Clark's Big Book of Bargains (17 page)

Last season I took my daughter to a pro football game and we paid $5 a ticket for tickets on the 40-yard line that had a face value of $38. That’s a good score. The downside is that you have to be willing to go home and not see the game. That happened to me once. There was a big walk-up crowd for a game, and I couldn’t find a deal on tickets. So I went home.

Another option is to take the family to a minor-league game, for which tickets are far less expensive. Because big-league sports have priced their tickets out of the reach of some ordinary fans, minor-league teams, with their low payrolls and overhead, are finding they can operate right near big-league teams.

A lot of the big-league baseball, basketball, and hockey teams sell a small number of seats at reasonable prices, maybe $5 or $10. Check with your local teams to see. It doesn’t have to cost you $282 to take a family of four to a game. Eat beforehand rather than at the ballpark and buy the bargain seats. My daughter Rebecca still talks about the time I took her to a hockey game years ago and sat in the $10 seats. There were all these drunk people around, and they made a big impression. It’s a different crowd up there than down below.

With concerts, there’s no way to get a good deal if you want to see a singer or a group that’s hot. Music fans will wait on long lines to get tickets, and pay outrageous prices and ticket surcharges. When you’re dealing with something that involves a fanatical desire, the choice you make is that price doesn’t matter. Before my wife, Lane, met me, she and a friend wanted to go to a concert at an open-air amphitheater, and they couldn’t afford the tickets. They went there and couldn’t find any bargain tickets, but he had a convertible, so they just drove around and around the amphitheater, listening to the show. You can’t sit still, because the police make you move along. So they just circled.

• Tips on Tickets •

• Go to the box office for your tickets and don’t pay the outrageous fees to Ticketmaster.
  

• Many cities now have discount ticket booths, modeled after the famous TKTS half-price ticket booths in New York City’s theater district.
  

• For sports events, try going to the stadium on game day and buying tickets from season ticket holders who have extras. It’s usually legal as long as you pay face value or less.
  

• Another option is to take the family to a minor-league game, for which tickets are far less expensive.
  

• Internet •

• www.entertainment.com
  

* VACATIONS *

Skiing is an ultra-white-collar sport, but you don’t have to pay ultra-high prices to enjoy it. I have some great tips that will save you money on ski equipment, clothing, and lift tickets. If you prefer the beach to the ski mountains for your vacation, I’ll save you some money there, too.

The biggest mistake people make when they go on a snow skiing vacation is to buy their clothing in their hometown. If you live in a part of the country that doesn’t have ski mountains and you buy your ski stuff at local stores, you’ll pay a fortune. In these “fly-out” markets, you’ll have only ultra-high-end retailers selling ski clothing and equipment.

The far better deal is to buy what you need when you get to your ski destination, whether it’s Colorado, Utah, parts of New England, Washington, or Oregon. At these “fly-in” markets, you can go to places like Wal-Mart and buy ski bibs (a one-piece snowsuit) for $15.99, instead of the $200 to $400 a pair you’ll pay at high-end ski shops in fly-out markets. You can buy ski socks, thermal underwear—whatever you need—very inexpensively, in communities near the ski mountains. But don’t buy at the resort. That’s important. All the bibs I have come from Sam’s Club, Kmart or Wal-Mart. Obviously, the ones I buy don’t have the cutest little designs and the latest fabrics. They just make you comfortable when you ski. If you want to look like one of the “ski bunny” crowd, you’ll have to pay a lot more than I do.

The best way to save on equipment is to buy it used. There are a lot of people who got into skiing and maybe got hurt or got too old to want to ski anymore—or maybe just decided they didn’t like it, but had already spent a lot of money on equipment. That’s created a huge used market in skis, boots, and poles, and you can buy the equipment at deep, deep, deep discounts. We bought Lane’s skis for $49. Brand-new, they would have cost about $600. And they had very little use on them.

I got my skis new for $49 at an end-of-season sale. It was a line of skis in a bland gray color, with a red stripe, that people didn’t like. I don’t care what color they are. Those kinds of sales are very common in ski areas, especially in larger cities near ski towns such as Denver and Colorado Springs, Colorado, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Portland, Oregon. In cities like those, where people drive to nearby resorts, skiers don’t have a lot of money, but want to ski. Used equipment sales also are an annual event in the ski cities and on the West Coast, usually in August or around Labor Day. San Diego has one every year. They’re like giant flea markets.

