Where to find deals!? How do your organize them!?

One of the toughest challenges I foresee living alone is $. For a while now, I've been looking for ways to save and there are probably more opportunities to scope out those savings now than ever before. I'm strictly talking about deals that you could find online, and not those cut out coupons, although they can come a long way but the process of finding and cutting them out and extremely time consuming. Groupon, Teambuy, and Living Social are probably some of the ones you've heard of, but the jungle of deals is much bigger.

I came across new deal sites every day/week and signed up for them all (subscribe by email). I received daily deals by email and very quickly realized that it was flooding my inbox (yup, I know how you feel). The most annoying part is getting pinged with a new email (from these sites) on your phone throughout the day. It is to me because I sync up my personal + work email on my phone in case something important needs my attention, and often email is the best communication medium, or Twitter (follow me here: @jackson_lo). Another pet-peeve, is knowing that these deals that come in are probably similar or the same... spas, yoga, etc. Although they are good, repetitive deals get a bit too much for me. Tell me if it does to you too...

One day... a friend of mine referred me to Cake Deals and it appears to solve this problem of 'deals spam'. In fact, I had an idea a few months back to do exactly what Cake Deals does today, but never implemented or thought through the plan, oops! Anyways, Cake Deals is a deal site that aggregates deals from other deal sites Here is a list of some of the ones that it picked up for Ottawa:

Blissmo
DealCanada
Dealfind
Dealicious
DealTicker
EveryBodyBuys
Groupon
Kahoot
KijijiDeals
Koopon
LivingSocial
MadDeal
MeTwoPlease
neerg
RedFlagDeals
Royal Coupon
StealTheDeal
SwarmJam
TeamBuy
TownHog
Tuango
Wagjag
Zozi

Here's a link to the actual Cake Deals site for Ottawa: http://www.cakedeals.com/deals/show/Ottawa

Cake Deals sends you one email per day with a summary of all the deals from approx. 100 other deal sites.

Some cool things about Cake Deals:

• City specific so you can subscribe to just your city, and/or other cities too.
• They have an iPhone app!
• Sorting; most recent, most savings, most bought, expiring soon.
• Ability to subscribe via RSS instead of email (would not recommend, would go with email but your choice!).

So Cake Deals look like the 'shit'. Try it out and let me know if there are any other deal site aggregators out there and I'll be able to share it! :)

Some other sites that I subscribe that 'may' be of interest to you:

• GAP Canada - they have some awesome deals from time to time, keep an eye out for them.
• PRIVE - another clothing site; got some good deals with their Levi's jeans.

Tips for managing deals in your inbox:

One useful tip I can share with you for managing your deals is using the Filter option in Gmail (this only applies if you sign up for all your deals with the same email account, specifically a Gmail account). Filters will help you categorize emails as they come into your inbox, so you can easily focus in on the emails that are important rather than seeing ever email as the 'same'. After you set it up, you don't need to do anything, except delete the ones that may be clogging up your inbox.

Here is how you would set it up...

Click 'create a filter' at the top and set up your filters like this:

then...

You're done! When an email comes in from anyone at @cakedeals.com, it will automatically be labelled with "Deals". Now you can manage your filters and edit them anytime you like. Label as many emails as you want with 'Deals' but keep it relevant.

Emails will still show up in your inbox, unless you specify to skip it. When you click on the label on the left, you will see all your active emails. Here's what my Deals section looks like (yeah... I haven't cleaned it out for a good week and now it's flooding...):

That's how I've been able to keep my inbox clean, and I can assure you that it will help checking your emails easier! That's all I have for today. If you have any local deal sites that you think is worth signing up for, please let me know at the bottom of this post :)

Happy deals hunting!