The Internet has given people who like to save money many entirely new ways to save, and inspired a whole new range of save money tips of which we all must be aware. Here’s a tip that every online shopper should know about and use regularly.

Before you buy something online do a quick search by typing the name of the retailer plus the word “coupon” into the search field. You might be surprised at how many retailers online have ongoing offers in the form of a code that one enters into a form during the buying process. This search only takes a few minutes can save you anywhere from $.50 to a whole lot of money! Times are tough nowadays, and whether you are unemployed of just could use a little extra money, why not approach saving as a way to actually make up for extra cash that you are not earning. After all, you may not be able to snap your fingers and get a job, but what you can do is take action and save yourself a lot of cash by saving with coupons instead.

Here are a couple of examples of the wide range of online merchants who offer money-saving opportunities of this kind online:

Every time I buy or renew a domain name or renew my hosting, I’ll check in Google for coupon savings via Hostgator or Go Daddy, two registrars/hosting companies which I use. I always save at least a dollar if I register a new domain name, but the more you spend the more you will save. If you spend $75 you might save $15 on the total purchase cost. It’s a outstanding investment of your time to get substantial coupon savings like this.

Recently I rented a car from a major car rental company, and just before I hit the reservation button I remembered this particular money-saving tip, and I did a fast little search for a coupon relevant to the reservation I was about to make. I saved almost $50 on my rental, and we’re talking after-tax free money that only took me a few minutes to save!

Honestly I don’t know why more people don’t talk about this tip for saving money, because as I have illustrated the range of retailers who offer coupons like this is very wide. Also there is a cottage industry of websites that have been created to point you to these coupon offers; by using them an affiliate commission is paid to the website owner but you get your savings, and the retailer gets his business. It’s really a win-win-win for everyone.

Don’t forget to use this save money tip the next time you are about to buy online and pay the full retail price. You will not always find an applicable coupon, but I guarantee that over time the effort you put into saving in this way will be completely worth it.

Complicating matters further is the issue of trying to predict the timing of your purchase. Often, buying far in advance (if you can) is the best way to lock in a cheap airfare. But as frequent fliers know, this is not always the case. Sophisticated ticket pricing algorithms today have seat prices changing almost continuously. If for some reason you don’t shop tickets until a week or less before departure, you will sometimes find that the airline was forced to radically reduce prices in an effort to fill seats on a half-empty airplane. Taking advantage of this phenomenon has serious practical limitations however, whether for business or holiday travel, as you run the risk of seat prices for a given destination simply increasing until the flight date, or worse, finding no seat availability at all.

What if there was a way to take a lot of the guesswork out of timing your purchase of airplane tickets in an effort to get the best price? What if there was a website that presented you with search results from several of the major online travel booking websites as well as a recommendation to buy immediately or to wait, based on its prediction of the direction prices would move? It might sound like science fiction, but the technology exists today. It is the best single way that I am aware of to save money on airfare.

Farecast.com was a website with a revolutionary way for a person to determine the best time to buy airplane tickets. The company was acquired by Microsoft in April, 2008, and thankfully Microsoft kept the ‘know when to buy’ feature when it blended it into Bing Travel.

Here’s how it works: you enter your departure and destination cities and your desired dates, with an option to include nearby airports in your search. There are also options to look at fares over many different dates as well as the option to check prices for multiple routes to a given destination. In this way, whatever flexibility you have in your itinerary can be incorporated into your search results, and can potentially save you money by showing you a larger range of flights (including hopefully, flights with surprisingly low fares) based on the filter you construct initially. As the search for lowest fares over multiple sites is being performed, you’ll notice the price predictor functionality “building your prediction”. Amazingly, when the search returns the lowest fares there will also be a suggestion to buy now or wait, along with a specific dollar amount prediction as to how much higher or lower the fares will change between now and your flight date. If the software tells you to wait, it also tells you specifically why; that there is a high likelihood of a major price drop in the next seven days for instance. Incredibly, the site actually quantifies just how much confidence it has, expressed as a percentage, that fares will rise, fall or stay in a given range around the current price, between now and the flight date. For added context you’re presented with a graph of price fluctuations for this route over the last 50 days. It is all based on Farecast/Bing Travel’s past track record for predictions within the market you are searching, and similar markets. One small shortcoming is that the Farecast technology does not cover international flights as comprehensively as it does domestic (US) flights. One wonders however, if the number of covered routes will increase as flight sample sizes increase, as well as leading to even better predictions in the future across the board.

If being informed helps one to save money on travel (or anything for that matter), it doesn’t get much better than Bing Travel with its ‘price predictor’ technology.

The technology is consumer empowerment on steroids. While I find myself normally gravitating towards Google for search and a lot of other things, this is one area where Microsoft still has a lock on a state-of-the-art internet application. Try it the next time you are booking tickets online and looking to save money on airfare. It’s one of the best save money tips I know.

