Free Haircut: Buy Nine Get One Free

I usually get my hair cut at Great Clips. They used to have a sale once or twice a year where you could prepay for haircuts at $7.99 each and then also use this buy nine get one free card. I have used prepaid cards for a number of years, buying enough for 10 haircuts or so when they have the prepaid sale. However, they have new owners now and are changing it to $9.99 each. I will probably still do the prepaid cards while keeping my eye out for any better deals. So, I used 9 prepaid cards at $7.99 each and then get a free one. That works out to $7.19 a haircut plus tips. Pretty good. I am going to use this freebie card tomorrow.

Stretching a Haircut

You can easily stretch a haircut without too much courage. There are two pairs of scissors in the upper photo. One is regular hair-cutting scissors and the one next to it is thinning scissors. If you look close, you can see that the thinning scissors have a straight edge on one side and a toothy looking edge on the other. These little scissors are rather amazing, because you can take some hair and think you are going to cut it all off but in reality all these scissors do is thin the hair out. They are pretty neat. I bought these at Wal-Mart. I think they were around $7.00.

So, if you comb the hair with a little mist of water around the frame of your face, hold the hair down so you can see the straight line. Cut with the first pair around the frame of your face about 1/2 an inch or so. Then, take the thinning scissors (if your hair happens to be thick) and thin it out a bit. This will keep the main shape of the haircut for the most part but it will feel lighter and look better until you get into see the hairdresser or barber and give you a couple of weeks reprieve. If you get a haircut once every 6 weeks, that's 8.6 haircuts a year. If your haircut is around, say, $15.00 (which I do not pay BTW, tips on that later, but I think $15.00 is about average) you will pay about $130.00 a year on haircuts (for one person). If you stretched every haircut an extra 2 weeks that would change to 6.5 haircuts a year for $97.50 for a savings of $32.50 a year. If you did this 6.5 times a year, you would be getting paid $5.00 per time you stretched a haircut. It takes about 15 minutes to stretch a haircut (at the most 1/2 hour). That equates to $20.00 an hour for your time, or at the least, $10.00 an hour, plus the gas and time you saved by not getting your haircut. Multiply $32.50 by everyone in your family that gets a haircut and that's how much you can save per year.

Revision: Apparently I was too cheap. Here are some US averages for haircuts:  http://www.usnews.com/.../28/what-america-pays-for-a-haircut