Ask a random bystander if he’s into online gambling and he might sniff that he doesn’t waste his money on games of chance. Ask him instead if he ever bought a refurbished piece of electronic equipment from an online retailer and he might say sure, from time to time. Well, newsflash, bystander, that’s online gambling.

Some online retailers will permit you to send back a refurb as easily as you would a new item, issuing you a magical RMA (return merchandise authorization, aka return material authorization). But just as often, you may find that your retailer’s policy is to replace your refurb rather than credit your original form of payment. A “with beans” correspondent recently tried to use a retailer’s online form to return a lousy refurbished phone and the knee-jerk response of the form was to spit back the response that an RMA could not be issued for the item. In so many words, the retailer’s was saying “Either keep your lousy phone or have us send you one that you now have reason to believe may suck just as much.”

Well, there’s a fiendishly simple way to get around that, and it comes down to three magic words: email or call the customer service department and say you understand the policy but that you see this as a customer satisfaction issue. Coolly dropping this phrase works almost every time, because linguistically and otherwise you’ve sidestepped the Draconian return policy and elevated your case to a realm that’s a bit more intangible. In the case of the bum phone, our correspondent sent an email with that phrase and within ten minutes got a response – by phone – from an apologetic rep who never once lectured him about the restrictive, stated return policy and graciously issued an RMA. That’s good news for you, very smart business for them.

Image source: Davide Vizzini via Wikimedia Commons

You feel like a hero carrying that bouquet of flowers down the street, don’t you, dude? How thoughtful everyone must think you are, including the bouquet’s recipient, until she wakes up the next morning to discover that you evidently didn’t buy these half-dead stems from the best of florists.

We’ve all been burned by flowers that die too fast, regardless of whether we’ve procured them from an expensive florist or the cheapo corner stall. And if you tend to frequent the latter, you likely aren’t getting comp packets of that powder that prolongs the life of fresh flowers. Well, if you want to be a hero for a bit longer, Lifehacker via myhomeideas.com zeroed in on a DIY powder mixture from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden that you can sprinkle into the flower vase: “mix 1 teaspoon sugar, 1 teaspoon bleach, and 2 tablespoons lemon or lime juice in a quart of warm water.”

If those fresh-cut flowers for your honey are perhaps a prelude to something more forever – a diamond in an engagement ring setting, say – withbeans has a bonus potion for you – a longtime jeweler recently shared his trade secret with us for making a diamond shine almost supernaturally: soak the little rock in a mixture with a teaspoon of bleach and a few spoonfuls of soap and water.

Longer living flowers, shiner diamond. Now, my friend, you’re a hero.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

For the average consumer, going green can be a multi-part question: What green products can I introduce into my daily life, are they really making a difference when it comes to saving energy and the environment, and are these products any good? Answers to all of these questions intersect neatly in an unlikely place – an Amazon Listmania! List on the Best of Green Gadgets and Energy Savers.

A Listmania list can sometimes be self-serving affair constructed around the motivation of the lister – that’s not a cynical comment, it’s just the way it is, as all of the products on the list are for sale. But given that all Amazon reviews have user comments attached to them, the list begins to feel more objective.

The selling point of the green gadgets list, quite simply, is that it’s a good discussion starter for your household. Many of us know there are little ways we could be saving energy, but we’re not often armed with enough information about them. Did you know there was such a thing as a handheld electricity usage monitor that, according to the manufacturer, “shows the operating costs of your household appliances” and “calculates cost and forecasts by week, month and year”? Perhaps you heard tell of such a thing, but does it work? Two hundred customer reviews add up to a cumulative 4 ½ star rating, which, if you’re accustomed to relying on user reviews, is a good sign. The “works great, fast results” type of comment dominates, but look for yourself. As with any product, it’s the details, even within the positive reviews, that call the product’s usefulness for you into question.

Among the list’s items is one that’s decidedly old school –a classic push-reel lawn mower that users say is safer, quieter, and better for the environment. But in the words of one user it requires “a little more elbow grease” especially on hills. So you might want to ask yourself, is that additional exercise going to benefit you in the long term, or will it cause a strain? Hypothetical questions, of course, but all worth asking if you’re thinking about new ways to go green.

