One of the challenges with finding the best sales locally is the amount of work it takes. Sunday circulars – the mini-catalogs you find from local retailers in your Sunday newspaper – are a great way to find deals. However, there’s one big weakness with them – it’s hard to find specific items. You can spend hours pouring over the circulars looking for a specific item of interest.

ShopLocal.com solves that problem by putting the Sunday circulars online. You can browse through the actual circulars page by page or search by item. Once you search for an item you can refine your search by brand, price, or even store.

I use ShopLocal very frequently for items that I don’t want to pay shipping on or that I want right away. I will also buy locally vs online when I want the option of returning the item to the store if I have problems or aren’t satisfied. I find that I can often find prices at local retailers as low as I can online.

Check out this brief screencast showing you how ShopLocal works.

Technorati Tags: shopping, local, retailers, sales, deals

This next video in a series of videos about RSS shows you how to organize your feeds in Google Reader so it’s easy to keep track of feeds as they accumulate.

This is the next video in a series about how to use RSS in general and specifically to find incredible deals shopping online.

So far all my videos have been in Firefox as will the rest of my videos. I wanted to take a brief moment to show how RSS works in Internet Explorer (IE). I also show you another method of adding a feed to Google Reader.

Stay tuned because tomorrow the fun stuff begins where I show you how to use this technology for finding incredible deals and even having the exact items your looking for come to you when they’re on sale requiring no effort on your part.

This is the second in a series of video tutorials that teach you how to use RSS in general for web browsing and specifically for finding incredible deals online.

In this video, I walk you through the process of subscribing to an RSS feed. Go go through a couple different ways of doing this. All the examples are using the Firefox browser. In the next video I’ll give an example using Internet Explorer (IE).

Enjoy.

Despite the fact that RSS technology has been around for many years, most of my acquaintances still don’t know how to use it. If you spend a lot of time online, using RSS technology will simplify your life and save your tons of time.

Below if the first video in a series of videos I’ll be posting in the next day or two that describes in detail how RSS works and how to benefit from it. This first video goes through an example of how RSS works and the benefit you’ll receive by taking advantage of the technology.

What does this have to do with personal finances you ask? Well all these video tutorials will ultimately lead up to a video showing how to find the greatest deals imaginable online via RSS. In fact, you will literally be able to tell RSS exactly what items you’re looking for and you’ll receive an immediate update when that item goes on sale. You can also receive instant notifications when someone posts an item for sale on sites like craigslist. I’ve purchased many items and saved hundreds of dollars using this technique so you won’t want to miss it.

If you already use RSS, you may want to skip the initial videos. But who knows, maybe you’ll pick up some additional tips you didn’t know about.

This is the first attempt at at video on GFD so please leave your feedback in the comments below.

Technorati Tags: RSS, personal finances, how to, tutorial