Several readers wrote to me immediately afterwards, bragging about various items that they got at a steep discount and urging me to reconsider my perspective on it, so I decided to give the site a fair shake.

I signed up for an account there. When signing up, you have to purchase a starter package of 100 bids for $60. All of their bid packages cost you $0.60 per bid – that’s the standard price.

After purchasing that package, I participated in four auctions and watched several more.

Auction #1: I bid on a $25 Staples gift card plus 10 bids. In this auction, I bid 13 times but didn’t win, costing me $7.80. I spent 20 minutes bidding on it, but I had to use the restroom and lost the auction. I debated for a while on whether to buy the package anyway – the “buy it now” feature basically allows you to buy such items at their face value minus your bids plus shipping – but the “buy it now” cost was $23.20 plus $1.99 shipping, meaning I would have just received a gift card I didn’t really want that badly for a net loss plus a few free bids.

Auction #2: I bid on a $10 Target gift card plus 5 bids. I bid 16 times on this auction ($9.60 in bids) and won it. Shipping on the item cost $1.99 so I essentially paid $13.39 ($3.79 directly and $9.60 in bids) for a $10 Target gift card and got 5 bids back, a net loss of $0.39. Not really much of a win. The biggest problem is that I lost track of how much I had actually bid to this point. This bidding took about fifteen minutes.

Auction #3: I began to think of a different strategy, so I bid on a $25 Wal-Mart gift card plus 10 bids. I bid 47 times ($28.20 in bids) and lost, so I used the “buy it now” option to recoup some of my losses, getting the item for $4.79 – $1.99 shipping plus the $2.80 face value of the auction once it became a loss for me to continue to bid.

This ate through most of my bids – I had used 76 bids of the original allotment.

The total cost of the bids used to this point – 13 bids + 16 bids + 47 bids – at $0.60 per bid, was $45.60 spent on bids.

The shipping and “buy it now” costs totaled $6.78.

Thus, my total cost for a $10 Target gift card and a $25 Wal-Mart gift card was $52.38 at this point – that’s not a win.

Of course, I did have fifteen “free” bids, which I used in an auction for a $25 Target gift card. I used all 15 bids, then bought the card for $15 plus $1.99 shipping

So, my total cost for the bids and the shipping was $69.37. For that $69.37, I got a $25 Target gift card, a $10 Target gift card, and a $25 WalMart gift card. Not only that, I spent an hour actually bidding and another half an hour reading auction listings.

Siply put, it was not worth it at all.

There are several points worth discussing about this experience, however.

The ads you see for the site, where they talk about people buying MacBook Pros for $180 or Kindles for $25, don’t include the amount people spent on their bids. It’s impossible to know how many bids people threw at these items, but I do know that people in various news reports have mentioned spending three or four hours bidding, which means they did have to spend a significant number of bids along the way. If you add in that additional cost, the “discount” isn’t nearly as steep.

The sunk cost fallacy is at play all over the place here. Quibids (and other sites like it) are just an e-commerce shop at their core with an interesting “auction/game” mechanism on top of them. The vast majority of bidders in an auction will not win that auction.

The reason people keep bidding, though, is the idea that they need to recoup some value from what they’ve already sunk into that auction. “I’ve already invested 20 bids and thirty minutes into this auction, so I need to get something out of it,” they think, so they keep bidding. I saw a lot of people jump into an auction, bid until they apparently reached the point where it was more cost-effective to just “buy it now,” and then drop out. In fact, the site seems to have a lockout mechanism at some point where it informs you that you’re better off just buying it now.

Thus, the only reason to use the site is if you’re willing to pay face value for an item that you actually want or can actually really use. If that’s the case – and you don’t mind paying the standard retail price for an item – then you might actually get some benefit out of sites like Quibids, because, in the end, the auctions there are akin to a lottery, where you have some fairly small chance of getting a steep discount on an item. If you don’t hit that chance, then you’ll be paying MSRP for the item.

For me, though, I’d rather just shop around for a better deal on the item. If I can find a particular item for 20% off with fifteen minutes of searching, I’d far rather take the guaranteed 20% discount than a small chance at some uncertain level of discount.

Of course, the real winner here is Quibids. They’re basically able to sell a lot of merchandise at the normal retail price online. They also get to pick and choose what items they’re selling, which means they’re likely choosing the ones where they know the difference between their wholesale price and the retail price is low.

This model, of course, only works if there are a lot of users on the site. If you only have one user who is able to win items for $0.01 consistently, then the site model doesn’t work. From what I’ve seen, they have a pretty solid user base, likely thanks to their strong promotional work.

The more users using Quibids, the better the equation shifts in their direction and the worse it gets for you, the end user. Your chance at a big discount on a specific item becomes very small indeed.

My recommendation, in the end, is to just shop around for items you want instead of gambling – and likely paying retail price – at Quibids.

The post A Deeper Look at Quibids … and Why I Don’t Think It’s Worth It appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

It only took until mid-April to reach that count.

Here they are – the fifteen websites that have directly saved me money so far in 2010, along with how exactly each one saved me money.

Craigslist (and its’ cousin, Freecycle)
http://www.craigslist.org and http://www.freecycle.org
This is definitely the big one, at least to this point in 2010. About a week ago, I posted an article talking about how we bought a 2004 Honda Pilot off of Craigslist, saving us quite a bit of coinage. Beyond that, we’ve also *almost* picked up three or four additional items off of Craigslist over the last few months but, as users know, stuff can sometimes go very fast on there. I usually just look for stuff that’s outrageously undervalued (a la yard sales on occasion) or free.

PaperBackSwap
http://www.paperbackswap.com
This has been my primary source of books for years. It’s simply online book swapping – mail out a book you’ve already read to someone who wants it and get a credit, then spend that credit to get a book from someone else. I get books in the mail for about $2 (the cost of sending out one of my old ones). Recent books to arrive in the mail include Foucault’s Pendulum by Unberto Eco, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, The Accidental by Ali Smith, and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Skype
http://www.skype.com
Skype allows you to use the internet as your telephone service, allowing you to call any number in the U.S., Canada, and a few other countries as well as have your own phone number for about $3 a month. I’ve been using Skype as my business number since last year and it’s worked like a charm. The best part? When I don’t want to deal with business calls, I just close the program. Problem solved.

FeedSifter
http://feedsifter.com
My biggest problem with online coupon sites is that they often convince me to go ahead and buy stuff I don’t actually need or really even want if I thought about it rationally. Feedsifter allows me to set up automated searches of coupon sites for the things I actually want, then pumps the results to me. I’ve saved $10 on Magna-Tiles and about $30 on some All-Clad pans to replace our peeling Teflon-covered pans.

RetailMeNot
http://www.retailmenot.com
Of course, sometimes – in a short-term pinch when you have an urgent need for something – such coupon sites can actually come in handy. You’re going there with a purpose and you just find what you need. In one case – when we ordered pizza from Papa John’s online – Retail Me Not came in handy. It showed us a pile of coupon codes, including one that fit what we intended to order quite well, shaving some cash right off of our total bill.

DealCatcher
http://www.dealcatcher.com/
Another time when a coupon site can be useful is when you go there for a specific purpose. Earlier this year, my wireless mouse failed and, after looking at a bunch of replacement options, I settled on several different models. One of them – the Microsoft Wireless Mouse 5000 – had a very nice price listed on DealCatcher, so I went for it, saving myself about $15 off of Amazon’s price and about $25 off of just running to Best Buy to get it.

Kayak
http://www.kayak.com
As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve been planning a summer trip up to the northern reaches of Minnesota. Over the years, I’ve used lots of travel sites for planning, but this time I’m using Kayak to help us figure out exactly where we’re going to camp and what services are nearby – with a four year old, a two year old, and a baby, something will come up, I’m quite sure.

Travel Iowa
http://www.traveliowa.com
Thanks to this website, we’ve hit several community events over the past few months, including Toddlerfest (which our children loved) and a few events at Iowa State University. It lists all kinds of events taking place all over Iowa during the entire year, allowing you to narrow it down as much as you’d like. Many other states have similar services.

Healthy Grocery List
http://www.healthygrocerylist.com
Hand in hand with a grocery store flyer, I used this site to come up with a set of healthy recipes and a grocery list for those items a few different times. I’d take the flyer, find some recipes using a few of the fresh ingredients on sale, then generate a grocery list. I’d then cross a few items off the list (because they were already on hand) and add a few staples, then head out to the store. A day is coming when this type of interface is available for a home recipe collection and when that happens, I’ll be a happy man.

Gas Buddy
http://gasbuddy.com/
I’ve used this site several times while out and about, usually with my wife. We notice we need gas, so I fire up Gas Buddy on either her Kindle or my cell phone and we find the cheapest price on gas near us. More than once, we’ve driven right by a gas station to one a half mile further down the road with prices ten cents a gallon cheaper.

YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/
I use YouTube all the time for do-it-yourself projects. Two recent examples include a toilet repair (here) where I replaced the flapper and some other parts, and a video on replacing a shower head (here), which went incredibly smoothly after watching the video. In both cases, watching the video saved me from hiring a repairman or botching something badly myself.

BillShrink
http://www.billshrink.com
We’re currently shopping for a new cell phone provider as my wife’s contract just ended. We identified at least three providers that will save us significant money (according to BillShrink) – we haven’t quite pulled the trigger because we’ve asked people we know about service issues with the various companies and are still deciding which one to take. So, this is more in the form of savings in the bush, not quite in the hand yet.

Yard Sale Treasure Map
http://www.yardsaletreasuremap.com
I love going to yard sales. It’s a fun Saturday activity and every once in a while, you find a stupendous deal – I once found some trading cards worth hundreds of dollars in a box marked $1 and, several years ago, I found some rare Atari cartridges for $0.50 a piece. We’ve also picked up strollers and tricycles at yard sales. If nothing else, they’re quite entertaining and this site makes it easy to find ones near you.

