I just booked a flight to Australia to visit some close friends that moved there, and I wanted to share my tricks of the trade on how to get the best and cheapest flight.  The more money I save on the flight and hotels the more I can scuba dive, horseback ride, or visit other cities.  I always aim to have the best trip I can by saving on travel and hotel costs, then spending on the things that will make the trip truly memorable.  

Flights:
1. First, go see a travel agent and ask for the best rate from your city to the destination.  They’ll give you a price to start with.  Get quotes directly from your city and also quotes from smaller cities that are nearby.  I’m flying from Buffalo to Sydney, which is only a 1.5 hour drive from Toronto but saves me over $300!  There is a cheap bus from Toronto right to the Buffalo airport but I’m hooking a ride with my brother who wants to check out the Brooks Brothers outlet, which is a win win for both of us.  
2. Second, open a window with every cheap flight website you can find, such as expedia, travelzoo, selloffvacations, travelocity, priceline, etc.  There are even sites that will check all of the cheap flight sites for you, like cheapflights.ca, bookingbuddy.com, or farecompare.com.  Search all of them, slightly changing the departure and arrival dates until you’ve found the best price.  But you don’t book!  Call up Flight Centre with the flight still on your screen and they’ll beat the price by $10, and in my case they got my Australian Visa for me. I love my money and time!  
3. Travelling to Europe is a bit different.  Find the best rate into a hub like Amsterdam, London or Frankfurt.  Then try to get a Ryan Air, German Wind, or Easy Jet flight from the hub to your destination.  You’ll save literally thousands if you’re flying to a remote destination like I did when I flew to Malta.  That trip cost $800 to London and then $90 to Malta on Ryan Air.  That saved me more than $1,000!  

Hotels:
1. Hotels work the same way.  Open nine hundred windows on your computer and find the best price.  Google for a “promo code” for the hotel that you want and see if you can bring the price down even more.  Make sure you watch for any service fees or taxes before you book.  Click through to the page where you enter your credit card info and compare prices from the total sum. 
2. If you have a company like I do, ask to register for their corporate rate. This will guarantee you savings during the busy months when deals are scarce.  They treat their corporate clients like gold, which is a hidden plus. 
3. Whenever I travel I always aim to stay at the trendiest boutique hotels or historic hotels for less than a discount hotel.  I’ve done this in Greece, Sweden, Germany, Egypt, Malta, LA, and NYC. Why not stay at the best places in the best locations? You deserve it!
4. Get a US$ Credit Card if you stay in the US for long periods of time.  Credit card companies charge 2.5% on top of the exchange rate, so if you are in the US enough to charge $2,000 in hotel and travel expenses it will save you $50 from that 2.5% fee!  

Find the best foreign exchange rate place and pay off the card when you get home.  In my experience the ULTIMATE place in Toronto to exchange money is Foreign Exchange under the Sheridan Centre Hotel.  123 Queen St W. 416 364-3004. Tell Razia that Dave sent you.  

I’ll we away for two weeks putting shrimps on the barbie so I’ll write about all the ways I saved money down under styles!

Dave

As you’ve probably already read, 80% of mutual funds under perform the market.  Why would I ever pay up to 2.5% in management fees to under perform anything?  You can really see that they don’t have our best interests in mind.  When the market was correcting huge in 2008 and 2009 did any of the managers go to cash?  Any strategic moves? No way.  The reason for this is that if the market had swung upwards at any point during the correction and they had not participated in it, they would have been fired.  So over the cliff we all went.  As long as the managers stay close to the index, -30 may that be, the safer their jobs were.  

That doesn’t sit well with my love of money, and that is why I manage my own money.  I know at this point you feel queasy at the thought of going through company annual reports, balance sheets, and listening to conference calls, right?  Well it is so much easier than that.  What I do is find a mutual fund or index fund that I believe in and then I copy it and save the management fee.  I, for example, love dividend yield.  I’ll search for the best dividend funds or index funds and then rip off their top holdings for $5 a trade at my discount brokerage.  That way I’m in control of what I do with my dividends.  

