My online sales career is long and illustrious. I’ve been at it since 2001 and have sold everything from art, jewelry, perfumes, household knick knacks, to – currently – skincare, both direct and via marketplaces (Ebay and others). It is at once a hobby, an addiction, and, in the early days, a safety net. And I’m always and forever trying to find ways to reduce the shipping costs. Even in pre-COVID times, shipping rates were getting out of hand and kept going up every quarter. Got to a point where to ship a 200g/0.5lb package to BC would cost about $25.

Yes, it’s true, even with Canada Post there are ways to save, like sending without tracking for smaller packages, but that wouldn’t work for fragile boxed items. Even for small flat bubble mailers it’s not worth the headache when a package gets lost. So many emails, “please wait another week”, “okay we’ll ship out a replacement”, “oh, the first one’s arrived 8 weeks late, great! what do we do about the replacement” and so on. Plus, Paypal and Stripe really like seeing shipment confirmation in case of a dispute. It’s rare, but can get unpleasant and it’s best to be armed with a tracking number.

Happily, last year I found FreightCom. I recommend it if you need a faster service with better rates. Their UPS rates for parcels going to the US save me at least $5-7 per pkg vs Canada Post, but the main advantage is the speed of delivery. To be fair, even in 2020 and now Canada Post has been great at getting packages to the border, but then USPS takes over and it can take a very long time. So that’s where UPS or Fedex come in, and FreightCom is a good option, highly recommend depending on your priorities.

However, if you don’t care much about timing and just want to save, save, save, go with my latest find – ChitChats! They pool the packages and then hand them off to either Canada Post or USPS in most cases. Still the same network, but for some reason, way better rates.

I’m somewhat reluctant to share this secret out of fear that I’ll ruin a very good thing. And then I think, the more customers they have, the better the rates they can offer. Probably. Hopefully. So here you you go. ChitChats.

I just created a shipment for a 100g package going from Toronto to North Carolina and it cost five dollars sixty nine cents. Canadian. Includes tracking and insurance. I kid you not. Canada Post would charge at least $12 for a tracked packet service. But typically you can expect something like $8-10 with ChitChats. Still very decent, almost like in the “old times”, in the “old normal” etc etc.

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I recently started shopping at AliExpress. It’s a retail arm of the wholesale Alibaba website. They both let you shop directly from the manufacturers in Asia (primarily China), the difference is in the minimum quantities. The main draw, obviously, is low prices. Plus, at AliExpress most items are offered with free shipping.

The upside.

• Really really low prices
• Huge selection
• Shipping to over 200 countries
• Buyer protection guarantee

The downside.

• Long delivery times
• All shipments require signature, can be annoying if you shop a lot
• Sub-par item quality, descriptions are often misleading
• Time suck – much like with Amazon, large product selection is great, but it takes a lot of time to find what to Finally Buy! I suppose it’s still less time than going out to the mall to shop, but to me the mental strain is just huge.

I have so far received 4 items from four different sellers. I threw away 2 of these as they were unusable: one was advertised as leather but turned out to be polyurethane, the other was just ugly and smelled like burnt rubber tires. Of the remaining two items, one is “sort of OK” and one is great (love my tiny neodymium magnets). So the ratio so far is 50/50, or 25/75 if you’re really picky. Their buyer protection guarantee sounds good, but I haven’t taken advantage of it since the two items I discarded cost about $10 together. It wouldn’t be worth the time to fill out the complaint form, take pictures etc. Since I can’t whole-heartedly recommend the website, I’m not linking to it. Clean conscience and all. Here’s an example of an item that didn’t live up to my expectations. These sell at a local store for around $8-10. They are exactly as pictured: nice and plump, with no mold lines, and without any funky smell. This is also the photo that was used on the listing I fell for.

This is what I actually received from one AliExpress seller for about $2 including shipping – thin, badly made from a knocked off mold. In addition, visualize the most foul rubber smell that stays on your hands for the entire day, you can’t rinse it off. And, I got 2 white, 2 black, and 2 red ones although the listing pictured white, brown and green, which is what I wanted for my office.

How dare I expect more for two dollars? Well, the logic was that the “$8 one was made in China anyway. This is probably the same.” It wasn’t.

Business idea!

Click the images below to enlarge I came across a retail site with the office located in Canada. They sell these symbolic bracelet sets. Guess where I saw these first! Yep, at AliExpress. That’s a great markup. But I’m not tempted to open up a store of my own, that’s why I so willingly share with you my source I’ve been down that road before, 12 years ago. It was waaaay harder to find low cost items, but on the other hand it was easier to sell. Sometimes I can’t believe the stuff we were able to “move”. There wasn’t such a glut of items out there, not as much selection, not as much fatigue, and buyers weren’t as savvy.

Anyway, that’s the story. Caveat emptor.

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This is for my American friends. The ones who got scared into keeping money in cash and out of the market
(In Canada, we have things like GICs and Term Deposits, none of this CD stuff.)

It used to be that when you bought a certificate of deposit (CD), you didn’t have a lot of choices. It was a simple decision. Nowadays, even with a basic CD you have to do some homework. It’s still a pretty conservative investing technique, if it can be called that…

Regular CD

To start with, there is the regular CD that has been around for many years. Even so, there is a lot to learn about plain vanilla traditional CD’s. First, you need to shop around for rates. Then, figure out if flexibility is important to you. With a shorter term, for example, 6 months, you can access your funds sooner, but a 3-year CD is likely to give you a higher yield. Though not always! I’ve seen shorter term products offered at better rates. My guess is that happens when a particular bank is strapped for cash, or they’re just trying to drum up some new business.