Hulu
http://www.hulu.com
We’re about to disconnect our cable entirely, saving us about $40 a month. Although we don’t watch much television, some of the series we do watch can be found on Hulu for free.

Netflix
http://www.netflix.com
At the same time, we now subscribe to Netflix (a downgrade from $50 a month cable to $9 a month Netflix!). We watch streaming stuff on our Wii, including some children’s programming (like Follow That Bird and our son’s favorite show, Caillou) on rainy days. In fact, we’re likely going to shrink our DVD collection yet again because some of the disks are redundant with what’s available on Netflix.

The post Fifteen Great Websites That Saved Me Money in 2010 appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

One Year Ago (August 23-29, 2008)
Everything’s So Easy for Pauline: Thoughts on Luck, Fate, Money, and Life This may be my favorite post I’ve ever written for this site. Luck plays such an enormous role in financial success, and looking down on people who haven’t achieved success because of things out of their control is just poor form.

How to Avoid the Trap of Splurging as a Reward for “Being Good” I fell into this trap more than a time or two. In the end, it undermines the value of “being good” – there’s no point to good behavior if you’re just going to shoot it in the foot.

The Retirement Perspective: Today’s Dollars Are Far More Valuable Than Tomorrow’s Inflation ensures that a dollar will be worth less tomorrow than it is today. This is a huge consideration when it comes to long-term planning, like saving for retirement.

Is a Positive Attitude Enough? This is my response to the plethora of “positive thinking” and “positive attitude” books out there. In a nutshell, no, positive thinking isn’t enough.

Personal Finance 101: Money Market Accounts Versus Normal Savings Accounts What’s the difference between a money market account and a savings account? It turns out that there’s a big difference, and knowing that difference can be quite important.

Two Years Ago (August 23-29, 2007)
Seven Nifty Tactics Credit Card Companies Use To Get Into Your Pocket – And How To See Right Through Them Credit card companies try all kinds of ways to extract a few dollars from your pocket, some obvious and some not so obvious. Here are seven of the most common tactics – and how you can protect yourself from them.

Should A Frugal Person Bother With The Coupon Section In The Sunday Paper? Many people immediately associate being frugal with clipping coupons from the paper. I don’t necessarily believe frugality leads one to coupons, though.

An Interesting Voluntary Simplicity Exercise That Can Really Improve Your Financial Situation This is so simple, yet so effective. Just walk into a room in your house and take an inventory using this lens. You might be surprised as to what you find out.

Ten Things Any College Student Can Do To Prepare For Success In Life College sets the foundation for later life in so many ways – I wish I had seen it then. Here are ten things that college students should consider doing because they put some of the foundations for a successful life in place while you’re cracking the books.

What To Do When Debt Seems Insurmountable Many people find themselves in such terrible debt situations that it seems like there’s no way they’ll ever find their way out. What do you do in this situation? Here are some thoughts on how to handle it.

If you’d like to browse through more of the archives, visit the chronology, where all posts are listed in chronological order.

Nine Ways to Get More out of The Simple Dollar
This is kind of a FAQ for new readers and is posted each week along with the Time Machine. Here are nine great ways for new readers to dig deeper into The Simple Dollar.

1. Subscribe by email or RSS. Visiting The Simple Dollar’s website is great, but for many people, it’s more convenient to receive the articles in another form. It’s easy to join 60,000 other subscribers and get The Simple Dollar’s content by email or in your RSS feeder (if you’re unfamiliar with RSS, check out Google Reader.

2. Comment. Each article on The Simple Dollar has lively discussion. Just click on the green square in the upper right of each article on the website and join in!

3. Read my story of financial meltdown and recovery. The Simple Dollar isn’t based on what I’ve read in books or learned in school. I’ve made a lifetime of financial mistakes – The Simple Dollar is a record of what works for me during the process of getting my life on a better track.

4. Download my free 49 page e-book. Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page is completely free. It summarizes all of the key lessons I’ve learned along the way about personal finance in one tidy package – in fact, all of the main principles can be found right on the cover.

5. Follow me on Twitter. I post tons of interesting articles, quotes, follow-up material, commentary, and other material on Twitter. Follow me! If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s essentially an open discussion forum for people to share ideas and thoughts with other like-minded folks – you just choose the people you want to listen to and their ideas and thoughts are all delivered to you on a single page.

6. Dig through “31 Days to Fix Your Finances.” 31 Days to Fix Your Finances is an article series that outlines how you can get a grip on your finances over the course of a month.

7. Send me your questions and suggestions. Send me an email and let me know what you’re thinking, what you’d like to see, and any questions you might have. I try to respond to as many emails as possible and I read them all. I may even use your question in a future article!

8. Become a “Friend of The Simple Dollar.” If you find the stuff on The Simple Dollar valuable and are willing to spend five minutes or so a month to help me out with small things, please consider signing up to be a “Friend of The Simple Dollar”.

9. Email a great article you find to a friend. Find an article that you think your friend would love? At the bottom of each article, you’ll find a link that says “Email this” – just click on that, type in your friend’s address, and send it right along to them!

The post The Simple Dollar Time Machine – August 29, 2009 appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

There were several big reasons that finally made me transition completely. What I found, though, is that most of those reasons actually directly helped me manage my personal finances, believe it or not. It turned out that my money was one of the biggest reasons to finally make that transition.

Here are nine ways I use Google Calendar to make my personal finances that much easier. Many of these can be done using paper calendars, but in most cases, GCal makes it easier to do them.

1. Keep track of bill due dates
This is perhaps the most obvious use of using a calendar for personal finance. When you know a bill’s due date, add it to your calendar, then pay the bill when you see it’s coming close to its due date. So, for example, our mortgage payment is due on the 28th of each month, so on my calendar, on the 28th of each month, there’s a note that our mortgage payment is due. It helps me keep track of our payments.

How can I do this? It’s simple. Log onto Google Calendar. First, I recommend creating a new calendar specifically for bill due dates if you haven’t already – this makes it easy to highlight them. Then, click on the day the bill is due, create a new event, and add the appropriate information – the amount and the type of bill, at the very least. If this bill recurs on a regular basis, make the bill a repeating event. You might also want to add an event reminder so you’re emailed a few days in advance of the bill due date.

Free from Broke offers a nice visual guide to adding a bill due date to your calendar.

2. Plan ahead for gift-giving occasions
My family has always been really into gift-giving and it’s considered a serious faux pas to forget someone’s birthday. In order to make sure I don’t forget a parent or a niece or a nephew, I schedule all of those important days right into Google Calendar.

How can I do this? I use almost exactly the same technique as for the bill due dates. I have an “Important Personal Days” calendar and I add birthdays, anniversaries, and the like to that calendar, scheduling them to recur every year. I also have two email reminders for each one – one about twelve days in advance, and another about five days in advance.

3. Pencil in key dates for sales
Let’s say I’m shopping around for a washing machine, and I’m looking for the best deal I can get. I discover that the local appliance store is having a sale on washing machines next month and given that their prices are already decent, I want to take a look at their numbers. But I might forget the sale! Not any more – I just pencil in the dates of the sale in the calendar, reminding me to check out the sale during that time frame.

This works for any sale that you come across. But, as with any sale, it’s important to distinguish between buying something because it’s on sale (bad) and buying something you already need and taking advantage of a sale to do it (good).

How can I do this? Again, this is just a simple scheduling of an event, except that I set the event as a multi-day one, with the start date and the end date matching those of the sale. Since this isn’t too regular, I have a “Miscellaneous” calendar where I put such events.

4. Keep track of milestones for big goals
As I’ve mentioned a few times on here, I have a handful of pretty big goals: finishing my second book (here’s my first one), running a 5K, and saving for a van. For each of these goals, I have some milestones along the way. I try to make my best attempt at a 5K each week, for one, and I have a word count goal on the first draft of my book each week, too. So I schedule these milestones. I just create an event each Friday saying something like “Book word count target: 30,000.” On Sundays, I have a “Walk/run your best 5K” penciled in.

How can I do this? Just pencil in your milestones whenever they occur. I have a “Goals” calendar that I put these under. Why so many calendars? It allows me to make groups of things appear and disappear at will when I’m looking at the calendar, which makes it very easy for me to keep track of what’s going on.

Dal, Chilean style, with chickpea curry, which I discussed in this earlier article.

5. Schedule meal plans intelligently
Remember my post about making multiple casseroles? As I mentioned there, it’s usually worthwhile to eat those casseroles within two months or so. So, in that example, I made four casseroles on a Thursday afternoon. We ate one that Thursday night, then I actually scheduled the casserole again for three weeks, six weeks, and nine weeks later. Then, when we sat down to plan for the week, my calendar would show me that we already have a meal in place for one night that week, meaning we can plan for fewer meals and save money at the grocery store.

If you do these in multiples, it gets really neat. Let’s say you cook six pounds of chicken breasts on a Tuesday in a slow cooker and freeze four and a half pounds of them. You’ll want to use these within a month or so, so I’ll mark down the following Tuesday, the Tuesday after that, and the Tuesday after that that we have 1 1/2 pounds of cooked chicken that need to be used. This keeps us from “wasting” food in the freezer. You can do the same thing with any frozen item you buy in bulk – for example, we often buy beef in bulk from a local butcher because of the quality and low prices, so in order to avoid freezer burn, I’ll pencil in when we should use the meat. Again, having this information right there drastically reduces our grocery bill and fits in perfectly with planning ahead for meals, which is itself a huge money saver.

