Best Deal Strategies: Magazines

I have a thing for magazines. Recently, I went to my rather small mailbox and found a note from the postman saying that my box was full and that I would need to drive all the way to the post office to pick up my massive stash of magazines and freebies. I have a few guilty pleasure mags, such as People and US Weekly, but I also get National Geographic and other brain candy type mags. One day I came across a wonderful strategy for getting magazine subscriptions for a few bucks each.

Here you go...

There are 2 avenues I would take to hunt for cheap magazines.

Strategy 1: Ebay.com of course. The trick here is to search for the magazine you are looking for (or just "magazine subscriptions") and sort by price from lowest to highest. I have saved hundreds of dollars on subscriptions this way. In fact, I went a little overboard, but at prices like these, you may get crazy too. The point is that you should always use this method first. I don't know how they get them so cheap, and I don't really care. They really do come as promised. Please read these warnings carefully, as Ebay is full of scam artists which you can avoid with this simple instruction. There are 2 main scams going on in the ebay magazine world:

1. A seller will sell you a magazine subscription, along with hundreds of other folks within a period of a few days, and then un-register their account. I learned this the hard way. I bought a mag for my sis for Christmas. The price was way too low to be a real deal, (USWeekly for 24.99) but I was just a novice mag hunter at the time, so I tossed it up to lessons learned. It wasn't the price that should have tipped me off, but the feedback. It seems simple enough, right? Check the feedback for these sellers. I wouldn't do business with anyone who has a feedback rating of under 100 or less than 99% positive feedback. This only applies to magazines. There are plenty of legit sellers out there. You can pay the extra buck to get an honest seller.



2. The second scam is in the fine print on the listing. Make sure they aren't selling you an auto-renewal. This is where they will give you a low price up front, but it auto-renews for full price after the term of the sale. This is easy to avoid. Just read the ad carefully.
   

These things seem scary, but a.) check the feedback, and b.) read the ad, and you should be fine. Don't worry about bidding on them. Elect to search "buy it now" only. There are too many listed out there, so sellers are putting their best offer on the table right away. Happy hunting...

Strategy 2: Online Magazine Outlets

There are dozens of great magazine outlets on the web, which all provide legit magazines at wonderful prices. Here is my favorite one:

BestDealMagazines.com - This one is really cool because they offer a "Deal of the Day" which today happens to be Sporting News for $3.89. I don't really give a flying leap about sports, but I will check back in with them daily to see what they are offering. Most of the time they feature chick magazines.

Here's another tip to save you some cash at BestDealMagazines = Coupon Codes "baby, yeah!" (that was my Austin Powers voice by the way)

Here are the most current codes:

$5 off $30 - MNDCJ316

$7.50 off $40 - MQQCJ316

15% off any purches - PXCJ316

$10 off $50 - MQPCJ316

bestdealmagazines.com

If you find that any of these have expired, please comment. I'll go in and see if I can dig up the latest and greatest. You can also scroll to the top of this page to do a quick search.