The rising popularity of snowboarding also has increased the supply and depressed the prices of ski equipment. People who have switched to snowboarding are getting rid of their ski equipment.

To save on lift tickets, ask locals where they get their discount tickets, because only the fly-in market pays full price for lift tickets. Locals buy them at supermarkets, drugstores, and restaurants that offer discounts on lift tickets as an incentive to shop there. Ski cities also have what are known as “locals’ mountains,” which don’t have a lot of fancy resort housing and cater to people from the region who drive in for a day of skiing. They’re good mountains, but aren’t really known to outsiders, who are known in ski lingo as “Flatlanders.” You can get a much lower price-per-day skiing at a locals’ mountain than at a fly-in mountain. In the Denver area, for example, locals might go to Winter Park, while Flatlanders go to Breckenridge.

If you’re learning to ski, locals’ mountains have far cheaper prices on “learn-to-ski” packages, which combine equipment, lift ticket, and lessons. These packages can cost as little as one quarter the cost at a locals’ mountain, where they hope to get you back again and again, than a fly-in mountain, where they know the revenue is coming in just once.

Golf

You can save a lot of money by buying your ski equipment used, and you can do the same if you decide to try golf. Golf frustrates people to death, so there’s a huge supply of used clubs from all those people who tried the game and quit. There’s also very little demand for used clubs, because golf is such a country-club sport that most golfers wouldn’t consider buying used clubs. With plenty of supply and little demand, the price of used clubs is very low. We checked a used sporting goods store called Play it Again Sports, which sells golf clubs for as little as $1 a club up to $600 for a set of very fancy clubs. It had a top-of-the-line set of Mizuno T-Zoid irons, which normally sell for $699 to $799, for $300, and the clubs looked brand new. There were good sets of irons for $150 and beginner sets for less than $100.

If you’re an experienced golfer, look for used golf clubs on eBay (www.ebay.com), a store that specializes in used sporting goods, or in the classified ads of your local newspaper. If you’re thinking of trying golf, ask an experienced golfer to help you.

The Beach

One of the best ways to save on a summer beach vacation is to go in June instead of July or August. Parents tend to schedule activities for their children, such as summer camps, to begin right after school ends. That pushes family vacations back to the end of summer, and this phenomenon has created an end-of-summer spike in demand that has affected everything from weekly beach rentals to travel to Europe. June, which used to be the heart of beach vacation season, has become more like a spring month at many beach locations. Because demand is less in June, there’s a great opportunity to save money on accommodations.

If you’re interested in going to a Florida beach, those in South Florida, particularly on the Gulf Coast, are much cheaper in the summer than are North Florida beaches. South Florida beaches have their peak season in winter, when North Florida is too cold. In the summer, when you’re most likely to want to go to the beach, South Florida is in its off-season.

The ultimate bargain time for the beach is in September, when kids are back in school. So if you don’t have children or your kids are grown or preschool age, that’s a great time to save. There are no customers at that time for beach accommodations and the weather is still warm, even in North Florida.

As you consider rental properties, check their rate cards for the seasonal cutoff dates. In many cases you can save big by planning your vacation for the period just after rates dip. Sometimes you can save even during a busy time, by staying in a hotel or rental property that caters to conventions and conferences but that doesn’t have any big meetings booked for that time. Computerized systems now automatically adjust prices based on demand. So if demand dips, prices immediately fall.

Another factor is the booming second-home market. Lots of aging baby boomers have bought second homes, which they rent out when they’re not vacationing. That’s created a supply of rental homes much greater than the demand to rent them, both at the beach and the mountains. A good way to take advantage of that is by renting through a real-estate agency rather than a resort property manager. Whether you rent a house or a condo, you won’t get the same frills, such as nightly maid service, or consistent quality. One house or condo may be beautifully decorated, while another may be sparsely decorated or even dumpy. So you’ll want to see interior pictures of the unit you want to rent, and they’re often available on the Internet. But you’ll pay much less. A weekly rental through a real-estate agency might cost half what a similar rental would through a resort operator. A monthly rental through a real-estate agency might cost only twice what one week costs. So you get four weeks for the cost of two. In the summer of 2001, I rented an oceanfront three-bedroom condo for a month for $3,100, or $100 a day. The property, when rented through a resort operator, costs $450 a night, with a minimum of three nights. I needed it for only three weeks, but it was much cheaper for me to rent it for a month than it would have been for me to go through the resort operator.