How can I do this? I use a “dinner” calendar to manage these things. I just create recurring events for both of the cases above, and when we plan meals once a week, I create events with what we plan for meals those days. I usually label any ingredients we need to use by saying “Ingredient: ” right in the name of the event. That doesn’t mean that we’ll use the ingredient on that exact day, but it works as a reminder when I sit down to exactly plan meals that we have, say, chicken breasts to use that week already in hand. I schedule a meal each night and include the recipes in it – we even usually pencil in a “leftovers” night about every third or fourth night. This really works well.

6. Plan ahead for scheduled maintenance
Home maintenance saves you money, period. Taking a bit of time on a regular basis to do things like change furnace filters, check fire alarms, check vents for clogging, and so on can make an enormous difference in the life of your appliances, the appearance of your home, and the energy efficiency of your home.

I speak from experience here. When we first moved into our home, we didn’t realize that our dryer occasionally ejected a very small amount of lint into the ventilation, which led directly outside the house. After several months of use, our dryer seemed to not work very well. We had to run it two or three times to dry a reasonably-sized load. We puzzled over this and considered calling a repairman, but my two year old son actually figured it out. He came walking over to me with some lint in his hand one day. I asked him where he found it and he walked me straight to the vent. A few finger sweeps later and the dryer suddenly ran as good as new.

The problem is remembering the numerous little home and auto maintenance tasks you need to take care of. The solution? A home maintenance calendar, which tells you when you need to change filters and when you need to do a walkthrough to check on things – and, yes, when you should check vents. I made a big list of home and auto maintenance tasks – picking out the ones you use and scheduling them can save you some serious change over time.

How can I do this? Again, with a “maintenance” calendar. These are almost all recurring events on different schedules – some every month, some every three months, some every six months, some every so many weeks (so that I don’t have days LOADED with tons of such tasks). If I see some maintenance tasks for that day, I just do them and then I know that things are being maintained.

7. Take control of your portfolio planning
I often encourage people to just put their retirement savings in a “target retirement” fund and just forget about it, but many people like to have more control than that. They want to balance things themselves. Perhaps they want more risk than those plans give, or maybe they want less risk. They might also want low risk investments in their retirement accounts but very high risk investments in their taxable accounts.

Either way, rebalancing those investments regularly is key. On a regular basis, it’s important to sit down and think about whether or not your investment allotments match up with what you really want to be doing. You might change your contributions significantly – or you might even actually move your investments around.

It’s important to do this regularly, and that’s what a recurring event is very useful for. I “rebalance” every three months or so, mostly by just altering my contributions. I’m fine with using a “target retirement” fund, but I actually enjoy digging in and tinkering with things myself.

How can I do this? If you’re involved enough in your investing to rebalance it regularly, just set up a recurring event with a reminder of what you want to be doing, as a note. So, you might have a “Rebalance my Roth IRA” event, with a note that says “I want to have 10% in this fund, 20% in this fund, 30% in this fund, and 40% in this fund.” I actually keep mine on my “maintenance” calendar.

8. Set up seasonal reminders
Different times of the year bring different things we should think about with our personal finances. Charles Schwab has a very useful article listing many of these seasonal concerns, some of which may apply perfectly to you.

Some things we all might want to do: get a copy of our credit report every four months from the FTC at AnnualCreditReport.com (you get one from each of the three agencies each year for free, so just get one from one agency in January, another from another agency in May, then again in September), start budgeting for the holidays in the spring or summer, plan seasonal charitable giving or volunteer work, and so on.

How can I do this? I put these in my “miscellaneous” calendar, but many of these are recurring. For example, I remind myself a few times during the summer to look for Habitat for Humanity dates, and I also prod myself regularly to put aside money for and shop ahead for Christmas. I also snag my credit report like clockwork and I also remind myself to occasionally touch base with my parents about their financial needs (a will or a master information document or anything else like that).

9. Remind yourself of the things that really matter
If you’re putting forth this effort into saving money, you ought to be doing it for a great reason. For me, my children are my big motivation – I want to make a truly great life for them. Of course, a great life means that I spend a lot of quality time with them, so I plan ahead for that. Aside from the “evening block” that’s devoted every day to family time, I often pencil in other events. Some of them are known – soccer practice and the like – but others are surprises, like whisking my kids away for a long afternoon at the Science Center of Iowa or going to story time at the library.

Make sure you’re taking time out for the things that actually matter in your life. It’s easy to see the big reasons before we get started, but often when we’re involved with projects and get so drawn in, it’s sometimes hard to remember to take time for the reasons why we’re doing this.

How can I do this? I have a calendar called “Family” where I schedule things like this. When I look at the week ahead and see a trip to the library or a trip to the Science Center or something like that, I feel like my week is more … complete.

An effective calendaring system has almost unlimited uses. Just remember that it’s a tool – the calendar doesn’t have meaning, your life does.

The post Nine Ways I Use Google Calendar to Keep My Money Straight appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Hold On… What Is Evernote?
Evernote is basically a note manager that synchronizes the notes across computers. You can create and edit notes on any machine with a web browser and several types of mobile phones. You can save pictures, web pages, voice recordings, text – anything you want.

The thing that I find really useful, though, is that if you take a picture of a handwritten note – if it’s legible at all – Evernote will automatically extract the text for you. So, let’s say I’m at a meeting and I’ve jotted down a few notes that I might want to write about later on. I can just take pictures of the notes with my camera, stick them on Evernote, and boom – I’ve got the text.

The best part? It’s free (well, not entirely – there’s some very high level of data beyond which you have to have a paid account (40 MB), but I’ve never reached it). I have upgraded to a premium account there, simply because I have a deep philosophy of supporting what I use, but you can use it to your heart’s content without paying a dime. They pay the bills with a small ad on the site.

Obviously, you wouldn’t want to store highly sensitive personal information on here, but for 99% of the notes you’ll take, Evernote simply works.

Seven Ways I Use Evernote to Improve My Finances
Given that Evernote makes text notes basically ubiquitous, this means I can update them pretty much wherever I’m at. This is perfect for little pieces of personal finance data that you’ll want to retrieve later on. Here are seven examples of how I’m using Evernote in that regard (note that you could also use a pad and pencil for these, but that having them in electronic form is almost always more convenient).

I use it to track my spending on the go. I keep a note going where I just record my expenses. A great example of this was on vacation, where my parents and I had agreed to split all expenses equally. During the vacation, whenever we simply paid for an activity or something else, I jotted it down in Evernote. Then, at the end of the trip, it was quite easy – I just copied the numbers into a spreadsheet and automatically totaled them, easy as pie.

I use it to jot down prices for comparison shopping. Evernote is incredibly useful as a price book. Whenever I’m in a store and I spot a great price on an item, I jot down that price and where I found it. Later, I’ll compare it to other prices, both online and off. If you’re shopping for a large purchase, like a piece of furniture or a television, this can be a great way to compare prices.

However, I’ve found it really useful for little things. Since we split a lot of our shopping for food and domestic items between Fareway (most food), Sam’s Club (some bulk purchases), Target (most household), and Hy-Vee (specialty foods), I find it really useful to keep track of what’s actually cheapest at each store and buy them there. Evernote makes this really easy – I now know that many deli cheeses are cheapest at Fareway, but some upscale cheeses are far cheaper at Sam’s Club thanks to using this technique, and that enables me to easily get the best price on the items that I buy.

I use it to take notes if someone lets me in on a bargain. Let’s say I’m chatting with my neighbor and he mentions that he saw that Lowes is having a sale on lawnmowers this weekend – and I’m in the market for a lawnmower. That can be a very valuable piece of information – and so I immediately jot it down. Later, when I see it electronically, I remember to visit the Lowes website, see what’s on sale, and do some comparison shopping.

Similarly, I overheard recently at the grocery store that one could find $1.50 off coupons for V8 Fusion online. I jotted that down quickly, went home, searched for it, and unfortunately came up short – but it’s easy to see how something like this could really pay off (if someone has a link to $1 off or more V8 Fusion coupons, I’d love ‘em!).

I use it to keep track of potential investments. On Sunday mornings, I’m usually found at the kitchen table reading the Sunday Des Moines Register – and while reading, I usually find out something interesting about some investment. I also find myself reading the Wall Street Journal sometimes at the library, and I always find some interesting businesses or investments in there.

Obviously, I want to follow up, so I just jot down that investment’s symbol on Evernote. Later, when I’m home, I just copy and paste that symbol into Google and into Yahoo! Finance and see what I find. This has helped me become more familiar with the business side – and the product side – of many companies and also led me to quite a few index funds that I’m watching for potential future investments.

I use it to jot down product research notes at the library. As I’ve mentioned many times, whenever we begin to look at a major purchase, I hit the library. I dig out piles of old issues of Consumer Reports and other consumer magazines and go through them, finding out what independent testers have to say about it.

Naturally, I take my laptop along on such journeys, and I find that jotting these things down in Evernote is quite helpful. I’ll type the interesting notes in quickly, take snapshots of anything interesting with my camera, and collect all the research electronically in one place. Later, when I’m at home, I can add to this research. Or maybe I’ll be at my parents’ house and I find something useful to add – I can just log on via the website and add to a note.

I use it to keep a convenient schedule of automated transactions. One note includes nothing more than a list of the automatic transactions that come out of our primary checking account every month – our children’s 529 accounts, my Roth IRA, our car payment, our mortgage payment, and a SmartyPig savings goal (for a better laptop sometime way down the road).

This has come in handy several times. Once, not too long ago, we were in Texas on vacation and I was trying to decide if I should pull some cash out of my checking account or my savings account. I pulled out my list of automatic transactions, did the math, and realized it wasn’t a problem at all to leave the savings alone – we had plenty of buffer.