There are many options when I’m in control of the dividends.  I could save the dividends up and buy another high yielding stock when I have enough funds to do so.  Which adds diversification to my portfolio for free.  I could also set the dividends up on a drip (dividend reinvestment plan) program.  My dividends would then buy me more stocks every quarter as they got paid out.  This way you naturally buy stocks higher and lower as the market changes over time. The indie term for this is dollar cost averaging. Quarterly I would receive more stocks that the following quarter would buy me even more stocks — and all for free.  This is a great way to accelerate growth over the long run. If I’m having a good month I might even pay myself my very own management fee and have an amazing dinner out with friends or family.  

If you share my love of dividends, look up the top holdings of XDV, the iShares dividend index. This ETF mirrors the 30 top stocks in the Dow Jones Canada Select Dividend Index.  You can grab the list of stocks right off their web site, plus their weightings.  To keep down my trading costs I buy just the top 15 stocks–making up 63% of the index. If you own them you’ll be participating when the index rises–in the last year it went up roughly 36%. You are given each stock’s weighting in the index which I could match, but with such small percentage differences between the top 15 I just buy them in equal weightings. If you did purchase the later you would have a 4.8% yield and some of Canada’s top dividend yielding companies.  When the dividend index is going up I know that I’m participating in the growth, and I have to keep checking back once a quarter or so to see if any of  my 15 have fallen off the list. I then simply make the appropriate trade to match the new top 15.  This is all on top of those sweet sweet dividends that are paying me quarterly.  

Make your own Mutual Funds and pay yourself instead of the managers.  You’ll love your money so much more.  
Dave

Count right now how many points cards you have  clogging up your wallet? When was the last time you actually went on a free trip or got some sort of reward from them? Have you ever thought how much more money you spend travelling across town to use that store or extra dollars you put on your credit cards to get a few more points?  
 
Due to the fact that I’m always trying to get the best “bang for my buck,” I’ve crunched all of the numbers and my chosen points system is the one that is the longest running. It’s called cash. I can use it to buy luggage, or gift certifcates, or travel on any airlines and my wallet is free of any cards of any kind.  It can be used everywhere and I can even save the tax or get a better price at some places when I use it. I’ve crunched the numbers and using cash for everyday spending saves you money.   
 
I recently tried to redeem two different points systems to get a trip to Calgary. A ticket that would have cost me $371, including tax, to buy with cash would have taken $45,000 worth of spending with one credit card and $25,000 with another card. Then on top of that they would have charged $187 or $114.80 respectively on top of my points for taxes and extra charges. I really don’t see how these point programs add up.  Here is my logic:
 
1. Using cash saves people up to 20% compared to using cards. You simply spend less money when you have to actually plop it down. Using cash puts a ceiling on your spending; if you’re spending virtue is in question–if you’re being naughty with your money–it’s very helpful. What I do is take $400 out of the ABM every Monday and that is my discretionary spending for the week. It has to cover everything from clothing and coffee to eating out for the whole week. If I drop it all on a crazy Monday night bender, then it is gone. I have to wait a week to get another $400 of play money.  
 
2. The average yearly fee for points credit cards is around $120 a year. To build the points to fly to Calgary it would take me two to three years to charge $25,000 on my card, plus two or three years of fees. Remember, the flight only costs $371. Yikes!
 
3. “”Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”  – Antoine de Saint-Exupery.  
 
Using a simple money clip is so refreshing. And elegant. Seriously, look through your wallet and see all the tacky crap the retailers get us to carry around. If they were not making money off the card, they wouldn’t offer them, so therefore we’re paying extra to use them.  
 
Cash really is king.  It keeps a ceiling on my spending, simplifies and streamlines my wallet, and gets me a better price on many things.  Now that’s a points system I can love!
 
Dave