Wal-Mart started early this year, slashing prices on electronics and other big-ticket items well before the traditional day-after-Thanksgiving Christmas season shopping kickoff.

And they continue. Wal-Mart has cut prices four times since mid-October and promises more savings and discounts for holiday shoppers. If you are a competitor, what are you going to do?

That’s right, you are going to try to keep up and that is exactly what Target is doing. Just as Target tried to follow in Wal-Mart’s footsteps over the $4 generic drug prices, so they follow in the discounting of popular electronics and other items that are high on Christmas shopping lists.

All of this can only be good news for consumers. Price wars ultimately will benefit all shoppers at both stores this season. Best advice for Christmas shopping? Before you buy, check the competitor’s price, it may have just gone down.

When shopping for electronics and big-ticket items such as cameras, TVs and other appliances, we are often faced with strong and seemingly sensible encouragement from the salesman to take out an extended warranty on the product. After all, you’re paying a lot for this advanced technological gadget - don’t you want to protect your investment?

According to Consumer Reports extended warranties are not only not necessary, they are probably money wasted. Most of the products they have tracked have not needed major repairs in the two years since they were purchased and often the cost of the extended warranty is more than paying for a repair, if one is ever needed.

Retailers advise you to take the warranties because they get a large percentage of the price of the warranty. In fact, they make more money on extended warranties than they do on the products they are selling the warranties on.

According to Consumer Reports:

For the consumer, extended warranties are notoriously bad deals because:

* Products seldom break within the extended-warranty window (typically around three years), our data show.

* When electronics and appliances do break, the repair often costs about the same as the cost of the warranty.

Read the rest of the article at Consumer Reports

We may hate that word discipline when it’s applied to ourselves, but it is the single most important factor in deciding whether we are rich or poor. Without self discipline, we will spend lavishly on the whims of the moment and end up with a mountain of trash and no money.

So how to become disciplined where money is concerned? Gary Simpson of Personal Finance Budgeting suggests taking out a large denomination bill from your bank account, say $100, putting it in your wallet and then never spending it! To know that it’s there gives one a good feeling - and having the determination never to use it for purchases builds self discipline.

It’s a good system and I can see that it would work. That is, if you actually have $100 in your account, of course…

Everyone starts somewhere, I guess. Have a read of the article - it’s full of good sense.

With the Christmas shopping season nearly upon us, we will be out and about, scrambling to buy gifts for loved ones. According to Amar Cheema, assistant professor of marketing at the Olin School of Business, Washington University in St. Louis, it’s also the season when people are mostly likely to buy self-indulgent gifts for themselves.

Christmas sales, rebate offers and easy credit (sometimes with no money down and 0% interest for a specified term) all give the shopper incentives to buy that big ticket item he or she has been longing for. But only 40% of consumers actually send in those rebate forms and easy credit can encourage consumers to spend more than they can afford.

But according to Cheema, these discounts are not as money-saving as they seem and you are often better off waiting until the post-holiday sales when retailers cut prices to reduce inventories to buy yourself that large-screen plasma TV.

Read the article at NEWSWISE