Do real nappies (reusable / cloth diapers) really save money?
I only used disposable diapers for my baby's first month.  However, I now use half disposable diapers (for part-time daycare) and half cloth.  My son is now 1 year and during a normal weekday, I go through 4 disposable diapers and 3-4 cloth diapers (this count includes a double thick cloth diaper for night).  On the weekend, I use about 7-8 cloth diapers a day.   For disposable, I buy Costco's Kirkland brand diapers which gives me about 200 diapers for $50.  I tend to go through one pack every other month.  For cloth, I bought FuzziBunz One-Size Diapers.  These are pretty expensive diapers (about $19/each) but I wanted ones that would last over multiple children (I chose these over the BumGenius because I thought snaps would last longer than velcro).  I bought 24 new cloth diapers which means I wash diapers every 2-3 days.  A couple of weeks ago I totaled up my receipts for cloth and disposable diapers and determined that I will recoup my diaper costs at around 16 months of part-time use. Notes: I just remembered a blog post at CashMoneyLife - Cloth Diapers vs. Disposable Diapers.  I had come across it a little while after posting my answer to a question at moms4mom.com - What can I expect to spend monthly on disposable diapers? And what do/did you spend? and I had linked to it from there, too, since it contained some information about disposable diapers. However, since you're asking about real nappies, i.e. cloth diapers, it is also relevant to your question, since it was discussing both kinds of diapers.  Here are some choice excerpts from the CashMoneyLife post: ...   The beauty of cloth diapers is   that while the upfront cost is much   higher, the ongoing cost is much   lower. Once you purchase them you are   only paying for laundry detergent and   the energy to wash/dry them. (Note:   I've also known people who have passed   along cloth diapers to other family   members or bought/sold them on   Craigslist, both of which could be a   cheaper option if you are willing to   do either).   ...   Which is better? I think they are both   great and I encourage you to try cloth   if you have young children. The cost   and environmental benefits will make   it worth your while. Then use   disposable diapers for what they were   intended for: a convenience. There are also some excellent comments following the post by readers who have also used cloth. "I don't think they do. And here's why. If you don't want your child to get skin irritation, you need to watch closely and change the ""nappy"" right when it got wet. For newborns it means like every 2 hours. It creates a big pile of laundry, but the main thing — additional burden on mother. So, even if you save a little on diapers, you will spend that on water+electricity bill + comforting the mother more often than you would otherwise."
The cold caller is just a different way to contact you compared to the junk mail that they send. The business  gets information from the credit rating companies for households that meet a specific set of criteria. It could be town, age, home ownership, low credit utilization...Or the exact opposite depending on what they are selling. Some business do sell your data. Grocery store know who buys certain products: parents buying diapers may want to start saving for college; ones buying acne medicine may want to talk about lower rates for car insurance.  When they call via phone they have a different success rate compared to junk mail, but for that business that may be acceptable for their needs. Your parents are troopers (pooper troopers?). Nothing in our area was affordable for those services so we tried the clean-your-own kind - they were really nice and probably would help potty train but seriously a few months of scraping poop into the trash and washing a bucket of smelly diapers got old quiiiiiick! I will say this - the kind you clean yourself is the absolute cheapest option. It was like $300 for a half week supply of cloth diapers so you're doing diaper laundry twice a week and the only other added cost is the special detergent which was pretty cheap and lasted a long time... Then we sold them used on eBay for $200 and bought the next size up when it was time which was like 2 months later (they snap to multiple sizes)... Rinse and repeat - works out pretty well if you're willing to commit to washing poop cloth twice a week. And 3 months of honest diapers is around $300 I think. "The real question is what can you NOT do!  If you track all your monetary actions, you know everything about your monetary situation.  That means you have the tools to ask and answer ""what if"" questions, such as: ""If I get a 10% raise, could I take longer vacations?""  You could calculate how much you spend per day on vacation and then consider the amount of your raise and how much of it you'd need to allocate to vacations to, say, be able to take a two-week vacation instead of a one-week vacation. ""How much more would I have to earn to move to this nicer apartment?""  This may seem like a simple question, but a surprising number of people can't answer it in a reliable way, because they don't have a clear understanding of how much money they make and how much of it they can afford to spend on housing.  If you find you have lots of spare income, maybe you can move to the nicer place right away; if not, at least you can get a sense of how much more money you'd need to make it happen. ""If I started taking the bus to work, how much would I save?""  You can look at how much you spend on gas and compare that to the price of a bus pass.  By separating out categories like gas, repairs, and car insurance, you can also calculate different scenarios, like if you still kept your car but only used it for occasional trips, versus if you sold the car and used only public transportation. ""If I want to take a trip to Tahiti, what can I cut back on to save the money?""  Using your table you can pencil out scenarios like ""Suppose I stop eating out for lunch at work and just bring my lunch, how long would I have to do that to save enough to pay for a plane ticket?"" These are just a few random examples.  The general idea is that with a record of hard numbers, you can start to consider potential tradeoffs in an objective way --- that is, you can ask ""how much in category X would I have to give up to gain this thing I want in category Y?"" The real trick in making use of your data is not so much ""what"" you can do, but ""how"" exactly to do it.  You may have to become more of a spreadsheet wizard to really delve into these questions.  Also, if you have programming expertise, you can even use something like Python to do calculations that might be laborious in a spreadsheet." We were members at costco, but decided not to renew.  Meat was a definite cost savings, and laundry detergent as well.  Diapers used to be a huge savings, but loblaws seems to be pricing things better now.  We did by a bunch of Kirkland brand diapers and wipes before the membership ended. The problem we had was that you just get too much stuff - you save a bunch on that laundry detergent that you buy once every two years, or the chicken you have in your freezer forever. In Canada, the basic membership is $55 and we could not be certain we made that back, nor that we weren't over consuming as we walked the aisles.  I have heard that the more expensive membership ($100) which gives you 2% back on purchases is a good way to gauge your usage and determine if it is worth it. It also costs nothing to give it a try - their policy is a full refund at any time, so in theory you could go in on your 364th day and get a refund. Very Interesting Math. Plain and Simple, it saves you $10.00. When 18% goes above $10 you loose the money, you save if it is (18% of the baae bill) is less than $10. This raises few questions: You are forced to give out 18% tips. You may wish to keep it at 10-15%. You have no choice. All thing considered, better to avoid such coupons. They force you to spend money, they force you to spend in a particular way and they force you to give a tip, you may not be inclined to. Debit card, no. Prepaid card, probably; some charities do use that approach to make monthly support payments, including to the homeless. You might want to find and talk to one of those groups to find out how they did it. There is nothing right or wrong about this. On such a short goals, you are essentially saying you need $2700 in next 4 months to buy 3 items. Essentially you can have sub-goals to save $675 each month. As you already have some funds; you can go by priority buy the bed and then once you have more saved, buy the laptop and then buy the bed. If you buy the bed now, it means that you will have to wait more for the laptop. If the goals are further apart; say something in few months and something in few years, you would have to create to separate buckets to save and contribute proportionately to both the buckets. Yep.  I mostly use Amazon for product research and comparison.  Amazon's prices were always in the ballpark, but now they are often the highest on the Internet.  An extra search or two will get you lower prices somewhere else.  Do not make Amazon your first stop for anything.