I’ve been testing a website this year to help with cost of kids’ birthdays and it worked out so well that I had our kids make their Christmas lists in October so that I could use it for holiday shopping. If you buy things on Amazon, you need to be using www.camelcamelcamel.com . Create an account so that it can email you alerts, and then dive in adding price watches on possible upcoming purchases. I learned of this website from the Choose FI guys, it’s been mentioned on several of their podcasts. It looks a bit clunky when you first pull it up, and there’s no mobile app, but it will work on mobile browsers. Believe me, it’s worth getting past the aesthetics with this one and just start using it.
This website can also assist with cutting down expensive shopping habits. I’ve heard Liz Frugalwoods mention putting time, usually days, between your first inclination to buy something, and actually pulling the trigger. The camels will not only afford you that time, but also ensure you’re getting the item for a price that you value it at if you do decide to purchase. The process goes like this:
Visit camelcamelcamel.com and create an account/login. Open another tab to www.amazon.com an search for the item you desire on Amazon. Once you find the item on amazon, click to go into the main description.
Now copy the amazon URL from your browser.
Go to the camel tab, and place it in the camel search. Search for the item on camelcamelcamel.com.
Now the magic happens. The camels will provide a price history for the item. Use the history to see how often and how much the price of the item dips. We can see below that the Galaxy Buds are currently around their all time low, and that they’ve been about $50 higher most of the year, but also that the price periodically drops $10-$20. We can also see that they are currently at a historically low price.
This may be a good time to buy the Galaxy Buds based on historical pricing. If we decide that the purchase would bring value to our life and is worth spending money on, it looks like we’d be getting a good deal. But lets say that we decide $100 is too much for earbuds. Lets say we don’t want to pay any more than $89 for them. Then we would use the camel price watch feature.
We input our email address that we want alerts sent to, whether we’re tracking the Amazon or 3rd party price, the price we want to pay, and click track. This creates a an alert tracker, and when the camels see that the price had dropped to $89 or less we’ll receive an email alert at the email address we provided letting us know and providing a link directly to the item! When the alert arrives we then have another choice. Some time has passed, do we still want or need this item? If not, we can cancel the alerting on camelcamelcamel.com. If we do, we can purchase the item at price that meets our value expectations.
It does take some time to add Christmas List items for 5 kids to camelcamelcamel.com. It also had to be done early to allow time to track the prices of the items and monitor for the sales I was looking for. I did take the time to do so, and I was rewarded with about 3/4 of our Christmas spending being through camel price alerts, and for the first time in years, our Christmas shopping was done by the first week of December, and UNDER budget. It’s an amazing feeling to get everything you want for your kids, at great prices, and not hit your budget ceiling. I hope the camels can help you going forward! Please drop any tips or tools you use that could save us all significant money in the comments! Happy Holidays!