The best part: if I make a change to the automatic transactions I have, I can just update one text file and I have the info everywhere. I don’t have to write a new note or make a bunch of scribbles on it. It’s clean and just works.

I use it to keep track of gift ideas for people. I keep a constantly running list of gift ideas for people. It’s actually quite easy – I just listen to what people talk about and if they mention anything they like or may want, I jot it down on this note. Then, every once in a while, I’ll go bargain hunting with this note – I’ll update my Amazon deal search filters with these items and I’ll search through several different bargain sites that I look at. Occasionally, I’ll find a hit – and when I do, I might turn a $70 idle wish someone has into a gift from me that only cost $20.

Not only that, this gift list comes in big handy when the holidays are actually close. I’ll get out this gift list just before Black Friday and browse through the circulars on Thanksgiving Day – and sometimes I’ll find an amazing match, connecting a great deal to a recipient who actually wants the item.

To put it simply, the sheer utility of Evernote gives me tons of opportunities to save money. The examples above just scratch the surface.

The post Seven Ways I Use Evernote to Improve My Finances appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

One Year Ago (June 21-27, 2008)
Addiction and Personal Finance Addiction is a dangerous thing. It can destroy finances, families, friendships, and lives. Having faced addiction in my own past, here are some of my own thoughts on the issue.

You Can’t Buy Love Love doesn’t have a price tag. If you’re throwing money at someone or something to try to make them love you, it won’t work.

Starting a Natural Collection A natural collection is a great free way to rediscover and enjoy the environment around you. My mother-in-law collects rocks, for one.

Ceiling Fan Hacks: Save Big on Energy Use A few simple tricks can maximize the value you get from your ceiling fans, cutting your energy bill and increasing your comfort in the process.

Giving Now Versus Giving Later: The Gospel of Wealth Versus Everyday Charity Should you build individual wealth and give a large amount later, or give what you have now? It’s a tricky question, indeed.

Two Years Ago (June 21-27, 2007)
Money, Spirituality, and Charity This sums up my feelings on the intersection of money, religion, and charitable giving quite well.

You Don’t Need Six Figures: The Financial Realities of Living in Iowa I’d far rather live in “boring” Iowa than in an “exciting” large metro area. The cost of living is so low, yet there are still tons of opportunities for things to do.

Trimming The Fat: Forty Ways To Reduce Your Monthly Required Spending Monthly bills will eat you for breakfast if you let them. It’s a great place to start looking for ways to trim your spending.

Cook Once, Eat Twice With A Crockpot Here’s how to make reusable meals in a crockpot. Our favorite strategy, actually, is cooking a bunch of chicken breasts at once in the crockpot, freezing them, then using them in other dishes.

The Financial Implications Of Living With Mom And Dad Moving back into the nest is a major challenge for both parents and children. Here’s some advice for making it work for both sides of the coin.

If you’d like to browse through more of the archives, visit the chronology, where all posts are listed in chronological order.

Eight Ways to Get More out of The Simple Dollar
This is kind of a FAQ for new readers and is posted each week along with the Time Machine. Here are eight great ways for new readers to dig deeper into The Simple Dollar.

1. Subscribe by email or RSS. Visiting The Simple Dollar’s website is great, but for many people, it’s more convenient to receive the articles in another form. It’s easy to join 60,000 other subscribers and get The Simple Dollar’s content by email or in your RSS feeder (if you’re unfamiliar with RSS, check out Google Reader.

2. Comment. Each article on The Simple Dollar has lively discussion. Just click on the green square in the upper right of each article on the website and join in!

3. Read my story of financial meltdown and recovery. The Simple Dollar isn’t based on what I’ve read in books or learned in school. I’ve made a lifetime of financial mistakes – The Simple Dollar is a record of what works for me during the process of getting my life on a better track.

4. Download my free 49 page e-book. Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page is completely free. It summarizes all of the key lessons I’ve learned along the way about personal finance in one tidy package – in fact, all of the main principles can be found right on the cover.

5. Follow me on Twitter. I post tons of interesting articles, quotes, follow-up material, commentary, and other material on Twitter. Follow me! If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s essentially an open discussion forum for people to share ideas and thoughts with other like-minded folks – you just choose the people you want to listen to and their ideas and thoughts are all delivered to you on a single page.

6. Dig through “31 Days to Fix Your Finances.” 31 Days to Fix Your Finances is an article series that outlines how you can get a grip on your finances over the course of a month.

7. Send me your questions and suggestions. Send me an email and let me know what you’re thinking, what you’d like to see, and any questions you might have. I try to respond to as many emails as possible and I read them all. I may even use your question in a future article!

8. Email a great article you find to a friend. Find an article that you think your friend would love? At the bottom of each article, you’ll find a link that says “Email this” – just click on that, type in your friend’s address, and send it right along to them!

The post The Simple Dollar Time Machine – June 27, 2009 appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

On the way out of the store, my wife chided me. “Don’t you always say on The Simple Dollar that it’s a bad idea to open yourself up to more advertisements?”

I smiled back at her and gave her a little wink.

In fact, whenever I’m asked for my email address at a store or a restaurant I might ever return to, I’m quite happy to give them my address.

Seem like a contradiction in terms?

Well, the truth is that I don’t give these stores my real email address – my personal one or my work one. Instead, I have a separate account that I use for just this purpose. That address has helped me out time and time again to save a few bucks here and there – and even better, I’m never tempted by ads that come in via email.

Here’s the game plan.

Sign Up For a Webmail Account
All you have to do to get rolling is sign up for a fresh new email account with one of the web-based email services. I find GMail to be the most convenient – but Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail work just as well for these purposes.

Choose a name you’ll easily remember. Your first name + “stuff” will probably be available, for example. If it’s not, try putting a very simple memorable number on the end. So, you might end up with something like “trentstuff2009″ for your name.

The key is just picking something you won’t forget, because you’ll want to pull it up from memory fairly often.

Sign Up For Your Favorite Retailers’ Lists
From then on, whenever you’re at a retailer and they ask for your email address, give them this new address. The retailer will almost always begin mailing things to this address – sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly.

If you’re anxious to get started, most websites for such retailers have sign-up forms somewhere on the site that will get you on their mailing list.

So, for me, I might visit the websites of various booksellers (Borders, Barnes & Noble) and, of course, Williams-Sonoma.

Once you’ve done that, don’t worry about it. Everything is good to go.

The Next Time You’re About to Shop There Anyway…
… just sign in to that email account and search for the retailer you’re about to visit, then check the most recent two or three mailings. You’ll often find a few coupons and notices of any sales that are going on.

Since you’re not receiving this stuff in your normal inbox, you won’t be tempted to go chase “bargains.” However, you still get the advantage of coupons for your favorite retailers without having to dig through coupon sites (and the resultant popup ads and the like that such sites typically bring).

Good luck!

The post A Deal-Collecting Email Address appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

What personal finance blogs do you read?

You can actually find the answer to this question on any page of The Simple Dollar. If you scroll down a bit, you’ll see a section in the lower right entitled “Blogs I Read.” Under that heading is a list of twenty five blogs that I keep pretty close tabs on – I visit all of them most days.

I update this list about once a year, and because of Collin’s prompting, I decided it was time to give that list a good refreshing. I removed about half of the sites that used to be there (a few are now defunct, the rest have simply become less compelling) and added quite a bit of new blood to the list.

So, which personal finance, career, and personal development blogs do I keep tabs on? Here they are, along with some notes on why I find them so compelling. If you want to visit any of these sites at any time, just visit any page on The Simple Dollar – the full list can always be found in the “Blogs I Read” section.

Ask MetaFilter
http://ask.metafilter.com
Ask MetaFilter is an interesting community blog of sorts. Here’s how it works: members pay a small fee to join, then they’re allowed to ask questions that are on their mind. The questions are all over the place, ranging from whether a person should move from Boston to Colorado to things like how budget reconciliation in the Senate works. The diversity of questions – and the wide range of responses, many of them well thought out – makes Ask MetaFilter a compelling read.

Bargaineering
http://www.bargaineering.com/articles/
Bargaineering (formerly Blueprint for Financial Prosperity) is probably my favorite personal finance blog for interesting ideas. Jim Wang, the author of the site, is quite good at generating compelling core ideas, which usually gets my mind moving. Quite often, I’ll see an intriguing idea on Jim’s site, stew on it for a while, try it out, look at how it works in my own life, and find myself eventually telling a story that goes off in some completely different direction. Two great examples of Jim’s interesting ideas are his post on the meaninglessness of net worth by age and his far-too-short introduction to the “100 boxes” budgeting technique.

ChristianPF
http://www.christianpf.com/
ChristianPF has a distinct take on personal finance: that the themes of Christianity and the themes of money management have quite a bit of overlap. Because the site focuses so heavily on that overlap – and because the author is a solid writer who occasionally throws out a few amazing gems – ChristianPF consistently offers insights that leave me thinking. Some of ChristianPF’s best stuff includes this amazing detailed description of how bloggers earn an income and five essential pieces of scripture that discuss money (although he missed the one that really impacted me, Ecclesiastes 2).

Clever Dude
http://www.cleverdude.com/
Clever Dude keeps me coming back because of the tone and the sense of humor underlying most of the posts. The site does a great job of putting just the right touch of humor on personal finance and frugality issues, often with the humor sneaking up on you and just brushing you when you least expect it. It’s just the right amount – enough to make the articles enjoyable to read, without going too far and making it all into a farce. Two great examples of this include the article about creating a frugal lunch for a lot of people and the post on saving money by reducing waste (with fifty examples).

