It’s time to get back to school. Shopping school, this is. Now, I’m not exactly the youngest person (just hit 60) and I’ve noticed a lot of folks in my age group are not very good with the Internet. They still do the bulk of their shopping offline, which is fine, but they often do this for even products that they could easily get online for less. I don’t mean to put these people down as they are my friends, but they need to get with the program! Hence, this site was born. I used to talk to my friends one by one and try to show them things online until I began realizing I was repeating myself a lot and showing the same things over and over. Because of this, it occurred to me it would be simpler to create a site that they can refer to. This site will:

• Provide information about how to shop online
• Give you clues on how to find great deals
• List coupon sites and individual discount coupons you can use to get great savings

Before diving in, however, let’s start with the basics. If you are new or clueless about online shopping, you’ll want to read this article from the FTC which will give you some information you should be aware of before going online to buy things.

If you’ve been buying your office supplies at local retail outlets, then you’re probably not finding the greatest selection of products. That’s right. Despite the size of many of these stores, the variety in office products is so large that any one store only carries a fraction of all the available products out there. So what is the solutions? Buying online, of course.

Now, when most people go online for office stores, they head straight over to Staples, Officemax, or Officedepot. While these sites are certainly decent, I would like to offer one more office supply store into the mix: Quill. You may or may not have heard about Quill, but it’s actually a quite large office store that does business exclusively online and by mail-order. The company has actually been around since the 50′s according to wikipedia.

One reason I like Quill is because there are many Quill coupons I can take advantage of. What are these online coupons? They are links that give you access to special deals. In some cases you need to use a coupon code, which will be provided on coupon sites like Chainstorecoupons.com. Just copy the coupon, and paste it when asked for, and your discount is automatically applied.

A while back, I told my friend Phil that I personally think Lasik surgery is a good choice given its lower lifetime cost compared to wearing contact lenses. Nevertheless, contacts require a smaller upfront investment, so they remain very popular.

It seems like the cost of contacts goes down every year, which I suppose makes sense. They are really just pieces of soft plastic and I always thought they were a bit overpriced, to say the least. If you are currently a wearer of contact lenses, I encourage you to purchase them online in bulk to save some money. The best deals can be found at popular contact lens stores like Vision Direct and Lens.com. If you have the time, it helps to visit a few different stores and find the one that offers the lowest prices for the exact contact lenses you wear. This alone can often save you as much as $10 a box or more.

Another benefit to buying contacts over the Internet is that you can get some pretty nice discounts on your purchase. If you use a Lens.com Coupon, for example, you can save something like 15% on your entire order. If this all sounds good to you, go to Couponanything.com to obtain the latest Lens.com coupons.

You can look for coupons like this in the mail, or go online to find other tire coupons.

Maintaining our vehicles is very important since we rely on them so much throughout the course of our daily lives. Unfortunately, vehicle maintenance can often be a large expense. Let’s explore some ways you can cut down on car expenses.

First, stop going to the dealer to get oil changes or other work done on your car. Dealers are notorious for overcharging you and pushing services you don’t need. Unless you have deep pockets, you should avoid dealers as much as possible.

This leaves you with either finding a local repair shop or hiring an auto technician. For the cheapest price, buy the parts you need yourself, and hire an independent technician. You can find them on places like Craigslist. Try to find one who is ASE certified to make sure you are hiring somebody with qualifications.

Finally, consider buying car parts online. Retailers such as Discount Tire have very nice websites that make things like finding and ordering tires a cinch. You’ll have to be able to judge yourself when your tires need to be replaced, but this is an easy enough skill to acquire.

If and when you do buy car parts on the Internet, you should always look for online coupons that you can use. Check out sites such as toptirecoupons.com for some current deals. I recently took advantage of some Discount Tire Coupons myself, and that one simple move ended up saving me quite a bit of money. So makes sure you do not overlook this step! You can find Discount tire coupons and other great deals on tires if you go to this site.

Many of my friends run a business, and as you know, businesses are all about maximizing profit and minimizing expenses. One thing that can quickly run up your bills is having to rely on a lot of professional services, whether it be attorneys, CPAs, or consultants. The solution? Doing it on your own, of course.

Now, you obviously are going to have times when you need the help of a professional, but for things such as bookkeeping and basic accounting, doing it on your own is quite simple thanks to software such as Quickbooks. Back when I ran a business, I did all my accounting with Quickbooks are hardly ever ran into problems.

From the time I used it, Quickbooks has certainly become much more powerful. Today, there is an online version of the software, and it also incorporates things such as payroll service. Of course it includes a lot of the standard bookkeeping and accounting features like invoice generation and inventory management as well. But I recommend most people use Quickbooks online these days since all your records will be kept on a secure server and you will be able to work on your accounting regardless of where you are, as long as you have an Internet connection.

While Quickbooks is not prohibitively expensive, it’s not exactly cheap either. You can actually get a 30-day Quickbooks free trial by going to Quickfreetrials.com, or by visiting this page: http://quickfreetrials.com/quickbooks.php. I highly recommend you do this if you are interested in purchasing this software.

While you’re at it, you might want to take other accounting software for a test-drive as well. I don’t know if they all have free trials available, but I’m sure many of them do.