Do More, Spend Less: The New Secrets of Living the Good Life for Less

✍ Scribed by Brad Wilson

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 222
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Do More, Spend Less is the new road map to winning as a consumer. It's a game plan to get off the default path, turn the tables on the banks, airlines, hotels, cell phone companies and retailers and emerge victorious in the great game being played for your hard earned cash.

Written by Brad Wilson, founder of BradsDeals.com, the largest editorial-driven deal website, the book provides tips, strategy and real-life examples of things he has personally done over the past 10 years as a professional bargain hunter. Learn how he:

• Earned 5m frequent flyer miles, all on the ground 
• Stayed two weeks in one of the nicest hotels in Europe for free
• Moved his credit score from 400 to almost 800
• Found discounts on new cars of up to 25% off

The entire basis for thinking about how best to shop, spend, travel, bank--essentially all aspects of being a consumer--has fundamentally changed. The power is now in your hands, and Do More, Spend Less shows you how to win as a consumer.

✦ Table of Contents

do more spend less: the NEW secrets of living the good life for less......Page 5
Copyright......Page 6
Contents......Page 9
Acknowledgments......Page 13
Introduction......Page 15
Introduction......Page 19
Unsophisticated Honeymoon Turns Me into a Professional Traveler......Page 21
How I Got a $40,000 Trip to Australia and New Zealand Almost for Free!......Page 22
Turning Coins into a Million Miles (Or How I Made the Government $2 Million)......Page 30
Hacking Together a First-Class Trip to Costa Rica (Or Why Buying Miles Can Be Smart)......Page 36
A Quickie: How to Save $500 and Fly across the Country for Free at the Last Minute......Page 37
How I Spent Weeks at One of the Nicest Hotels in the World for $20 (Or How to Turn Award Points into $54,000)......Page 39
How to Rent 6,000 Square Feet of Steve Wynn's Hotel for Barely $100 a Person per Night (Or How to Live Like a King without Betting Your Castle at the Tables)......Page 50
TSA Precheck (Or How to Make It through Security without Taking Your Shoes Off)......Page 53
My Very Inexpensive 1,500-Square-Foot Oceanfront Suite in Hawaii (Or How I Stayed in an Oceanfront Hotel Room Bigger Than My Condo)......Page 56
How I Get Executive Platinum and 100,000 Miles for $1,500 (Or How a Bankruptcy, My Hometown, and Richard Branson Got Me Top-Tier Status on an Airline)......Page 63
Little-Known Secrets to Getting Elite Status (Or How to "Challenge" the Airlines and Win!)......Page 66
Lounges (Or What Are Cuban Cigars and Chauffeured Porsches Doing at the Airport?)......Page 70
How I Built Up More Than 5 Million Frequent Flyer Miles......Page 82
Time-Saving Tools for Advanced Flyers (Or How to Do No Work But Still Get Award Seats)......Page 84
Airline Alliances = Opportunity (Or How a Travel Hacker Goes Global)......Page 85
Flying First Class to Hawaii for $285! (Or How the European Banking Crisis Just Bought You a Vacation!)......Page 88
How Do I Do This Myself?......Page 95
Introduction......Page 117
How My iPhone and Service Plan Cost Half What Everyone Else's Does (or How to Get Smarter About the Biggest Purchase Most of us Make)......Page 120
All the Free DVDs a Kid Could Ask For (Or How to Get Banned from eBay)......Page 124
Selling and Profiting from DVDs I Didn't Own (Or How Amazon's Canada Store and International DVD Arbitrage Helped Me Pay for College)......Page 125
When Too Good to Be True Is Just Good (Or How I Got a Free $70 Coffeemaker)......Page 127
How I Stumbled into $1,000 When My TV Broke (Or What You NEED To Have In Your Wallet)......Page 129
Why Buy $10,000 Worth of Bose Products (Or How Red Envelope's Bankruptcy Got Me My Headphones)......Page 131
Can You Buy Everything Online? Almost. I Do!......Page 132
But How Good Are the Deals?......Page 133
Why You Should Never Buy a Mac at the Apple Store (Or Reason 1,343,206 That Everything You Know about Being a Consumer Is Wrong)......Page 137
Why It Is Smart to Buy a Diamond Sight Unseen over the Internet (Or How Tiffany Stole Your Kid's College Fund)......Page 139
Who Would Order an Out-of-Stock Item?......Page 144
Broken iPad and iPhone? No Problem......Page 145
To Extreme Coupon or Not to Extreme Coupon (Or How to Save Money but Lose Time)......Page 146
How Do I Do This Myself?......Page 147
Introduction......Page 153
How to Easily Buy Cars below the Factory Invoice Price (Or Why Invoice Price Is Meaningless When Shopping for a New Car)......Page 154
How to Play and Win the Car Leasing Game (Or How to Lease a $60,000 Mercedes for the Same Price as a $30,000 Toyota)......Page 166
Why You Should Never Get a Mortgage or Home Equity Line from Your Bank (Or How I Got a Sub-Prime Mortgage but Avoided Foreclosure......Page 172
The Awesomeness of Credit Unions (Or How a 25-Year-Old Can Have Twice as Much Money in Retirement)......Page 176
My Favorite 10 Credit Unions and the Secret Backdoors into 8 of Them (Or How to Climb in the Great Trojan Horse of the Banking System)......Page 182
The Four Types of Credit Cards (Or the Four Good Types of Credit Cards Plus a Fifth You Can Ignore)......Page 186
Balance Transfer Arbitrage (Or the Easiest $10,000 I Ever Made)......Page 188
How to Create Your Own Business Line of Credit at 0 percent......Page 193
How to Save $312 in 13 Minutes Every Six Months......Page 195
The Quickest Way to Make $1,000 (Or Sign-up Bonus Success Stories)......Page 196
How to Manage an Extra 100 Points on Your Credit Score (Or Why Downgrading, Bumping, and Reallocating Can Get You a 740+ Score)......Page 199
Why More Credit Always Trumps More Credit Inquiries (Or Why Credit Inquiries Don't Actually Hurt Your Credit Score)......Page 204
The Best Place to Buy a Used Car (Or Why Your State Doesn't Want You Buying and Selling Cars)......Page 207
How I Got My Credit Score from 400 to Almost 800 (And How You Can, Too)......Page 208
How Do I Do This Myself?......Page 211
Conclusion......Page 213
Index......Page 215