海角大神

I think mail-in rebates are a pretty brilliant idea 鈥� for the company, anyway. According to most reports I鈥檝e read, the majority of them are never filled out, which means the company keeps the money.

Let鈥檚 spell that out in a real world example.

The last time I traded in my cell phone, the store was loaded with phones. Many of them had prices you might expect 鈥� $199 without a new contract, $49 with a new contract, $0 after a $50 mail-in rebate. Unsurprisingly, it was the $0 that was marked in bold with enormous lettering.

If you were to fill fill out the rebate form and return it in time, you鈥檒l get a $50 check back in the mail. That鈥檚 a good thing.

However, the reality is that most rebates are never mailed in. Redemption rate statistics vary, but some redemption statistics indicate the return rate may be as low as 5%. My speculation is that it鈥檚 higher than that, but it鈥檚 still well below 50%.

On top of that, there鈥檚 also slippage, where people receive rebate checks but forget to cash them. This accounts for an additional small percentage of rebates that the company gets to keep. Adding these together, it鈥檚 no wonder that companies love to offer rebates because it provides the illusion of lower prices while not actually costing the company nearly that much.

The easiest method of protecting yourself is if you get a rebate form, fill it out and mail it immediately when you get home. Don鈥檛 put it off for even a moment. This should be the first thing you do when you return home after receiving a rebate form.

This mostly just comes down to task management. I鈥檓 a big believer in the idea that almost all tasks are easily sorted into one of four groups: important and urgent, important and not urgent, not important and urgent, and not important and not urgent. This is a useful idea that comes from Stephen Covey鈥檚 books.

For example, an urgent but not important task might be a phone call. It鈥檚 urgent because your phone is ringing and demanding attention, but it鈥檚 not really important.

On the other hand, returning a large rebate form is important but not urgent. You don鈥檛 have to do it today, so it鈥檚 easy to put it off.

One of the big challenges in time management is that people substitute urgent for important. They鈥檙e more likely to pick up the phone than to fill out the rebate form, even though the rebate form is more important in the long run. That phone call happens to be urgent, and urgent wins the prize.

The thing is, urgency is really only useful in comparing things of the same importance. If you have a rebate form due in sixty days and one due in thirty days, the one due in thirty days is more urgent and should be filled out first. If you compare most tasks to a random phone call, though, most tasks should win.

Rebate forms are a perfect example of this. Because they鈥檙e not urgent, people often put them aside to deal with urgent things, even if the urgent things are far less important.

Don鈥檛 make that mistake. It will cost you money with the rebate forms, and it will cost you in other aspects of life as well.

This post is part of a yearlong series called 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),鈥� in which I鈥檓 revisiting the entries from my book 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap,鈥� which is available at Amazon and at bookstores everywhere. Images courtesy of Brittany Lynne Photography, the proprietor of which is my 鈥減hotography intern鈥� for this project