Image Source: P3 International

The idea of taking baby steps has been around for ages – for as long as babies, actually – but when you apply that idea to how to overcome shyness, taken up by personal growth writer Mark Harrison, it helps to know what those steps might be. The indefatigable Lisa Hoover at LifeHacker zeroed in on this point in her post about Harrison’s article, noting that one tactic for practicing your public speaking might be to “ask a question from the audience during your next company presentation, or vow to say hi to two new people at the next party you attend. It’s okay to be nervous—baby steps.”

Harrison goes well beyond the “imagine everyone in their underwear” trick to explore ways to build your confidence day to day. Repeating in the shower every morning that “you’re the man” may seem silly (especially if a person within earshot outside the bathroom asks later who you were talking to) but it goes to Harrison’s idea of using your subconscious to pump yourself up.

When it comes to public speaking, it helps to remember that your audience is going to respond to how seriously you take yourself, and Harrison observes that “shy people often take things far too seriously. So what if you make a mistake, if your voice trembles, if you forget your lines? So what if nobody laughs at your jokes? Is it going to kill you? I doubt it. Lighten up and keep things in perspective.”

Lightening up is easier said than done, but think about the presentations you’ve most admired. They probably haven’t been perfect, and somewhere along the line the speaker was probably a bit self-deprecating. Think about the whole notion of being up at the podium and your next thought suddenly going out of your head. Rather than putting your head down and standing in silence of twenty seconds, you might say, “Wow, my brain just shut down, give me a second to re-initialize” if you’re speaking to a techie crowd. Tweak it to your audience. You might change the line to “My mind just took a short vacation” if you’re addressing a roomful of travel agents.

You get the idea. Lightening up has almost nothing to do with the charisma of the speaker and almost everything to do with admitting your lapses to your audience – it’s something they can relate to, and thus an excellent way to connect with them.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

A splurge, almost by definition, is only a splurge if you don’t do it all the time. If you did, it would be something else – bankruptcy. But for many couples, there’s an insidious middle ground – that one-time splurge that begets other mini-splurges. Gadgets are prime examples. Buy a pricey one and soon your mind will drift to the gadget’s accessories. They’re not cheap, but their price points may be just enough below the radar that you don’t feel compelled to get your partner’s permission to buy them.

Adam Baker makes the latter point when discussing how he manages financial vices in his life, using as an example a martial arts class he takes to the tune of $168 a month. He notes that both he and his wife, Courtney, are on the same page about the expense: “Even though the training expense is for only me, I have Courtney’s full support. Without this type of support from a spouse or significant other, vices of this nature can stir up a ton of resentment.”

Being able to control the vice – going to the point about accessories, above – is also important, as is a notion in Baker’s article teased out by blogger Lisa Hoover about whether the purchase is consistent with your other goals. Baker observes that the cost of his class isn’t consistent with his household’s financial goals, but since the class helps him blow off steam, it has the ancillary benefit of helping him keep calm when he’s under pressure.

This whole notion of ancillary benefits is a slippery slope – almost every expense, good or bad, has an ancillary benefit – but the fact that Baker’s focusing on fitness makes his example accessible for a lot of consumers during these uncertain times. If your job was eliminated, do you cut the recurring fee for your gym membership out of your budget? Staying in shape during your job hunt seems like a good ancillary benefit, but couldn’t you stay in shape at a less expensive gym, or by running around the block? Baker’s points are an excellent starting place for these discussions, especially when confronting vices in your budget that weren’t necessarily vices last month when you had the income to support them.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

If you’ve ever spent sleepless nights watching infomercials for the Miracle Brownie Pan or Miracle Mop, you’re hit over the head with the notion that you need to take these things you’re already doing, like making brownies or mopping up the ensuing mess — and do them better.

Never mind that every gadget appears to be “miraculous” or “magical” – that’s the marketing department’s handiwork — but if you start with that entirely viable idea of doing something better that you’re already doing and reframe it a bit so that it becomes “How can I take something that I really can’t do at all and do it,” you end up with a gadget like Joby’s Gorillapod, the flexible tripod that permits you to mount your cameras and other devices seemingly anywhere.