You need to also consider whether the interest rates are going up or down in the future. If they go down, then a long-term CD is more advantageous, while if they go up you want to be able to get your money back quickly to take advantage of the rise. There are techniques you can use to balance off short-term versus long-term investment, such as laddering and barbells. (I’ve done Ladders and Bullets with term deposits. It’s ok. Makes you feel busy and smart, doesn’t necessarily produce great results.)

Brokered CD

If you are looking to have access to your money at any time and are still looking for the security a CD offers, then you may want to consider a brokered CD. This is a CD that you can sell at any time on the open market provided there are buyers – just like you would sell a stock or bond. The way these work is that the broker buys a large CD from a bank, and then breaks it up into a number of smaller brokered CDs which it sells to its clients. The interest rate is typically lower than you would get on a regular CD, but this is offset by the flexibility it provides.

Market-Linked CD

Finally, you may want to consider buying a market-linked CD, which gives you a fixed return like a traditional CD, but also gives additional returns linked to stock market growth. You can’t lose money if the stock market goes down, so in some ways this is a win-only proposition. However, before you invest in this type of CD, you really need to get professional advice from an unbiased expert, since there can be significant issues around tax treatment, and the FDIC protection may only apply to the capital you invest initially, not to any gains you may make.

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Another mall, Walden Galleria was fine but it’s not exactly an outlet mall. Their brands are nearly identical to what I can find in Toronto with only a few exceptions. Prices overall weren’t much lower, but I think many people go to Walden for The Cheesecake Factory. Their cakes were good.

I’ve read somewhere that Coach ([[COH]]) makes more money at their outlet stores than full-price stores. Can’t find the source but I believe it – their place was a sh*t-show, a horde of people were running around the store with a mad look in their eyes, and that’s on Thursday. Can’t imagine what it’s like on a weekend.

All in all, I thought it was worth the trip, and will probably do it again at some point.

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I’m selling my unlocked cell phone on eBay where I came across this warning:

Due to a recent change in US law, eBay sellers can no longer sell unlocked cell phones unless they were unlocked by the manufacturer or unlocked prior to January 26, 2013. There are also restrictions on unlocked phones sold before the carrier contract expires.

Turns out, it is now illegal to unlock carrier phones in the US. A bunch of corporations lobbied their interests and made this into a LAW, can you believe it? Unlocking a phone will be considered a violation of copyright law – specifically, subsections concerning circumventing DRM (digital rights management).

I always felt that unlocking phones had a somewhat borderline criminal vibe about it, but then it was MY phone I was hacking, wasn’t it? When it comes down to it, when buying anything with software, we agree to the Terms and Conditions that are never read, and it may turn out that we don’t even own the phone.

Wonder if Canada will pass the same law. And will Craigslist follow Ebay’s example?

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I don’t know what you guys are paying for gasoline…. but here in California we are paying up to $3.75 to $4.10 per gallon. My line of work is in petroleum for about 31 years now, so here are some tricks to get more of your money’s worth for every gallon:

Here at the Kinder Morgan Pipeline where I work in San Jose , CA we deliver about 4 million gallons in a 24-hour period thru the pipeline. One day is diesel the next day is jet fuel, and gasoline, regular and premium grades. We have 34-storage tanks here with a total capacity of 16,800,000 gallons.

Only buy or fill up your car or truck in the early morning when the ground temperature is still cold. Remember that all service stations have their storage tanks buried below ground. The colder the ground the more dense the gasoline, when it gets warmer gasoline expands, so buying in the afternoon or in the evening… your gallon is not exactly a gallon. In the petroleum business, the specific gravity and the temperature of the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, ethanol and other petroleum products plays an important role.

A 1-degree rise in temperature is a big deal for this business. But the service stations do not have temperature compensation at the pumps.

When you’re filling up do not squeeze the trigger of the nozzle to a fast mode. If you look you will see that the trigger has three (3) stages: low, middle, and high.You should be pumping on low mode, thereby minimizing the vapors that are created while you are pumping. All hoses at the pump have a vapor return. If you are pumping on the fast rate, some of the liquid that goes to your tank becomes vapor. Those vapors are being sucked up and back into the underground storage tank so you’re getting less worth for your money.

One of the most important tips is to fill up when your gas tank is HALF FULL. The reason for this is the more gas you have in your tank the less air occupying its empty space. Gasoline evaporates faster than you can imagine. Gasoline storage tanks have an internal floating roof. This roof serves as zero clearance between the gas and the atmosphere, so it minimizes the evaporation. Unlike service stations, here where I work, every truck that we load is temperature compensated so that every gallon is actually the exact amount.

Another reminder, if there is a gasoline truck pumping into the storage tanks when you stop to buy gas, DO NOT fill up; most likely the gasoline is being stirred up as the gas is being delivered, and you might pick up some of the dirt that normally settles on the bottom.

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I can’t deal with the newspaper sales people after the trial runs out. They’re the most annoying and persistent bunch. Good luck if you decide to take this free cheese.

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I guess people don’t even realize that CC transaction fees are already built into almost every price you see when you shop. I would gladly pay cash if I had the option of getting a cash price for goods. But, since this isn’t the case, I might as well earn my Amazon rewards money…

Actually, I find that – surprisingly – just about everyone is open to negotiation, from Best Buy reps to small stores (especially small stores, of course). It works very well on higher-priced items. For anything above $100 I start off by asking “what’s your price if I pay cash?” Oftentimes they will discount beyond the built-in 2-3% credit card fee just for my asking “What’s the best deal you can give me?” Seriously. This has saved us hundreds of dollars just last year.

Beware, though, only pay cash for expensive stuff if you have total confidence in the retailer and/or product.

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