The Benefits of getting up with the Baby at 4:00 am

Sometimes getting up at 4:00 am in the morning pays off and today was one of those mornings. I have told you my fondness of finding good deals and usually some of the best deals are to be had in the wee hours of the night before they get well publicized on the various deal sites and most people like myself included are generally aspleep. Today was just such a day but as luck would have it in this case I was actually up.


After spending about 30 minutes to get the little girl back to sleep, I decided I should probably stay up just a bit longer to ensure that she really was fast asleep. No sense putting the head back down on the pillow and just about to fall asleep to be awoken by an upset baby. So I decided to go to the office in the next room and check on my favorite deal site http://slickdeals.net . This was the right thing to do because as it just so happened I was able to get in on the ground level of a deal before it went on fire.

Amazon.com was selling Battlefield Bad Company 2 Ultimate Edition for $28.96 normally about a $60 game while at the same time offering a Trade-in credit for the game of $27.00. Just at a base level it looks like ok nothing really special here I could play the game for a week and then return it only losing a dollar but the kicker here was that this game qualified for Amazon's current promotion of Buy One Video Game or Accessory and get the 2nd 50% off. So by buying two games for just about $40 bucks I could then turn around and ship them back to Amazon for a trade in credit of about $54 in amazon gift cards.

Before proceeding with the purchase I needed to lock in my trade-in credit price because it was surely about to plummet once the market got flooded with a bunch of other Slickdealers doing the same thing. The only problem with this was that now I was locked into a seven day window in which the games must be shipped out back to Amazon and I didn't have the actual games in hand yet. The one good thing about most of the online trade-in sites is that they provide you with a prepaid shipping label so the package only has to be postmarked by the deadline not actually received. But if I were to miss the seven day window I would forfeit my guaranteed trade-in price and would be stuck with what ever the current market price was at the time received. Luckily though I am an Amazon Prime Member which means I am entitled to free 2 day shipping . So I should be able to get the games in hand before I actually need to send them back. This netted me about $14 and so I decided to repeat the deal once more but this time with the XBOX version since Amazon limits the number of trade-ins it will accept from a single user of each title. So in the end I had about $28 in credit coming to me for about 15 mins work.

As expected by the morning commute all the trade-in sites were flooded with the game and of course the premiums went down accordingly. So I got in early before the word got out all because my sweet little girl couldn't sleep and needed her Daddy at 4:00 am .

On a side note Amazon doesn't just accept trade - ins on games but also some books too. Another good site for trading in games and electronics that I like to use is http://gazelle.com . There you can get cash delivered to your Paypal account and they will sometimes even offer you a bonus amount if you accept a giftcard to a certain retailers like Amazon.