I have been doing a ton of refunds/returns lately, not because I’m abusing the system (i.e., buying something to use once and then returning it), but because I don’t know what I’m doing!

This has usually been happening at Home Depot. In fact I think I did it 3 times in a two week period. The first time, I went to buy some supplies for plating my cable and telephone connections. I wasn’t sure if I had the proper tools to strip and terminate the cable connections so I bought $30+ worth of tools “just in case”. Turns out I didn’t need them so I ended up returning them (and later I found out that you can buy strippers for very cheap from the overseas Chinese outfits).

The next time, I tried hooking up the dryer vent. My initial research online said that you should get a rigid metal one so that lint doesn’t get caught and become a fire hazard. We picked out an aluminum vent connection but also decided to get an metal accordion one “just in case” because we had to do a L-connection and there wasn’t a lot of room. In the end, we didn’t use the 8″ rigid metal vent but used the accordion one (and only about 4″ worth). Another $14 saved.

Finally, we bought some supplies to put up our blinds/curtains, including some for our french door-like windows on our doors. But the screws that were provided with the rods seemed to be long enough that it would go most of the way through the door, so we bought a pack of shorter screws. Well when the installation guy came, he had his own supplies so we didn’t need to use them! That saved us $4.

In total, I think we saved about $50 doing refunds (plus a couple of extra trips to Home Depot since we did the returns the “next” time we went to HD – which is quite frequent nowadays). Oh and as a bonus refund, we found that the hotels we booked for our winter vacation ended up being on sale so we did a cancel and re-booking which saved us about $250!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: chinese, housework, money