Specs And Drugs And Rock 'N' Roll

By Cliff D'Arcy
May 9, 2006

(I apologise for my pun on one of Ian Dury and the Blockheads' best-known songs!)

One thing that I just can't get my head around is shopping for pleasure, also known as "retail therapy".

In fact, I dislike shopping so much that I almost need therapy or counselling after a few hours of trudging around a shopping centre or high street! Still, if I'm forced to shop in person, I love to haggle for lower prices; you can learn how I negotiate in The Best Ways To Pay Less and How To Haggle And Save A Fortune.

On the other hand, I do enjoy shopping online, not least because it allows me to enjoy one of my favourite pleasures: getting deep discounts off everything that I buy. Here are a few of the websites which I use to pay less for my purchases:

Glasses/spectacles

My previous pair of specs cost me the thick end of £300, thanks to their "designer" label (Calvin Klein? I thought he made underwear?) However, when my toddler finally succeeded in her quest to mangle them beyond repair last December, I went shopping online for replacements.

Armed with an up-to-date prescription (including my pupillary distance, which records the distance between pupils), I visited several online opticians before finally choosing a decent pair of bins from Budgetspex. The frame and lenses cost £30, protective lens coatings cost £15, and postage and packing added £1.50, for a total of £46.50. What's more, my glasses (and a free case) arrived in the next day's post, which seriously impressed me!

To be honest, you'd be hard pushed to tell my "budget" glasses from similar pairs costing five times as much. The reason for this is simple: opticians' mark-ups on frames and lenses come in at around five to ten times, so it's easy to go direct and save 70% or more. Other cheap online spectacles suppliers include Glasses Direct, Goggles4u, Selectspecs, Specsonthenet and Spex4less.

Drugs

By drugs, I mean, of course, over-the-counter and prescription medication, not recreational or narcotic drugs! There are two simple ways to save money on medicines: buy generic (unbranded) alternatives and shop around online. (If you need regular prescriptions, a pre-payment certificate can save you money if you pay for more than five items in four months or fourteen items a year).

It costs hundreds of millions (even billions) of pounds to develop a new drug. Hence, drug manufacturers are given an exclusive patent to market a new drug for a limited number of years. However, once this patent has expired, free-market competition produces low-cost generic alternatives which have identical active ingredients. Therefore, the next time that you're in the chemist, ask if they have the generic version of your medicine, as it can be a fraction of the price.

For example, my local chemist charges £5.99 for a bottle containing a hundred sprays of Beconase, a steroid-based nasal spray to lessen allergy symptoms, which comes to 6p per spray. Our Chemist charges £7.49 for a 180-spray bottle of Beconase, which brings down the price to 4.2p per spray. However, as a hayfever sufferer, I know that the active ingredient is beclometasone dipropionate 50 micrograms, which I can buy in generic form for £5.29 for 200 sprays from Express Chemist. This works out at 2.6p per spray, or a 56% discount on the branded 100-spray alternative. See what I mean about big savings? After all, I don't need a designer label on my medicine!

Rock 'n' Roll

If you enjoy music or movies, there's no need to pay the full recommended retail price (RRP) for CDs and DVDs, because there are loads of price-comparison websites to help you out.

For instance, I've been listening to José González's album Veneer (which includes Heartbeats, the haunting soundtrack to the Sony Bravia adverts on TV and in the cinema). Rather than pay the full RRP of £14.79, I found it for £6.99 including free delivery at 4CheapCDs, a saving of £7.80, or 53% off. What a bargain!

Here are a few websites which I use to find cheap CDs and DVDs, together with some popular online retailers:

General price-comparison websites: Froogle | Kelkoo | Pricerunner | Shopping (formerly DealTime).

For DVDs: Best DVD Price | DVDPriceCheck | Find-DVD.

Multi-region DVD players will play any DVDs, but if you have a player with regional coding, be sure to buy Region 2 (European) discs!

Online retailers: Amazon | BlahDVD| CD Wow! | Play.

Furthermore, if you'd like to know how to buy many other goods cheaply online (including books, electrical goods, holidays, supermarket shopping and so on), then read These Websites Make You Wealthier and Save A Fortune When You Spend (point four of which explains how to earn extra cashback or points from cashback websites).

By the way, when you've found a huge bargain, please don't ruin it by paying with the wrong plastic card or loan! For example, by shopping with a Best Buy cashback card, you can earn an annual rebate of up to 2% of your spending, which could be worth £150+ a year. Alternatively, you could enjoy up to ten months' interest-free credit with the best cards for shoppers.

Also, if you need a personal loan for, say, a new car, home improvements or holiday, be sure to read my five tips on finding a top-notch loan, and check out the delightful deals in our Personal Loans centre. Finally, if you prefer to save up before splashing out, check out Your Ultimate Guide To Saving and view the great rates in our Savings centre.

Here's to happier (and cheaper) shopping!

More: Find better credit cards, personal loans and savings accounts via the Fool.