Penny For My Thoughts

So, as part of my new job, I can refill my maintenance prescriptions at a retail pharmacy (at my old job, there was mandatory mail order).  As a result, I have been playing the prescription transfer with Rite Aid, CVS (my pharmacy of choice!), and Shaws.  I hadn’t seen a sign about Walgreens accepting transfer coupons, so when a new Walgreens opened near me, I called to see if they accepted them.  The person working there informed me “It’s not legal to use prescription transfer coupons in Massachusetts.”  Um, right, that’s why Rite Aid has then in their circular every fliping week.  At present, I’ve been favoring Shaws promotion of getting a $25 gift card from their mall when you fill 10 prescriptions.

All of this considered, you can see why I was amused when a new CVS sent me a promo flyer (a coupon for free Coke at a CVS is pretty exciting when you’re me), including a $25 transfer coupon.  LOL.

Free ice cream at Friendly’s today, for those of you who live near one.  It’s from 12-5pm.  I’m particularly excited as I do not live near enough to a Ben and Jerry’s shop to participate in free cone day.

So sorry I’ve been so absent-my long, drawn out saga of getting a new laptop has cut into my blogging time.  However, I logged into my car lon account the other day, and found that my baance is $850-under $1,000.  woot!

For those of you outside of the New England area, you might not have heard about Massachusetts increasing its sales tax from 5% to 6.25%.  As I work in the human services industry, I see the sales tax increase as being a necessary evil-the programs that would have been cut would have been an utter disaster.  Massachusetts’ sales tax has been at 5% as long as I can remember-and its MUCH cheaper than the sales tax in, say, New York or Chicago.  Of course, as my mother pointed out, this is worth it IF the money actually goes to such programs (I think Newsies put it best with “How about a crooked politician/hey stupid that ain’t news no more.”)  Of course, then I got to thinking-I’m not crazy about sales taxes due to their regressive nature (wow, I did learn something in that Econ for Dummies course I took in college).  So the irony of this increase is that it disproportionally affects some of the same classes of people who are helped by it.

Possible subtitles for this post were Epic!Fail and yes, it is possible for something to both suck and blow.  I love Food Network, but am ambivalent on Sandra.  One thing that’s always goaded me about her is how she’s all “America’s Second Harvest-I teach people nutritional skills!” then turns around and makes a meal with an ungodly amount of fat and sodium.  Anyway, I was curious to see her new show, Sandra’s Money Saving Meals.  There’s 30 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.  Not only were her tips asinine (buy day old bread!  Buy store brand biscuits!), but her meal ideas were junky and uninspired.  In short, I commend Food Network for trying to stick with the times, but I don’t recommend the show.

Given that I am a vacation freak, you’re probably not terribly shocked to learn I’m a bag Samantha Brown fan (when I was in Disney World in 07, she had just finished filming there-the manager at the Boardwalk was saying that she always stays there and she really is that nice.  Ergo, I was thrilled to see that a new season started last night.  It seems that Samantha Brown is now trying to do budget weekends.  While not as LOL worthy as Rachel Ray’s $40 travels (*love Food Network, hate Rachel Ray), it still seems a little lacking.  Sam was discussing her good hotel deal in Philly, but didn’t really give any context as to how to get a good deal-I presume this is due to Expedia’s new, and painfully obvious sponsorship of the show.  I don’t blame them-airtime doesn’t grow on trees, but enough is enough.  The ideas weren’t horrible, but it seemed to lack a little on method for options on saving money.

Congratulations are in order to Danielle, who won the Amazon.com gift certificate!

There will be no networth post this month due to computer issues.

I have now been blogging for one year-I can’t believe it.  I talked about starting a personal finance blog since I started reading pf blogs in late ‘06.  I must express my gratitude for Tricia,whom I knew from Sunshine Rewards, but is a new media powerhouse of her own accord.  I also thank my fellow Chattywomen, as well as all the pf bloggers who came before me who I learned from throughout the past year.

Anyway, now that the accolades are over, we can get on with the party!  Woohoo!  I’m giving away a $15 Amazon gift certificate!

How to enter-between now and next Tuesday, May 5 (Cinco de Mayo!) at 5pm EST, you can enter in the following ways

• Leave a comment (with e-mail, please-one per person) telling me one entry of mine you liked over the past year-that’s it!

For more Entries:

• Digg this post, and leave a comment with your Digg name-one entry
• Blog about this contest (with a link back here), and leave me a comment with a link to your post-three entries!

It seems like everyone I know who works in marketing is saying that their company is slashing their marketing budget.  As a result, many of these companies are starting to push new media, or web 2.0 media, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the like.  While less expensive than conventional marketing ways, their company may still be paying them to spend the time on such sites.  But how can you remain assured that your Industrial Marketing is getting you somewhere?  You may want to look into Return on Investments (ROI) Pro Analytics.

What ROI analytics enable you to do is to get the information to educate yourself on who is visiting your website, as well as how they use your website.  With ROI data, you could easy see if and how uses of new media (or old media) are working for your company, making ROI a good investment (no pun intended).

I feel like there’s some sort of joke in here.  Many moons ago I had an account with BayBank, Baybank became BankBoston.  BankBoston became Fleet.  Fleet got my goat so I switched to Cambridgeport savings.  Cambridgeport Savings was bought by Citizens Bank, as they were going to charge me a fee, I switched all my money to Banknorth.  Banknorth became TD Banknorth, which is becoming TD Bank.  TD Bank will be charging me a fee (as my Electric Orange account through ING is my main account, the amount in the TD account is piddling), so I researched it.  I switched to a checking account that was fee free at Citizens Bank today.  I like having a brick and mortar bank to use for the occaisonal thing.

Unrelated to that, check out this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance-my article about the Diva Cup is in there.