Crafter Confidential: September 13
Crisis Type: Economic Overload
Details: Never home to cook and forced to eat out in spite of high cost
Therapeutic Craft Project: Paper Flowers (Scroll down for How-To vidio)

Sometimes I feel like I am always in the hunt for food. With a busy schedule, I seem to never be at home at meal time. Forced by circumstance to eat out every meal-it is important to look for ways to cut the cost of dining out while still being able to eat quality food.

Well folks I hit the motherload this week as Restaurant.Com ran an unbelievable deal--90% off the cost of $25 gift certificates. I buy gift certificates from them quite often and they have great sales but 90%??? That is a cool $1 bill for a $25 dollar gift certificate. When I first started looking at the site it seemed to be complicated and I could not really tell if the certificates were a good deal or not, but considering that I would be in many of these restaurants any way and paying full price to boot makes them a great deal. I found a webpage that helps break down the math associated with the utilization of the gift certificates and what the savings actually add up to when redemed at a business. Add in the discount on the certificates and the savings almost double. click to see the savings calculator.

The typical full price of a Restaurant.Com gift certificate is $10 and with the 90% off promotion it was clear that this was a deal worth taking. It was such a good deal in fact that I spent $40 and marked several names off my holiday list. It is hard to imagine that for that $40 I got  $1000 (40 x 25) worth of food discounts at some of my areas best restaurants. Like I say, I have been a steady customer but this is the first time I have seen them offer the 90% off promotion. Today was the last day but promotions run continuously so you just have to find a good source that keeps updated codes to use at checkouts. I regulary check the website DineOutAsheville.Com which posts the new codes and even gives the expiration date. Don't worry that you are not local to Asheville because once you click on the restaurant.com link it will prompt you to search by area code. One tip I will leave you with when checking out besides using your promotion code is to pay with PayPal if you have an account. Doing so puts the certificates directly in the account while processing of credit cards sometimes causes a delay.

Kelly

P.S. Don't forget to watch the paperflowers how-to found on You Tube. IT is a great project to make with scraps of scrapbook paper and you can make them in various sizes for various projects. Try them out!



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