We are constantly bombarded with Infomercials, especially in the early morning and wee hours of the night, when we’re at our weakest moments.

While the some of the infomercial products may work, most are not worth the money.  You’ll buy them, using them a few times, realize they aren’t magic, then (especially with exercise equipment)  just put them in the basement.

Infomercials should not be part of the frugal lifestyle.  As a mid-level frugal person (freegans being at the apex level of frugality), I’ll watch the infomercial and try to figure out a way to simulate what they are doing for free.  Especially with the exercise packages.

Speaking of “Exercising” Infomercials, it’s not the video that will make you lose wait, it’s “the you“ (and me too), actually doing the exercise routine in the package.  In my opinion, most exercise videos are definitely not worth the money.

If you want to look good, you really need to alter your diet and stick to an exercise routine that:

• You create yourself.
• Is on TV and you can follow (Gilad, All Star Workouts, Bodies in motion, whatever…), be sure to combine this with a little bit of weight training too.
• You can borrow from the library via an exercise video, most libraries will carry such videos (DVDs and tapes).  You’ll be surprised if you look for it.
• Involves Walk/Bike/Jog, and work out with weights.  Remember the diet part too. 😉
• anything that involves both cardiovascular and anaerobic exercises, even part-time work (a two for one deal here!!!)

Of course, you need to do the exercise routine for more than a month…

As for the “Making Money” Infomercials, Google the review of the product.  Nine times out of ten, the review will be negative.  and the 1 time out of 10 that it isn’t negative, it’s usually a site that is trying to sell us the product.

So how do you know what is worth the expense and what isn’t?

• First, not much is worth it, think of a way you can achieve the same desired results for free!
• If the presenter says “It’s great” or gives thumbs up too many time, really start to question the product.
• Google the infomercial product name follow by the word “review”, this is tricky though because some reviews are people trying to mislead you into buying the product from them.
• Read blogger posts from highly ethical bloggers.  ex.) MoneyReasons.com, freemoneyfinance.com, frugaldad.com, thesimpledollar.com, etc…  After reading a few days worth from a blogger and skimming it’s archive of previous articles, you’ll have a fairly good idea if the blog is ethical or not and thus to be trusted…  Note, the reasons I mention this here is because I’ve been seeing a few blogs that are really “wolves in sheep’s clothing”.  Meaning that the blogger is really a new startup company pretending that it’s a blogger!  !!Caveat emptor!!

If you’d like my opinion of an infomercial, email me at MoneyReasons(dot)com[at]gmail(dot)com.

To use the address in the previous sentence,  replace (dot) with . and replace [at] with @ (this is an anti-spamming technique).

If you think my assessment is flawed, please submit a comment or email me.   If you have stories you like to share, please do.