As mentioned in my previous post, I planned on buying a new high-end cell phone as well as a upgrade a broken plasma TV on the same day. Worst case scenario, I saw this costing me $1000. That’s a tough hit that you don’t see too many personal finance bloggers make in one day.
The first thing was the plasma TV return to Costco. Costco has a great liberal return policy. It’s almost so good that it’s a fault. Allow me to explain. Because plasma TVs had dropped since when I bought mine, I was able to get a name brand with a lot of extra features for just over $500. At the time, the same TV might have cost me $1500 more. The returns woman seemed to look at me as if I was trying to scam her, “We really need to change this return policy”. Alas she admitted there was nothing they could do and they don’t have a plan to sell an extended warrant (recommended by many on plasma TVs). So now I have new TV. The only problem was transporting it home and setting it up. You think that because it’s thin it would be light. It is not.
Later, I called Sprint to order the Palm Treo 700P. Because it was on their web site, but their telesales couldn’t find it in their system, they decided to give me $250 off for signing a new two-year agreement. I usually try to stick to one-year agreements, but this was a pretty good deal. I’m now free to buy the device from Sprint’s or Palm’s website at my leisure. It turns out that Palm is giving away a free 1GB Secure Digital card for those who have previous Treo’s and programmers (like myself) who have registered with them (which is free) get an additional $100 off a new Treo. That takes a $650 phone and makes it effectively $350 or $325 if you count the value of the SD card. It looks like my current Treo 650 would fetch about $225 to $250 on Ebay, so I’m really looking at an outlay of $75-$100 for the upgrade.
The final cost on the day should be about $600 — not bad considering what I thought it was going to cost me going in.