service, Picasa, since they purchased it in 2004.

This past November, Google also expanded their menu of options for purchasing additional storage, and ever since, I’ve been percolating on ways that we might use their service.  Photo storage/sharing seemed to be the most natural option, and with 20 GB (yes, gigabytes) costing just $5 per year, it was something worth going for.

So we decided to move our photos from Flickr (which we weren’t really using that much anyway) to Picasa.  It’s a work in progress.  We had something like 5,000 photos stored on Flickr, and it took a ton of time to get them downloaded (in an organized fashion) and uploaded back to Picasa.  Now it’s on to the even bigger task of re-captioning and even more organization.

In the end, we’re saving $20/year on the deal.  Doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s those kinds of small changes that can really start to add up in the end.

Interested in how we actually made the switch and moved the photos? Leave us a comment below and we’ll follow up with another post on that very subject.

You might remember our decision to wait on installing windows after we’d received an estimate from Window World, the company that we were looking to hire.  We realized through the estimate process that we were going to have to install 7 or 8 more windows than we had originally intended, which quickly put us out of our budget for the project.  Well, like any good salesperson, our man Tony gave us a call in late March to let us know that there were going to be changes in the Michigan laws governing lead removal for window contractors.  We won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that signing an installation contract after April 22 was going to mean a significant additional cost per window.

So, we decided to reevaluate out budget and see about the possibility of going ahead with the project several months earlier than we had expected.  We were actually able to cut down on costs by getting a little creative.  Window World’s pricing, as you can imagine, is on a per window basis.  There is a cost savings, however, if you take a set of multiple windows and replace them with what’s called a “slider.”  Here were are two main culprits, first in the kitchen and then in the living room:

To us these were prime options for going with the slider, and here’s how they turned out (fun photo touches included for dramatic effect):

So, the project is complete!  We weren’t planning to do it in this time frame, but it proves that if you get a little creative, you can make something happen.

Up next: new vinyl railings for our front steps.  We’ll be back with those photos later in the summer!

This a guest post from our good friend, Katie B., who blogs over at devotesherlife.com.  She read our post, “Amazon: your ongoing garage sale“, and had some excellent thoughts to add to the conversation. Enjoy!

Let’s have a moment of honesty. How many of you are pack rats? Go ahead, raise your hand. Don’t be shy. Me too; or at least, I used to be. It wasn’t until the first time I moved, at the age of eighteen, that I realized how much stuff I had that I never used and didn’t need. But what is a person to do with this kind of stuff?

Some things lose all value after use and really should just be thrown out or donated. But what about that pair of designer jeans that have only been worn a few times and no longer fit? Or the collectible Wizard of Oz dolls that are now retired and can no longer be bought at a store? After moving twice within as many years, plus going back and forth between college and home, I wanted to weed out my belongings, but I knew I had things that were worth some money and hated the idea of just getting rid of them. It felt like throwing away actual dollar bills. A garage sale would have only made me a few bucks, at best. So I tested out an internet service that, I think, intimidates many people: eBay.

Among the most valuable items I considered selling was my American Girl Doll collection. I owned four of the five dolls that existed at the time, plus ALL the clothes and accessories for them, the four beds, and one table and chairs set with dishes. For those of you unfamiliar, the dolls themselves run about $100. Add in the furniture, clothes, and accessories, my best guess is that I had around $3000 worth of American Girl products at full value. I loved these dolls as a kid, but hanging on to them waiting for a daughter of my own seemed silly and simply took up too much space.

After some eBay research, I decided to list the furniture all separately, but to list each doll with her clothes and accessories as a set. That way, I didn’t have to manage too many separate sale listings and could combine the shipping costs in a much easier way. In a matter of three months, I sold all the dolls plus an extensive collection of carousel horse music boxes and my nine Effanbee Wizard of Oz dolls. That summer I made a whopping $4500 selling on eBay! This actually turned out to be MORE than I made at my summer job working as a cashier at the community pool! All my dolls and music boxes were in good condition, but they still had lost value with use. I had original boxes for most of the Wizard of Oz dolls and music boxes, but not for the American Girls. Some of my items sold well because they were retired, others just because they were in good condition and slightly lower priced than buying the product new. Either way, it created a lot less clutter for me and put money in my pocket!

(Two quick last notes on using eBay: first, since eBay does charge listing fees and takes a small percentage of the final sale price, it is really best for more valuable items. Second, be aware of who your buyers are. You can select options such as only selling/shipping within your country, only selling to eBay members who have a positive account history, and only accepting payment through PayPal. I had one unfortunate experience selling a laptop where a purchaser used an eBay account and a PayPal account that did not match (two different user names and addresses). He also requested that I ship to a third address, which was not verified. This didn’t seem right to me, so I reported it to eBay and PayPal. The transaction was cancelled and investigation proved both accounts were being hacked and were subsequently closed. So as always when making transactions on the internet, keep a watchful eye and use your critical thinking skills!)