Consumerism Commentary
http://www.consumerismcommentary.com/
Flexo, the writer at Consumerism Commentary, has the knack of a good essayist. He can turn a simple, seemingly unrelated event or idea into an interesting personal finance take. For example, his article on whether it makes sense to follow what makes you happy does a great job of riffing on Arrested Development, and this piece on money and unintended consequences turns a look at ethanol in fuel into a great discussion of looking at the ramifications of your choices.

Consumerist
http://consumerist.com/
Consumerist is a blog run by Consumers Union, the folks behind Consumer Reports. It focuses directly on consumer issues, which means that it often calls out poor customer service from companies, faulty products, and so forth, mixed in with some great advice on saving money and making good buying choices. This is what I call a “flood” blog, meaning there are a lot of posts each day – I usually find myself just leafing through the piles of posts for the handful that really apply to me. Some great examples of what Consumerist brings to the table include 112 ways to save money and a a great look at the dark underbelly of the housing crisis, where awful homes are built in middle-class neighborhoods.

Deal Seeking Mom
http://www.dealseekingmom.com/
Deal Seeking Mom mostly just provides a lot of great coupons and freebies – the site does a great job of filtering out many of the less-useful items and just provides some of the cream of the crop – and occasionally drops a great article on specific money-saving tactics in the middle there. Two great examples of this dual nature is a great article on the learning curve of saving money and the guide to getting free rentals at Redbox (which I’ve used several times, actually).

Dumb Little Man
http://www.dumblittleman.com/
I keep coming back to Dumb Little Man for the variety. The site posts articles on a wide variety of topics – productivity, personal development, money management, careers, and so on. The author usually gets right to the point, outlining a handful of good suggestions on the topic. For me, it usually serves as a great starting point for ways to improve myself, whether in terms of money or career or even my day-to-day life. Two great examples that I found particularly useful are 14 Simple Ways to Convert Your Sedentary Lifestyle (I’m a high-volume writer, so I’m more sedentary than I’d like to be) and 50 Very Simple Ways to Be Romantic (I’ve used many of these with my wife).

Freelance Switch
http://www.freelanceswitch.com/
Freelance Switch focuses very specifically on the money and career issues that face people who are freelancers – of which, to an extent, I would include myself as a member. Because of that tight focus, Freelance Switch can toss out many of the extraneous details and really hone in on factors that matter specifically to freelancers. Two articles that really clicked with me: 101 Ideas to Get More Freelance Work and Generate New Client Leads and Mixed Marriages: When One Spouse Goes Freelance (which was particularly insightful for our household).

Free Money Finance
http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/
Free Money Finance succeeds for me because the author is very, very effective at combing through the mainstream media, finding the articles on personal money management that are really compelling, and commenting on them in a relatable fashion. The (slight) majority of the posts at FMF follow that general format and, for me, those are the ones that keep me coming back for more. Two good recent examples of this technique are The Little Things Matter to Interview Success and Ten STeps to Becoming a Millionaire.

Frugal Dad
http://frugaldad.com/
Frugal Dad. The name alone tells you exactly what you’re going to get: frugality tips and personal finance thoughts related to kids. Two topics that, unsurprisingly, appeal to me quite a bit. Another factor that works in Frugal Dad’s favor is that the site, over time, tells the story of his life – a meshing of good advice and memoir that I find appealing. Two of my favorite posts from Frugal Dad include The Language of the Perpetual Poor and Planning a Frugal Family Fun Night (from which I’ve used several ideas over the years, in some form or another).

Get Rich Slowly
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/
Point blank, this is the best personal finance blog out there (besides TSD, of course). JD and I write with a fairly similar tone and have similar ideas so often that I’ll sometimes check Get Rich Slowly before I post a new article just to make sure that JD hasn’t randomly came up with a similar idea. Here are two examples of that, where JD has written articles I’d be proud to say were my own: The Road to Wealth is Paved with Goals and The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good – but I could list dozens and dozens of great articles from GRS.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich
http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/
I read I Will Teach You To Be Rich for two reasons. First, Ramit’s focus is largely on entrepreneurship – it’s fairly obvious that his audience is the Silicon Valley startup crowd. Second, his tone is pure entertainment – a pastiche of self-assurance and compelling advice that makes most of the articles there quite worth reading. Two great examples of his style and advice are The $28,000 question: Why are we all hypocrites about weddings? and Money Diaries: The 20-something cube-dweller with an addiction to phone accessories.

Lifehacker
http://lifehacker.com/
Lifehacker is a very frequently updated site (ten or more times a day) focusing on productivity technology issues, but occasionally brushing on personal finance, personal growth, and other areas. I almost always find a gem or two by browsing through Lifehacker – a useful piece of software, a good piece of advice, or something wholly unexpected. Two articles from Lifehacker that really influenced my thinking: Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret (“don’t break the chain” is utterly brilliant) and How Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Gets Things Done (some great advice from a person I admire a lot).

Money Saving Mom
http://www.moneysavingmom.com/
Money Saving Mom is something like a hybrid between Frugal Dad and Deal Seeking Mom – it’s a real medley of frugality tips, solid coupons (I’ve used more coupons from MSM than from pretty much any other site I’ve visited), and excellent anecdotes about parenting with frugality in mind. Walgreens 101, for example, is a great introduction to saving money at that particular store, and a great example of how the site can really save money is with this method for getting Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers for $0.16 at Target using coupon stacking and finding deals from flyers (my kids love these crackers – and the post is a good example of the type of thoughtful deal-finding that shows up on MSM).

Pick the Brain
http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog
Pick the Brain is an excellent wide-ranging self-improvement blog, offering up tons of interesting articles on motivation, productivity, money management, and other aspects of self-improvement. The variety of ideas is what keeps me coming back – it’s infrequently updated, but when I do see an update, it’s usually full of solid ideas. Two articles that really made me think were 7 Ways to Grow the Action Habit and George Orwell’s Five Rules for Effective Writing (all of which I strive to use).

Productivity501
http://www.productivity501.com/
Productivity501 focuses squarely on how to be more productive with your time – and time is money, after all. Mark does a consistently great job of digging through ordinary tasks and finding ways to reduce our time investment on those tasks, resulting in more time to spend on other things of greater personal value (like spending time with my kids, for example). Here are two excellent tastes: Components of a Paperless Office (this is something I strive towards, and the article is my guide for doing it) and Getting the Most Out of Magazines (which basically describes how I tackle personal finance magazines).

Queercents
http://www.queercents.com/
Queercents is actually a collective blog, including writings from a large number of writers that are all members of the LGBT community. As with many group blogs, the presence of many writers creates a great diversity of opinion and perspectives – and often you find a writer or two that you really click with (I like Nina, for example) while being exposed to a lot of ideas and angles that you would have never considered before. Two great articles: Answering The Question: Should I Go To Graduate School? and Build A Business While Keeping Your Day Job (something I had to do when The Simple Dollar was first getting started).

Red Tape Chronicles
http://redtape.msnbc.com/
Red Tape Chronicles (from MSNBC) focuses on consumer issues – mostly, how to deal with customer service headaches, identity theft, and other painful elements of modern financial life. Bob Sullivan provides great fact-based coverage of consumer fraud, writing really strong material that often leads me to investigating similar experiences in my own life. Two great examples of the material you’ll find there are How to Save Money on: Bank Accounts and Win Customer Service Phone Battles.

Smart Spending
http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/SmartSpending/
Smart Spending is something of a “meta-blog” of personal finance blogs. Karen Datko and Donna Freedman do a great job of scouring a wide range of personal finance blogs, finding a wide variety of commentary on personal finance issues while adding their own unique views. Smart Spending is a great resource for seeing what lots of different voices are saying on personal finance topics. A couple of great examples: Is Bankruptcy Her Best Choice? and ‘Gifting Club’ Pyramid Schemes Flourish on Web.

The Digerati Life
http://www.thedigeratilife.com/blog/
I often look at The Digerati Life as something of an urban parallel to The Simple Dollar. The author lives in the Bay Area and often has a more urban perspective than I do, but we regularly come to the same conclusions. What keeps me coming back? A warm tone and a lot of excellent advice. Two samples: Force Yourself To Save! 15 Painless Ways To Pay Yourself First and Borrow, Barter, Buy Used: Espousing The Frugal Lifestyle.

The Wallet
http://blogs.wsj.com/wallet/
The Wallet is a personal finance blog from the Wall Street Journal. It can be dry at times, but if you want a flood of thought-provoking reading on personal finance, this is a great source. It’s a mix of link collections to interesting articles from all over and short pieces from WSJ staff writers, all adding together to create a compelling mix of money material. Standouts (to me) include Be Aware of Who’s Behind Advice on Cell-Phone Plans (this is part of the reason why I tend to trust bloggers whose material I’ve read over a long period of time) and Extreme Finance: Cutting Out 401(k) Contributions.

Unclutterer
http://unclutterer.com/
Unclutterer is a fascinating blog with a very specific topic: reducing clutter. In Erin’s eyes, clutter stands in the way of personal productivity, personal happiness, and good personal finance, too. Her soft, witty tone and her consistently thoughtful ideas on reducing the clutter in one’s life keep me constantly coming back for more. Two great examples: Retail tricks that get you to buy more and If you have a job you hate, prioritize what is important to you and align your career accordingly.

Wise Bread
http://www.wisebread.com/
Wise Bread is a group blog that looks at a huge array of personal finance issues, providing a wide range of voices and insights on money matters. The wide variety of voices (in particular, the always-excellent Philip Brewer) and wide variety of issues make this one a great blog for getting your juices flowing when it comes to money management. Two great examples include Baby Carrots – The Frugal Idea That Isn’t and Like DIY? Avoid These Ten Costly Mistakes.

