It's Hard to Spend Just $10 on the Internet

At Christmas time I was determined not to use my credit cards. Money was tight enough for me, the last thing that I needed was to heap some interest charges on top of whatever I payed for gifts. But, the problem I faced was that I found some gifts that would be perfect, only I couldn't find them in any local stores, only on the Internet. I came up with the idea of buying one of those gift card that you could use like a credit card and using that instead; it would get me the gifts that I needed and wouldn't be paying interest charges, only shipping.

The plan worked pretty well for me (we'll discuss the outrageousness (damn you, spell check, it is a word) that is the cost of shipping in a minute) and I got all the gifts that I needed. I was left with just over $10 on the gift card. Then I got an email the other day and it turns out that I'm going to get hit with card "maintenance" fees if I don't use all the money up and so it's spend it or lose it time. To prevent this from happening I've spent the past couple days casually looking around on the Internet, trying to find something to buy. The problem is that the only things I really want right now (new driver, new golf bag) cost a lot more than $10. Anything else I either don't really need or don't really want. I was further constricted because, let's be honest, any shopping I do for myself is going to come from one of four categories: Celtics, Patriots, Notre Dame or golf.

The other issue is that you can't buy anything on the web without getting hit with huge shipping costs. The few things that I looked at were like $4 and then cost me $6 in shipping. So it's going to cost more to ship it to my house than it is to buy it? No wonder the economy is screwy (yeah, those two things are not at all connected, I know, but let me have my faux-political rage). Anyways, I found it was really hard to find anything on the Internet that was worth the money and would still allow me to stay under my strict $10 limit.

I ended up buying a 3-pack of Notre Dame golf balls (which, when it comes to my golf game, is the equivalent of throwing the money into a pond) for cheap and it actually left me with another $2.87 on the gift card. I found that much easier to spend, as it's exactly the cost of two songs off of Amazon at .99 cents and one at .89 cents. The only issue then was finding classic songs to download because, as I've discussed on this blog before, the music coming out today sucks. But, I was successful and cleared out the gift card without a cent left to waste.

So, go ahead, you try and spend under $10 on the Internet without buying totally useless crap. It's not as easy as it looks.