If you’ve flown in the past year or two, you know that the airlines have made flying an a la carte ordeal, charging fees for almost everything.    Checking bags, pillows, blankets, snacks are all things that now cost money on different airlines.  One airline is even making passengers chip in to pay for the crew.   Okay, I made that up, but it is true that one airline is going to start charging a fee to buy a ticket.    Hmmm… charging me for the privilege of buying something from you.  Yeah, I think I’ll pass on that.

In any event, a new feature in the booking engine at Trip Advisor is attempting to add some clarity to all these fees.   If you use their fees estimator, which is a button that shows up on the results page after you enter the basics about your flight (route, dates).   If you click the button, a pop up asks you what services you will need and will then adjust the ticket price on each airline to give you a better understanding of where the best bottom line value is.

For those looking to find the lowest overall price for their next trip (and who isn’t), this tool might be worth a look.

By the way, if you ever need to track a flight, try the MyRatePlan Flight Tracker.

Let’s start with the bottom line here:    Don’t take out a loan or advance on the tax refund that you are expecting.   Period.  End of story.   If you want your money quickly, just file electronically and tell the IRS to direct deposit your refund to your bank account.  If you made $56,000 or less in 2008, you may qualify to file your federal taxes for free.  If you do direct deposit, and there aren’t any issues, you’ll have your refund in two weeks or less — it may take another week or so if the IRS mails your check.   After you file, you can check the status of your refund online.

So, if you take out a refund anticipation loan, you are borrowing against money you’ll see within about one to three weeks.   For that privilege, you’ll pay a very high cost.  We won’t go into the math here, because fees and rates vary wildly across preparers, but the effective APR (all the costs of the loan annualized for a full year) is often north of 100%. It may not seem like the cost is that high, because you only are actually borrowing for a couple weeks, but maybe this example will help:

Let’s say you get a $1,000 loan for two weeks and it costs you $50 in fees and interest.    If you were to put that money in a bank account earning 2% interest (a pretty good rate right now), you would earn about 77 cents.   So, basically, someone is charging you $50 for money that is costing them less than $1.00.

About 8.7 million people took out these loans in 2007.  Don’t be one of them in 2009.   For more information, read this release from the Consumer Federation of America & National Consumer Law Center.

Recommendations:

1. If you are using cable modem, consider DSL or even dial-up
2. Find free Wi-Fi

Annual Savings Potential: $240 (cable to DSL), more for dial-up or Wi-Fi

Discussion   Unlike most cable service, most phone companies price DSL based on speed.   If you are using the Internet primarily for things like email or reading web pages (as opposed to downloading large files), a lower-speed DSL (still about 10x or more dial-up) can be had for $20 or month in some areas, about 1/2 the price of cable modem service.   If your needs are even less, most dial-up is now less than $10/month.   After almost completely disappearing, we’re seeing more interest in dial-up in recent months.   Want to spend even less — like $0?   Many coffee shops and the like offer free Wi-Fi (although you might need to make a purchase), as do many public libraries.  If you completely give up your Internet service, you’ll probably want to have a free web-based email (e.g., gmail or hotmail) if you don’t already have one.