Zen Habits
http://zenhabits.net/
Last but not least is Zen Habits, a site focused on simplicity in life, money, work, and love. Leo’s goal with Zen Habits is pretty clear – if you reduce the complexities in your life, you have much more life to enjoy, a philosophy I wholeheartedly agree with. Leo’s posts vary widely, but they all strike the common theme of finding a simpler way in life. Two great examples: Handbook for Life: 52 Tips for Happiness and Productivity and The Cheapskate Guide: 50 Tips for Frugal Living.

Got a favorite blog along these lines? What’s great about it? Let us know in the comments.

The post My 25 Favorite Personal Finance, Career, and Personal Development Blogs appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

The only problem is that chasing bargains like this takes time – time I don’t necessarily have. I used to have a routine of visiting a number of bargain sites, but after a while, I found more and more useful sites and it became harder and harder to keep up with all of them.

So I found a better solution (which I’ve hinted at in the past). Using a number of easy-to-use online tools, I built a single webpage that shows me the best deals from tons of different online sources all in one place, customized to show me just the deals I want. Better yet, I can access this page from any computer.

Sound good? Here’s how it’s done.

iGoogle: The Backbone
iGoogle is quite nifty. To put it simply, it lets you create a custom web page that is automatically updated with whatever you want to add to it – news, sports scores, weather, stock tickers, and so on. Here’s the URL:

http://www.google.com/ig

When you first visit the URL above (and sign in, if you have a Google account), you’ll get a small handful of default “gadgets.” Get rid of these so that you have some space to add more useful stuff. First, click on the down arrow on the left (seen below) and choose the option to “Edit this tab…”

Then, click on “Delete” for all of the gadgets and then click on the “Save” button in the upper right. You’ll go back to an empty iGoogle page, ready to be loaded up with some great gadgets for bargain hunting.

Adding New Gadgets
So, how do you actually add new things to this page? This is similarly easy. Just click on the “Add stuff” link over on the right hand side of the page…

… then click on the “Add feed or gadget” link on the right.

You’ll get a little popup box that asks you to paste in a feed URL. Once you do that, the contents of that URL will be added to the iGoogle homepage.

But what URLs can you add? There are lots of great URLs out there loaded with bargains. Let’s go through a few.

Bargain Websites
Below, I’ve listed ten different feed URLs that you can copy and paste directly into iGoogle, as described above. Just copy the URL below, paste it as described above, and it becomes an automatically updating part of your iGoogle homepage.

If you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to any of these (likely just by clicking through, depending on how your system is configured).

Amazon Gold Box
http://rssfeeds.s3.amazonaws.com/goldbox
This lists almost all of the daily deals available from Amazon.com.

CheapTweet

http://cheaptweet.com/all.rss

This lists deals posted on Twitter, filtered by the users of CheapTweet.com.

Coupons.com
http://www.coupons.com/rss.asp
This lists the latest coupons from Coupons.com, most of which are for discounts on household products.

Dealnews (Most Popular)
http://content.dealnews.com/dealnews/rss/popular.xml
This lists the most popular deals discovered by Dealnews.com.

Dealspl.us
http://feeds.feedburner.com/dealspl/all
This lists a huge number of deals on a wide variety of products, filtered by social bookmarking sites. This is definitely one worth filtering (see below) because a lot of stuff comes through.

FatWallet.com Hot Deals
http://feeds.feedburner.com/FatwalletHotDeals
This lists a wide variety of deals (mostly technology items).

Free Deal World
http://freedealworld.com/feed/
This lists a lot of good freebie offers.

Money Saving Mom
http://feeds.feedburner.com/moneysavingmom/mNWf
This is a well-written blog that features a lot of good coupons for household products.

SlickDeals.net
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SlickdealsnetFP
This includes a wide variety of deals from many sources, all filtered by the SlickDeals community. This is definitely one worth filtering (see below).

Woot.com
http://www.woot.com/Blog/Feed.ashx
This is a daily tech deal site that often has amazing bargains.

Bargain Twitterers
A few months ago, I mentioned that there are many useful people on Twitter worth following for the deals they post. If you’re not into Twitter and would rather “follow” these people in another way, you can keep track of the posted deals using this iGoogle technique. Here are the feed URLs for seven Twitterers I mentioned in the article.

DellOutlet
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/5688592.rss
Computer deals from Dell.

AmazonDeals
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/1922861.rss
Lots of “hidden” deals from Amazon.com.

AmazonMp3
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14740219.rss
Excellent legal albums in mp3 format for $1.99-2.99.

Dealyzer
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/17331003.rss
A wide variety of deals of all types.

DealUniversity
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/17893953.rss
An excellent assortment of tech deals.

CheapTweet
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/17545909.rss
An aggregation of many of the best deals posted to Twitter.

BooksAMillion
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/17248079.rss
A great collection of deals on books.

Filter These URLs
You might find that all of these things are overkill – you can’t possibly keep track of hundreds of deals a day. If that’s the case, it’s quite easy to simply filter them, focusing in on the specific items you’re looking for.

FeedSifter.com lets you put in a RSS feed URL (like the ones above), then filter it for any list of terms you put in, then gives you an output feed that contains only the items that match the terms you listed. I actually described using FeedFilter once before, to similar ends.

Let’s see this in play. I like to use Amazon’s Gold Box (described above) for certain types of bargains: video games, cookbooks, and a few other odds and ends. I don’t have time for – and don’t really care that much – about the other deals that Gold Box might give me.

So, I’d fill out Feed Sifter like this:

A quick note: search terms fewer than three characters match everything, so use ones longer than that.

When you click on the “Filter my Feed” button, you’ll get an option to subscribe to that new feed. Click on that and you’ll find that the Amazon feed is now filtered for those search terms. Copy THIS URL and add it to iGoogle as described at the top of this post, and you’ll be able to see the latest deals, filtered to your specifications, whenever you want.

You can filter ANY of the above URLs in the same way using FeedFilter. Personally, I filter some feeds (SlickDeals) and don’t filter others (AmazonMp3).

How Do I Use It?
I have a nice big page built on this technique that I visit several times a day. Perhaps once a week, I’ll find something worth picking up – but when I do find something, I’m usually saving quite a bit on that item.

Give it a try! It takes a bit of time to get such a page set up, but once you’re set up and ready to go, it can be a big help when you’re looking for Christmas gifts or for specific bargains for yourself.

The post A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating a Deal-Finding Homepage appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Instead, why not use this lazy hour to do something at your desk that can directly put money in your pocket? Here are nine great suggestions for doing just that.

Find a better primary bank – and sign up
I’m often shocked to find that most people seem to be very unhappy with their primary bank. They’re charged unnecessary fees, don’t earn much interest, and are greatly inconvenienced by the customer service or the ATM network. These factors are not only an annoyance – they cost you real money that adds up to large sums over time.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There are many banks out there with great customer service, large fee-free ATM networks, no ridiculous fees to simply maintain a checking account, and offer interest on even basic checking accounts. I use ING Direct’s Electric Orange checking, for example, after having abandoned checking and savings accounts with a particular large national bank, and that switch has saved me $50 a month per month in the years since the switch.

Shop around for a new bank. There are a lot of options besides ING – look at HSBC Direct, Everbank, FNBO Direct, and E-Trade are all good banks that have strong customer service, keep the fees from draining your money, and offer interest on the checking. Don’t base your decision solely on interest rates, though, as those vary quite a bit over time – instead, do some Google searching to find reviews on all the banks and keep a careful eye out for customer service comments.

Many banks allow you to sign up for both checking and savings services online, so if you decide to go the full nine yards, you can actually begin the process of transitioning to a new bank right at your computer.

Set up an automatic savings plan
While it’s a great idea to have a full-service bank for your primary checking, for many people, it’s good to have a savings account set aside for emergency funds or other specific savings goals. While I typically use a savings account at my primary bank for my emergency fund (because it’s easier to access), I usually hunt primarily for the best rate when I’m saving for a specific goal (like an appliance replacement).

One good place to do just that is with SmartyPig. Not only do they offer a strong interest rate if you set up an automatic savings plan with them, they also toss in discounts from specific retailers if you meet your savings goal. So, if you need to replace a washing machine in the next several months, set that up as a goal with SmartyPig, earn a good interest rate as you save, and get a discount on the item itself when you reach the goal. I’m currently using SmartyPig to save up for a replacement television by socking away just a few bucks a week.

Another great way to find a high-interest savings account purely for setting some cash aside is Bankrate.com’s savings account yield rate listing. It allows you to see the highest rates available nationwide for savings accounts – and since customer service and ATM access and other factors aren’t as much of a concern with a simple savings account, it can be a good idea to simply seek out the highest rate (though that can change over time – you should compare rates again every once in a while).

Read your grocery store’s flyer and prepare a meal plan and shopping list
It’s so easy to set up a meal plan and make a shopping list, yet many people skip it and head to the grocery store cold. Just a few minutes of prep work can save you quite a bit of money and also make your shopping trip shorter – and there’s no easier place to do it than right in front of your computer.

Visit the website of your grocery store of choice and download their weekly flyer. Browse through the flyer and identify a few interesting items that are on sale, and use those items as the backbones of the meals for your upcoming week – make a list of the meals, in fact. If you need help, use a recipe database like RecipeSource to fill in the blanks. Then, from that list of meals, make a grocery list that includes all of the items you need. You can create both the meal plan and the grocery list on your computer’s text editor or at Google Docs.

When you’re satisfied, print off the list and head to the grocery store. Shopping by grocery list is not only faster than wandering the aisles, it’s also cheaper – your eyes are on the list and scanning the shelves for specific items, which means you’re much less likely to be tempted by impulse buys. That saves you time and money in the store.