There are seven versions of the Gorillapod now, including the original camera mount and models for heavier-duty cameras and handheld devices as well as magnetic version that could turn your car door, say, into a base for a tripod so you can self-time that photo of you and your family at a windy scenic overlook.

One reason Gorillapod seems almost effortlessly life-changing as an invention is that without our realizing it, the makers plant a few possible uses for it in our head and then inspire us to come up with others. The press area of the company’s Web site provides a trove of ideas – take the tree limb with the camera mounted to it; there’s no real context for the photo, but perhaps it’ll put you in mind of the tree in your backyard that can now provide an assist when you want to shoot your family holiday card.

Rather than just make perfect brownies, the Gorillapod can be plugged into almost any situation we get ourselves into – it’s open ended – the mark, one could argue, of an admirable invention.

Image source: Joby

Smart phones have turned every idle minute into an opportunity to catch up on e-mail. But you’ve probably noticed something. Say you were in line at the bank when you started catching up on your messages, but then after your transaction’s done, you decide to sit down and finish e-mailing. Had you really intended to use that time to deal with your mail? Same goes if you’re waiting for a child or a friend to show up — how often have you made that child or friend wait so you can finish sending your message?

Start using the “doctor trick.” When doctors have one patient after another throughout the day, they don’t take every phone call as it comes in or return every call the second they see the little pink message slip. And you know this is true if you’ve ever waited for a doctor to call you back. Many doctors will wait for those little message slips to pile up, will return them during a quick break, and then will get back to business until they have time to deal with the next message pile. Sure, your doctor — as well as you — needs to deal with emergency messages as they come in, but as for the rest,  just because a call or e-mail is actionable, that doesn’t mean it has to be acted on the second you receive it.

Experiment. Set aside two half-hour blocks during the day to check your messages, and you might find that you won’t be keeping people waiting and you won’t risking your life checking your messages while crossing the street. And not incidentally, only checking your e-mail during designated times does wonders for productivity in the home or office, too.

This simple strategy has been known to change people’s day-to-day lives dramatically. Leave a comment if you’ve tried this approach, or if you have a different timesaver tip you’d like to share.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Self-help books can certainly get you in the mood to rethink how you organize your life, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone from habits-of-effective-people guru Stephen Covey to the famously prolific Stephen King has inspirational ways to increase your efficiency and free up the cluttered sectors of your life. But when it comes to efficiency, one of the best bits of advice is a saying so simple and homespun it’s almost profound: Don’t touch a piece of paper more than once.

What this saying refers to, of course, is a scene that has played out in homes and offices for centuries: Piles of paper accumulate on desks and dining room tables, the piles are arbitrarily dumped into bags when company comes or shoved into drawers when the clutter’s unbearable, and a fair amount of our lives is spent sifting through those piles multiple times, looking for scraps of paper we may never find.

Consider instead how uncluttered your life would be if you held up that piece of paper the second it came into your possession and immediately made the decision to file or scrap it or otherwise do that actionable thing that makes that paper irrelevant. And this is where the idea of finding your bills and paying them efficiently intersects. Missouri-based blogger Chett, inspired by the 4 Hour Work Week, explores the book’s concept of “batching,” which essentially means grouping like tasks together so that you’re not “arranging your work area, getting the materials needed, and getting in the right frame of mind” every time you need to do something. And in Chett’s case that something was getting organized to pay bills. Beyond the physical set-up obstacles, Chett and his wife came up with a very shrewd way to help consolidate the process:

“We called each one of the companies that we make payments to i.e. utility companies, phone companies, mortgage, insurance, etc. and ask that the payment dates be changed to dates between the 21st and 26th of each month. Every company was willing to accommodate our request. In the future we will sit down to pay bills once each month. When we finish we will immediately know what residual income is left over and can make plans accordingly. This process should also make debt reduction easier as you can immediately see how much extra you can apply to your smallest payoff to eliminate that debt.”

Chett correctly observes that mastering personal finance often has less to do with understanding numbers and more to do with finding a process that works for you. Batching could be your thing and, certainly, so could gathering all those document piles in your life and touching a lot of that paper for the last time.

Image: Wikimedia Commons