Do you find yourself losing more money than you are winning items? It’s time to get smart. Money smart. If you aren’t keeping track of your expenses it’s about time you start. A great app to manage your financial transactions and always know what is in your bank account is the Mint smartphone app from Mint.com for Windows 8, iPad, iPhone and Android devices.
Here are some great tips to help you keep track of your spending on DealDash.com and any other penny auction site.
1. Set limits
Don’t spend more money on bids than you can afford to lose, because if you don’t win the only way to not lose the money you spent on bids is to use buy it now on the item you lost. If you say you are only going to spend $50 to try and win that new dresser set or Nespresso espresso machine, stay true to your word. Maybe even put a post-it note on your computer screen, buy a bid pack with the determined amount of bids you can afford to lose if you lose and don’t buy more bids after that until you’ve either won or can feel ok about losing what you lost if you don’t win.
2. Set Up a Dedicated Bidding Account
You don’t have to set up an entirely new bank account for your bidding activities, but what you could do is get a pre-paid Visa credit card and fill it with the amount each month that you can use just for your penny auction bidding. Believe me, if you don’t do this and use your regular credit or debit card your spending could get out of control and you will be more shocked when you see your statements than you should be.
3. Track your wins
There’s a new app, like Mint, but ctually keep track of your “worth” in goods such as cars or merchandise, this could be something to try to keep a database of everything you have won and what the items are worth. The app is called Trov (Trov.com) and it will let you store the things you own, get current market values of your things, organize them and when and if it comes time to sell them, Trov even has a sharing option.
. Or you could just view your won auctions from the DealDash user dashboard to see what all you have won and what you paid for each item.
5. Track time, and money. Compare wins with bid pack purchases
This is a great way to pinpoint and keep track of what you really paid for your won items. Set up a Quicken Spreadsheet with specific columns one for the item – one for the value, one for the amount of time you spent to win (or lose) remember time= money. Lastly, create a column for how much you spent in bids to equal how much money you really saved on each item.
6. Take a look at the data you collected.
Are you ahead or are you at a negative as far as saving money goes? If you’re the latter you may just want to take a step back, re-evaluate and take our simple tips to heart and start limiting and tracking your activity on DealDash.com
Be an informed penny auction bidder.
If you have any questions about DealDash, wondering what type of items they have be sure to check out our previous posts here filled with tips, strategies and item guides.
Do you have tips for mana ging and keeping track of your spending on DealDash.com? Let us know about it here!