Do some strong research for an upcoming major purchase
Whenever you make a significant purchase – and I view significant as being anything over $20 or so – you owe it to yourself to do a bit of research into that purchase, whether it’s merely to make sure you’re buying exactly what you want or making sure you’re getting the right price. Doing this, though, can be a bit time consuming. Here are a few tips to get you started.

ConsumerReports.org is worth it (for me). I use Consumer Reports as the starting point of many of my major purchases (and an awful lot of my minor purchases, too). I use their data as the starting point for purchases and as a good indicator of the relative quality of a given item compared to the competition. You can sign up for the service for just $2.16 a month.

Hit Twitter Search and Technorati for specific comments from real users. Both of these tools reveal what real people are saying about specific items and companies.

Send some emails. Contact your friends and see if they have any recommendations on specific items and item categories.

Sign up for a swapping service
I enjoy watching movies and I especially enjoy reading books. Sure, I can use the library for these things, but I have to remember to return them and I can’t make my own markings on the books if I want to. I prefer to have a copy of my own to hold onto if I find long-term value in it, but I also like to have the flexibility to get rid of the item if I don’t want to keep it over the long haul.

So what do I do? I use PaperBackSwap to trade books by mail and SwapADVD to do the same thing with DVDs. It’s easy – just sign up, indicate ten books or DVDs that you’re willing to send to other people, and you receive two credits that you can use to request that books (or DVDs) be sent to you (they cost one credit each). When someone requests one of your books, wrap it up, send it out (it costs about $2), and you’ll get another credit. The end result is that you can swap DVDs and books you don’t want for DVDs and books you do want for about $2 a pop, which is a lot cheaper than buying them.

I’ve been using both services for years and I’ve had nothing but success with them. When I want to watch or read something new, those sites are my first stop – there’s nothing better than clicking a few times and getting the book or movie you want in the mail without paying a cent.

Set up a “deal monitoring” page
A while back, I wrote about a clever trick I use for automatically finding Amazon deals on my Google home page. That’s just the start – you can use the Google homepage to automatically find all sorts of deals you might be interested in using the same FeedSifter + iGoogle trick described in that article.

Follow certain Twitter search terms. Go to Twitter Search, type in the search terms you want, do the search, then note the “Feed for this query” link over on the right. You can put that link into iGoogle and automatically see those results on your iGoogle homepage.

Follow certain deal blogs. You can simply follow the feeds of good deal blogs as well, like MoneySavingMom, or filter their postings using the feed filtering trick I described above.

Keep a list of links to deal sites. Other deal sites like FatWallet do not offer a feed that you can track, so you may want to make a list of these bargain sites and include them on that page.

Doing all of these things enables you to see tons of bargains and deals at one glance when you open your web browser. It takes some time to set up, but once it’s working, you can see tons of deals very quickly any time you want.

Start a “deal” blog
If you want to carry that “deal monitoring” idea a bit further, why not set up a “deal” blog? You can easily start such a blog at Blogger to share the best deals you find with others. Just share the deals that seem to appeal to you the most along with a bit of commentary and you’ve started something that others might want to follow, plus you’re quite likely to discover tons of new deals via comments and people connecting with you. Put up an ad or two and you’ll earn a bit of money in the process.

A blog is a great way to share the things you discover with others, meet new people, and earn a few cents. Combining it with deal tracking is a great way to combine a money-saving hobby with a money-earning one.

Set up a Roth IRA
Many people out there think they should be saving for retirement, but it seems like a huge obstacle. How does one even get started on something like that? The truth is you can actually get started right at your desk. Many investment houses have Roth IRA plans that are easy to sign up for – all you need is a web browser. From there, you can set up a small automatic contribution from your checking account into that Roth IRA. This is exactly how I signed up for my Roth IRA through Vanguard.

The first step is to make sure a Roth IRA is right for you. Are you eligible for a retirement plan through your work and, if so, do they provide matching contributions into that plan? If that’s the case, it’s worth signing up for their plan just to get the match. Is your income under the limits for a Roth IRA? If you earn less than $100K, you’re fine, but if not, you’ll want to check the eligibility rules. Also, are you currently earning significantly more than you expect to bring in in retirement? If so, then the Roth IRA might not help you in terms of taxes – look for a normal IRA for your savings, or see if there is a 401(k) or 403(b) plan available at your place of employment.

Who should you invest with? There are a lot of different investing houses that offer Roth IRAs – do some research yourself and read the opinions of others. I use Vanguard for mine and I couldn’t be happier.

What should you invest in? For most people, a simple “target retirement” index fund is the best choice. It automatically balances your retirement savings for you, keeping you aggressively in stocks when you’re young and moving you to more stable bonds and cash as you grow closer to retirement. Most investment houses offer “target retirement” options.

Once you’ve made up your mind, though, signing up for a Roth IRA is actually quite easy. Just fill out the online forms, set up an automatic deduction from your checking account, and watch your retirement savings begin to build up.

Dig into your community calendar
Bored? Don’t know what to do this weekend? It’s likely that your community has quite a few free events going on this weekend, some of which might be of interest to you. Visit your town’s website – and the websites of towns near yours – and see what’s on the community calendar. Free concerts, free community festivals, cheap meals, and countless other things might be in the offing right under your nose – and it’s well worth a few minutes to find them.

Good luck!

The post Nine Ways to Save Money at Your Desk in the Next Hour appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

If you’d like to take a peek, feel free to check out my own updates. I also make Simple Dollar updates available on Twitter.

Anyway, one of the hottest topics among online marketers and bloggers is how exactly someone can use Twitter effectively to gain a following and perhaps grow one’s business. Twitter is particularly interesting in this regard because it allows one person to carry on something of a conversation with a large crowd of people that want to hear what they’re saying. Take my own account, for example: if I send an update, I’m effectively talking to 2,000 people who have chosen to hear what I have to say.

Surprisingly, out of this creative explosion has come a ton of bargains. Quite a few people have jumped on Twitter as a way to provide coupons for their business in a very inexpensive way. Others have written computer programs that scour the ‘net for bargains and post them automatically to Twitter. Still others are exploring giveaways and contests.

I’ve followed quite a few Twitterers who are trying these things and I’ve found ten well worth sticking with. Even if you don’t find them worth following, you may find this post worth bookmarking so that you can check in on these accounts from time to time.

DellOutlet – Dell already has excellent prices on computer systems, but they’re giving out some incredible deals directly on Twitter via the DellOutlet account. There are at least two items that I’m considering buying from Dell, so I’m just waiting until they pop up with great coupons on here. If you’re considering upgrading your PC, this is one that’s well worth following.

amazondeals – Every day, Amazon throws up a few “lightning deals” on their site, which are simply individual items sold at a pretty stiff discount for just an hour or two. I tend to follow these pretty closely, as there are often deals on there that can be “turned” for a profit or can be given as gifts later on (several of our Christmas gifts came from this feature). Amazon has chosen to share these on Twitter, which has made it very easy for me to keep tabs on these deals.

AmazonSteals – This one’s similar to the above “amazondeals” account, except this one isn’t directly affiliated with Amazon and it also digs deeper into specific Amazon categories to find steeply discounted items. It actually forms a very nice pair with amazondeals for digging up great deals buried within Amazon.

amazonmp3 – A legal mp3 album every day for $2. That’s basically what this account offers. The mix is widely varied, but I find about one album a month that’s well worth it for me (most recently, Urban Hymns by The Verve, which I listened to over and over again about twelve years ago).

dealyzer – This account seems to simply scavenge the web for huge discounts of all kinds. The mix is quite varied, but I find things regularly on here that are worth following up on (for example, I got the Planet Earth documentary set for my son for $34 shipped directly from Discovery because of this account).

shoppersshop – This is a very low traffic version of dealyzer. Outside of the pre-holiday sales, there’s only about one update a week or so, but when they come, they’re almost always well worth it. I actually found several of the other accounts listed on this page by following shopperssshop.

DealUniversity – Here’s another strong deal aggregator, but this one focuses almost exclusively on electronics deals. Their picks really are a mixed bag, but there are enough gems that come through to make it worthwhile if you are good at sniffing out deals on tech items.

cheaptweet – Cheaptweet is basically just an aggregation of the top picks from CheapTweet.com, which itself just scours Twitter for sales and other deals and allows users to vote up the best of the lot. There’s a fair amount of conversation in there, too, but when the deals come through, they’re usually good ones.

booksamillion – Run by the folks behind the Books-A-Million book chain, this account offers up deals on … books. Following this account is like shuffling through a good bargain table at a bookstore – you won’t be interested in most of it, but every once in a while a dirt-cheap new book will float through.

SmartyPig – I felt it appropriate to mention SmartyPig here, since I’ve been following them practically since their inception. SmartyPig is an online savings account with a goal-setting twist. So why mention their Twitter account? Every month, they give away a SmartyPig account with $100 in it on their Twitter feed (and their methods for determining winners is both transparent and entertaining). The traffic on here is pretty low, too – most of their Tweets are related to their monthly giveaway.

Do you know any other Twitterers that offer good deals on Twitter? Let us know in the comments!

The post Using Twitter to Save Money: Ten People I’ve Found Worth Following for Savings appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

A great idea. So that’s just what I did. Here are seven websites I used to directly save money over the last week, my exact purchases and savings, and how much cash they saved me. I’m not including banking or investing sites here – just sites I use to literally spend less money.

PaperBackSwap
PaperBackSwap is arguably our biggest regular saver (and one I’ve waxed ecstatic about on The Simple Dollar before). My wife and I both spend multiple hours a day reading – it’s our most constant hobby – but between the library, PaperBackSwap, and my wife’s use of ManyBooks.net on her Kindle, we basically haven’t bought a book in ages.

