Woot

Are you familiar with woot.com? They have a deal of the day-they sell only one thing every day, but it changes daily and you can get a great deal on something.

We had our own deal of the day yesterday. We both use our credit cards for almost all purchases. And we rack up the bonus points. We do pay it off each month, so it's not like we're paying for these points through interest or finance charges. I think I last cashed in some points about 18 months ago. With the recent news about the credit card industry and potential changes to credit cards, we decided to see what we could get with our bonus points in case the banks decided to stop their bonus programs completely.

For the past several months, I've been wanting a Wii. My reasons for wanting a Wii I stem mainly from jealousy and my less than perfect relationship with my dad. See, I was the only one of his 3 daughters for whom he did not buy a Wii for Christmas. He gave both of my sisters a Wii; I got a crochet and golf book, both of which had the flavor of books you find in the $5 bin at Barnes and Noble. So I've been wanting a Wii as kinda a way to make a statement to my dad. Of course having played one, I know how much fun they are, too. And hubby's been wanting one because he likes video games.

So we were on the hunt for a Wii. Now I had 35,000 points on my credit card. Unfortunately, the free Wii required 67,000 points. But, for a reason I will not understand, I could get a $250 gift card to many stores, including Best Buy (enough to buy a Wii) for only 25,000 points. Woot!

Hubby had enough points for a $100 Best Buy gift card, so we cashed that in as well. Hubby also had a variety of Visa debit cards that he got from various places and still had a couple dollars left on them, which are like gift cards except you can use them at any store that takes debit cards.

But our deals didn't end there. Before we left for the store, we checked online to see if Best Buy had any special deals on the Wii. They didn't. We got to the store and as we were picking out our purchases, the salesman came over to help. I asked him about any special deals they had with the Wii and he explained the bundle deal where you buy the Wii and a bunch of cr@p you don't need and save a few bucks. We weren't going to do that, but also saw on the same price tag thing that they would give a $20 gift card after we purchase a Wii. I asked about that and he said it was a go. Woot!

So we got our Wii, a WiiFit, and an extra controller and went to pay. Our plan was for me to buy the Wii and get the extra gift card and then hubby would buy the rest with our new gift card and extras from our bonus cards. The register did not ring up the $20 gift card automatically and I asked about it. The guy at the cash register was unsure that program was still going on. Hubby couldn't find the guy who told us about it, but he did find the price tag that outlined it and brought it the cashier. Once a manager came over, we were able to get the $20! But we were the last ones in the store to get it b/c the manager made clear to the cashier to not put it back out on the floor.

Having squeezed all we could out of Best Buy, we headed to Gamestop since BB didn't have the game hubby wanted (Mario Galaxy). We were searching the Gamestop shelves when a salesman came over to help us. We asked about the game and he said, "oh that's our special deal this week, so it's in front." Woot! We ended up buying 3 games (buy two, get one free). Again we had trouble at the register. I think the special deal was supposed to end on Friday and not go into the weekend or there was some problem and we were not supposed to get all the deals we did. But the gave them to us anyway.

So to sum up, we got a Wii, WiiFit, extra controller, and 3 games. And we only spent about $80 of our money.