Day 11: Stop paying retail for clothes.
Ramit clearly doesn’t know who he’s dealing with here. I’m wearing $220 Diesel jeans today that I paid $48 for on Ebay. I’ve got a Versace suit from Hong Kong. I have a closet full of top-quality dress shirts and not a single one of them cost me more than $40 - I flat out refuse to pay any more than that, even though some of them are fancy Kenneth Cole numbers that retailed for $150. I think that’s actually what’s kept me from ordering the perfect jacket even though I desperately want it and know I’ll positively wear the crap out of it for years. No one has it on sale! I can’t pay retail for a jacket… it makes me feel defeated. Every time I put the jacket on it would reek of foolishness, laziness and failure.

Ramit had some great links today to some of my favorite bargain-chaser sites. ShopItToMe is really excellent, provided you take the time to set it up initially. Invest the effort to specify your sizes, and the brands you would realistically buy, and voila! Highly-targeted advertising. As a marketer I find it brilliant, and as a consumer I truly appreciate never ever seeing a sale on women’s sweatpants land in my inbox. Express, you could really learn from this.

I’m doing his Savings Goal Account thing with the perfect-yet-impossible jacket, using my Paypal account to accumulate the funds. Everything I sell on Ebay (less fees and shipping, which get charged to the Paypal account) turns into Jacket money, and earns interest in the Paypal money market (although not much). Will I have the guts to buy the jacket when I reach the goal amount? That remains to be seen.