Day 10: Take full advantage of free rewards and perks
I'm starting to wonder if Ramit is either doing Professor Xavier-style long-distance-mind-reading on me, or just following me around for the last couple weeks in an unmarked car, because I'm seriously right on track with his savings suggestions about a day before I read them. Day 10's tip is about taking advantage of credit card rewards, discounts through insurance providers and shopping clubs, and workplace perks. I'm just reading it this evening for the first time, so I honestly had no idea what his Day 10 topic was until just now. With that in mind, here's what I did today:

• Used Alaska Airlines mileage to book flights to Hawaii for Heidi and John's wedding next October. Total cost for nonstop airfare to Maui: $5.00, plus whatever I spend on mai tais on the way down.
  
• Called Citi Smith Barney to exercise stock options. This is more "compensation package" than "workplace perk" but what most employees fail to take advantage of is the full-service Smith Barney investment agents available to us on the phone for no extra transaction fee. I got treated like Warren Buffett even though my stock portfolio looks more like Fred Flintstone's.
  
• Logged into Citibank's awesome ThankYou rewards program to see how I can spend the points I earn every month for using bill pay, having my checks direct deposited, or otherwise doing things I would do already. In addition to planning how I'll spend what's already accumulated, I made a list in an easy-for-me-to-find place of the ThankYou Network vendors I shop at regularly, so I can remember to access those sites via ThankYou and earn double points for things I was going to buy anyway.
  
• My gym membership is set to expire in January, so today I set a reminder to hit Costco for another discounted annual subscription. Costco also has Starbucks cards at 80 cents on the dollar, so I'm going to buy a stack and use them for managing my Starbucks budget, save an easy 20%.
  
• I have a discounted purchase program at work on things like Xbox Live subscriptions, and as that is also set to expire in January I set a reminder today to buy it through the company program and spend half as much.
  
• My employer also offers us a restaurant discount program, so I'm going to finally stop at the front desk for a membership card and hopefully some of the eligible hotspots will be near Lahaina. :)
  
• I put together info on my AAA membership, all of my rental car agency loyalty rewards programs, and a couple quick Travelocity search results pages into a Google Docs spreadsheet (my new favorite project planning tool that follows me to any computer I'm using) so I can start comparing rates for rental cars in Hawaii next year. One way or another, I'm not paying retail on that.

So after already operating in a very rewards-centric state of mind today, I read Ramit's Day 10 entry and immediately had another idea. I have a couple tags from the Christmas gift tree at work to fill, and I'm thinking I could fulfill them by spending ThankYou reward points. Several of the things kids asked for are easily within my reach by using points, or combining points and cash, and I'll be able to get really nice things for the kids on the gift tree. I'll also use the ThankYou Network vendors to purchase them, so I'll get points back for any cash I spend.

I'm still fighting the battles with Craigslist people today, too, trying to clear out stuff from the weekend's ultraorganizathon. As is typical with Craigslist hippies, they consistently flake out and otherwise frustrate me. I'm trying to draw firm lines this go-around and minimize the amount of effort I spend bending over backwards to donate things to people that are probably more greedy than needy. We did haul a huge load of useful stuff to Goodwill on Sunday, so at least some of the stuff we cleared out might end up helping someone who is actually appreciative. In contrast, Ebay buyers are impressing me with their interest in the stuff I posted there, and the first batch of auctions ends today. I can literally hear the loose coins jingling through the intertubes on their way to me.

Buying gym memberships Costco will save me monthly money, but I do that already, so I'm not counting that as new savings. The rest of this stuff is about large, one-time purchases so I'm not going to add that into the monthly savings total, either. Running total is still at $187/month.