More Big Purchases - Window Coverings
Posted on November 21, 2007 by Eric
Filed Under Housing, Shopping
There seem to be a lot of big purchases that have to occur when you buy a new home. Many of them are things you don’t necessarily have to worry about with an existing home. We’ve planned for pretty much everything, but it can still be overwhelming to see all that money flowing out after saving it up for over a year.
Our latest battle has been with window coverings. We’ve been shopping around for the different kinds of window blinds that are offered.
We need blinds to keep some of the heat out during the summer months. It can get pretty intolerably hot down here. We also like the blinds for the privacy they give. And they can’t have any strings for tilting or raising because our cats are mischevious. We have learned our lesson with that one.
We’ve worked with three people directly to get quotes, and we’ve done some estimating on our own from catalogs and information from local stores. The last person didn’t work out due to some family problems she has been having, so we’re really stuck with 2 quotes to choose from. We checked some other local places and did our own estimates on how much it might cost there (based on catalog prices), but were never given a formal quote. We feel a little crunched for time because it takes a while to get the blinds into the house once you get the windows measured and the blinds ordered.
With this purchase, we don’t feel we have the time to search for the absolute best deal. I think if we felt we could spend another month getting people in and comparing prices,we might be able to find an even better deal than we have now. The problem has been that nearly everyone wants to come and measure for themselves before they will give a quote. And even if we find a better deal, for a month’s worth of time it had better be a really fantastic deal to justify the waiting.
We decided today to go with the best deal we’ve been able to find so far. Although I think we might find a better price if we shop around a bit more, we’re pretty comfortable with the price, and it’s beaten the others by a significant amount of money. The place was also much more professional, and offered much faster time frames than anyone else to get the blinds in. Faster and cheaper kind of sealed the deal for us.
Now the final decision we have to make is do we pay for it up front in cash, or take advantage of their financing and 1 year no payments and no interest? I really don’t like the idea of going into debt, but I see this more like the credit card arbitrage game. We’ve become very, very disciplined with our spending over the last year and I think we can handle it. We have the cash to pay for them (we anticipated this expense and have been saving for it) but the idea of getting to earn the interest on the purchase for a full year sounds good to me, too. We would put the cash aside and invest it in CDs or money market funds to get as much interest as possible before we have to use it to pay off the purchase.
Does anyone have an opinion on the one year no payments no interest arbitrage deal? I’ve personally never done it, but it sounds like a good deal as long as you remember the date things are due and make sure that you pay it off a little before that deadline to be safe.
PS - If you came looking for Tightwad Wednesday, it’s going to be posted tomorrow. Melissa wants to do some more work on it before it’s ready to go up and she’s busy cooking and preparing for Thanksgiving tomorrow. Check back in the morning for the post!
Image Source: markhillary
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I like using the one year, no interest opportunities. Just be sure to send your payment about a month before the due date. They sometimes monkey with the dates a bit and if you are late even one day, they will charge you the entire year’s worth of interest and these places usually have high interest rates.
I probably agree, but read all the fine print before making a decision. If there are a lot of opportunities for failure, it may not be worth the risk.
On the other hand, if you calculate the actual amount of interest you could earn, you might find that it is much too little to be worth any amount of worrying. Just going with this vendor rather than the second-best one is probably saving you much, much more!
@Nancy - Thanks for the heads up on paying early. I had planned to do that to avoid any issues but didn’t realize they might try to monkey with the date.
@Debbie M - In this case, we got the best deal *and* the opportunity to do the financing. It’s not a huge amount of money we could earn on interest, but maybe something like $200.