When you’re thinking ahead to your next vacation, or talking about it around the dinner table, it’s a lot of fun to kick around different possibilities: this anticipation and planning should be part of what a vacation is. In addition to being a way to save money on travel, what I’m about to share with you a source of ideas for trips that may have never occurred to you, that could open the door to new travel destinations that you may never have thought of as affordable.

Home swapping involves trading your home or a secondary residence, even an apartment that you rent, for similar accommodations with someone you may not yet know across the country, or across the world. Usually nowadays you would join a home swap website for a nominal fee, and insert a written description and photographs of your property. Then you can search for homes in places you would like to visit, as well as receive offers from other potential swappers who are interested in your listing. I always thought I knew exactly where I want to go on my vacations, but lately I have thought very seriously about visiting places I never considered previously, because of the offers I’ve received to swap, through the home swapping website that I joined. Here’s another tip: join a large site to increase the number of property offers that you will have. The internet makes it easier than ever to save on travels: if this doesn’t help you save money on business travel, it still is a route to save on traveling during personal vacations.

The swap occurs at an agreed-upon time when both parties want to travel, and usually involves use of all household amenities, subject to pre-agreed-upon guidelines between both parties. Maybe the swap involves a vehicle, maybe it does not. Maybe one of your requirements for a swap is that the other party take care of your family pet, or maybe it doesn’t. Your counterpart in the swap arrangement has the same motivations and probably trepidations that you do, and this is part of the reason why home swapping works. Most homeswap websites that I have looked at have a feedback system, and members who have done multiple swaps over the years. If someone has done several swaps, you are likely to feel more comfortable with them.

Maybe you’re thinking: even if they’d like to save on travel, who wants to rent my house or apartment, there’s really nothing special about it! The thing is that you have no idea how good a fit your residence and its location would be for others, and besides, chances are the person on the other end is thinking the same thing. Okay, neither of you will be staying in a fancy hotel on the holiday in question, but look at the money that you will both save, money that could be put to other uses on your trip, or simply saved. If saving money in this way seems attractive to you, you can bet there are plenty of people out there who feel the same way. In fact there are many, many home swap sites to be found on the Internet.

To save money on travel is one thing, but what about the destinations that I referred to at the beginning of this article? No compromise there! Whether you are looking for a small apartment in Bali, a place near the ocean, or in the mountains, or in the middle of Rome, you will find people offering residences in places that are intriguing for a vacation, I can assure you. There is truly something for everyone. And that’s the thing-if you know exactly where you would like to go, you can contact people offering home swaps in those locations. But if you are open to suggestions as to your next holiday, you’ll find it very exhilarating to look through offers you receive through the home swap site in your e-mail box. You are under no obligation to accept any of these offers, but if something sounds interesting and the desired travel dates of the other party match yours, you can take the first tentative steps to see if you feel good about the other person and the property they are offering. Your motivation might be to save on travel, but you might find yourself on a non-standard holiday that you enjoy much more than your normal hotel stays.
Even if you do only one swap, you could potentially save hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a longer trip or months-long sabbatical. Saving money through homeswapping is worth looking into– you’ll be glad you did!

My basic suggestion here would be to ask yourself if you really need that landline telephone that you’re still paying for. You know that you would save hundreds of dollars a year if you are able to live without it. Is there anything about your present home telephone that could not be accomplished just as easily with your cell phone? Of course I’m assuming that you have a cell phone, because my argument here really centers on the undesirability of paying for something like having a telephone line, twice each month. I think that for most people who still have landline telephones getting rid of them seems like a big step, but would be one of those ways of saving money where after you did it, you wish you had done it years earlier.

Some of the best ways for saving money generally are by eliminating duplicate expenses, that we have developed over time without really realizing it. Old habits die hard, as they say, and they develop a momentum over time. But it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t change our ways when another method becomes available. Saving money by eliminating your landline is a perfect example of this. It may sound like a radical step in the name of saving money, but just look at how many times you actually use your landline phone in the course of a week, and how many times those calls could have been taken just as easily on your cell phone. I have taken this step, and frankly I’ve never spoken to anyone who has decided to save money this way, who regrets it.

Which? researchers found that there was little correlation between price (and presumed ‘quality’) and the enjoyment of a given brand. They tested the instant coffees of seven supermarkets’ own brands-Aldi, Asda, Lidl, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose, against Nescafe Original, which is as much as three times as expensive as the others. Nescafe was generally preferred, but not by much, and the experimenters estimate that a couple could save as much as £54 a year by switching.

At 6 AM, do you really think that you prefer a premium brand three times as much as you would a more economical brand? At that hour I’m lucky if I can find socks that match. But that’s a different blog post altogether.