So, I don’t know exactly what the official stance would be on this one, but one of the things I think FWF was missing was the chance to leverage our little network here to get special deals, rates and opportunities from our professional lives. Like what if one of us is a rebating real estate agent? Or a personal banker with the opportunity tot pass along special sign up rates or offers.
There would have to be ground rules to discourage shills of course, but would anyone else be interested in establishing such a database of opportunities?
Mods, feel free to delete or lock if I’m out of policy - no offense intended.
This is a great idea.
For example, people working for Fortune 500 companies have access to discounted amusement park tickets. One of my friends that works for Oakley was able to get me a couple of cool Oakley glasses for 1/3rd the market price. Another friend that works for a tire company was able to get me tires for 50% cost…way cheaper than Costco / Sams / Discount tires. Why don’t we make a thread on discounted tickets/stuff that your company provides and you can share with the rest of us ?
I think the problem is no one is going to want to post “Hey, I work for Oakley, PM me for 1/3 off sunglasses” because then they’d be inundated with requests, have to deal with maintaining a spreadsheet with everyone’s username, address, and paypal info, track packages, etc. and then have their company come to them and ask why they bought 400 pairs of sunglasses at the discounted employee plan that they aren’t allowed to resell.
What would possibly work well is if we had a way to anonomyze people’s information. So that if I did work for Oakley, and got 70% off sunglasses, I could post it anonymously as ABC123 and list that this is what I have and I can do it 5 times before my company freaks out.
The cost savings might be $300 per person, and I did it 5 times, I saved other people $1500 dollars. I now have $1500 worth of “credit” to the site, so that I can use it to get $200 off auto parts, $500 off Disney tickets, $500 worth of Delta Skymiles, etc. This way everything is fair and not just a rush to get as much free/discounted stuff as you can take without giving back.
The site itself gets a 3% transaction cut somehow - perhaps the person buying the item has to pay 3% of the cost savings to the site to maintain operating costs.
This will all work great until the IRS finds out about it and gets involved.
Wasn’t there the travel agent (name? PatelFromIndia) who used to be good with free advice, and also getting FW members as clients for his travel agency?