In a nutshell, PaperBackSwap works like this: you sign up, list ten books you’re willing to trade by mail, and the site gives you two credits. A book costs one credit – you “spend” one of those credits on the site to get any book they have listed sent to you. Every time you send a book to someone else, you get a credit.

Here are the books I’ve requested in the past week from PaperBackSwap (and a nice peek into my current literary tastes):
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
… and I also ordered The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion to be shipped to my mother, but I won’t count that one.

Assuming each used book is worth $2, that means I’ve saved $12 this week because of PaperBackSwap. While this isn’t entirely, perfectly accurate (I likely would have used the library and gotten other books), these books are now mine for as long as I like and I can mark up the margins and such as much as I want (which I often do if I’m really trying to understand a book).

SwapTree
While I love using PaperBackSwap and SwapADVD (below) for trading books and DVDs, respectively, there’s really no similar service for video games. At the same time, I like to play a wide variety of games for my Wii and for my Nintendo DS, particularly interesting puzzle games that make me think. Most games, though, intrigue me for a while, then I grow bored with them, so unsurprisingly, I want to trade them off. I used to take them to used game sellers, but I’ve started using SwapTree.com instead.

SwapTree is sort of like PaperBackSwap in that you’re swapping items online. The only catch is that it actually forces you into a direct one-on-one trade. If you list an item, someone else must have it already on their wishlist in order for you to trade it. There’s no way to get rid of a lot of stuff you don’t want (like when you clean out your book collection) and build up credit on there. You have to want something right now.

As a result, I prefer other services for trading some things, but this service works really well for video games.

In just the last week, I traded Resident Evil 4 (a shooting game that bored me to death) for Zack and Wiki (an adventure/puzzle game in the Monkey Island/King’s Quest mold). In essence, this was a free game. If I had bought it used (and traded in RE 4), it probably would have cost me $5-10, so in that respect, SwapTree saved me about $7.50 (or so).

FatWallet.com Forums
The FatWallet.com Forums are the best place to keep an eye out for extraordinary tech deals. If you need a particular piece of computer hardware, be patient and keep an eye on these forums. A friend of mine picked up an ultra-portable 7″ laptop with solid state storage and ridiculous battery life (7 or 8 hours) for $299.

My story from the last week? The MicroSD card in my phone stopped working, meaning I couldn’t store many pictures at all on my cell phone. So I wanted an ultra-cheap MicroSD card to replace it, preferably one at least a gigabyte in size. Bingo. I saved $3 from about two minutes of web surfing.

If I go on a book tour (a possibility), I might also go for one of those ultra-small ultra-light laptops just for writing while on the road. Guess where I’ll be watching for the right deal on it?

Coupons.com
Coupons.com is the site my wife and I use most frequently for coupons. My wife is actually the maven here, more than I am – she searches the site a couple times a week for coupons, particularly for ones that match our upcoming shopping list. For example, she found a $3 off Pert Plus coupon that we used to replace the shampoo and conditioner in our downstairs shower (the one that guests use) – it was free after the coupon.

At Coupons.com, things are pretty straightforward. It’s basically like going through one of those Sunday newspaper flyers online, except you just mark the ones you want and at the end you click on a “print” button and the ones you selected pop right out of your printer, easy as pie. We find it useful to use it after we’ve got our shopping list ready to go so we can find coupons that match it.

I tried to keep track of the Coupons.com coupons we used in the past week and came up with a total of $7 saved – two instances of the Pert Plus coupon, and two $0.50 savings on yogurt.

SwapADVD
SwapADVD is a sister service to PaperBackSwap where you can trade DVDs by mail. When you sign up, you just list ten DVDs you own that you’re willing to trade and the site gives you a credit, which you can use to request any DVD on their site. Whenever someone requests one of your DVDs, mail it out, and when they receive it, you get another credit. You can list as many DVDs as you want. My DVD collection is tiny, so I’ve never sent out a DVD via SwapADVD (yet – I have several I intend to swap soon) – instead, you can actually transfer extra credits from PaperBackSwap into SwapADVD (and since I’ve shipped out quite a few books via PaperBackSwap, I just pulled some of those credits into SwapADVD). I prefer it to Netflix simply because there’s no monthly fee at all. Once you have the DVD, just hold onto it as long as you want with no cost, then when you finally do watch it, just trade it again.

Anyway, over the last week, I’ve requested Road to Perdition, Adaptation, Thank You for Smoking, and Crash, just so that we have a few new interesting films to watch on those rare evenings when the kids go to bed early and we want to cuddle up with a glass of wine and a good movie.

Assuming a used DVD is worth $3, that means SwapADVD saved us $12 in the past week.

Home Depot’s Home How-To Site
I’m absolutely atrocious at home improvement tasks, but we’ve been wanting to install a ceiling fan in both my office and in the kids’ bedroom. I’ve been really hesitant to work on the project and wanted to hire someone to do it (if you’ll remember, I was trying to talk myself into it just a little over a week ago), but I finally bucked down and went for it, using their wonderful guide to installing a ceiling fan, including an excellent summary video. This guide directly saved me the cost of hiring someone to do it – $40 or so, perhaps.

Home Depot’s Know How section is excellent. There are useful guides on all sorts of projects, and I’m trying to build up the courage to use it to replace a toilet. Almost always, I’m glad I’ve done it myself afterwards, but I have a lot of apprehension about it beforehand – guides like these help push me towards the goal.

Upcoming Events Calendars
My family and I are constantly on the lookout for interesting things to do that get us out and about in the community (and in neighboring ones), enjoying new things, meeting new people, and so on. The problem is finding interesting ones – it’s easy to go to places that are expensive and have fun, but there’s always free stuff going on.

That’s why we hit the community calendars of several area communities to see what’s going on, particularly the Ames, Iowa and Ankeny, Iowa ones, along with a huge number of community calendars for small towns in Story, Polk, Marshall, Boone, Jasper, and Dallas Counties. We’ll even go further for interesting stuff, such as Pella’s Tulip Festival in the spring.

Community events provide a great deal of our entertainment. Let’s assume each community event saves us $5 as a family if we choose to do that instead of something else. In the last week, community calendars saved us $20 – it pointed us to a free public fireworks display on the 4th, towards a farmers’ market, towards a cultural festival in a nearby small town, and towards a free concert, too.

Find and bookmark some community calendars near you and check them out when you’re planning your weekend. You might just find some interesting stuff free in the community.

Totaling It Up
Let’s look at the total savings!
PaperBackSwap: $12
SwapTree: $7.50
FatWallet.com Forums: $3
Coupons.com: $7
SwapADVD: $12
Home Depot: $40
Community calendars: $20

We used the web to directly save $101.50 in the past week in free (or vastly reduced) entertainment, coupons, and home improvement tasks. This easily pays for the cost we put into it.

What about that time investment? Our time investment for this stuff is surprisingly small. We have all of these sites bookmarked and we only use them when we have a specific purpose in mind (“How do I fix that leaky toilet? I need to replace that SD card! My bookshelf is getting thin! Is there anything interesting to do Sunday afternoon?). When you know what you’re going in for, it doesn’t take long at all – just a moment or two, and it’s certainly quicker than doing the equivalent things offline.

Give some of these services a try – I hope you’ll find them as useful (and cost-saving) as we do.

The post Seven Websites That Saved Me Money in the Last Week appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

While it’s grown beyond that original plan, it certainly has fulfilled the motivational part of the goal. I’m motivated every day to keep my finances in line, to the point that it’s become an integrated part of my life. It may have happened without The Simple Dollar, but the motivational factor of putting my situation out so publicly was an enormous motivator.

The best part is such public motivation can be done by anyone and can be applied to any goal. Here’s how.

Define Your Goal
The first step in achieving something is to clearly state what you’re trying to achieve. What are you aiming for?

Figure out what you want to change. Most of us already have this part figured out. We know what we want – we want better health, a better figure, a greater financial life, a better job, a business of our own. The problem is that goals are often nebulous and thus are easy to pass through – just like a cloud. So, once you know the change you want to implement…

Define exactly what it means to achieve that change. If you want to lose weight, figure out your target weight. If you want to improve your financial state, figure out a target debt level or target net worth. Want a better job? Define exactly what that job is. Know exactly what your goal is and exactly how you can determine if you’ve made it.

Devise a plan to take you to that exact goal. Now that you have a specific goal, what steps do you need to take to get there? Let’s say your goal is a specific net worth. That means you need to reduce spending, increase your income, or both. What’s your plan of attack? What about a target weight or BMI? That will likely involve dietary changes and an exercise regimen. What’s your plan of attack?

Define Daily (or Near-Daily) Metrics for that Goal
Once you’ve got your goal specified and have a plan in place to reach that goal, you also need to define very specific microgoals along the way. Losing fifty pounds is not something you can grab ahold of today, but losing one pound is. Exercising for thirty minutes every day isn’t something you can grab ahold of, but exercising just today for thirty minutes is something you can do.

Look at your specific goal and your plan to get there. What sort of regular, repetitive steps will you have to take to get there? If you need to eat better, your regular, repetitive step comes with each meal. If you need to exercise, your regular, repetitive step is a daily (or near-daily) exercise session. If you need to start saving, a spending log is perfect. If you need to start building up your resume or just learn something new, learning something each day and documenting it is a great way to go. A musical instrument? Daily practice is perfect.

The point is to define those tiny steps you need to take each day. Make them small enough so that you actually can take those steps each day and you’ll find yourself walking right toward your goal.

Announce Your Progress with those Metrics to the World
One big problem, though, is motivation. How can you keep motivated to take those small steps? Some people have that internal motivation, but others are often driven to be motivated by others, and that’s when online tools can help.

Twitter is a great way to publicly log your progress. Twitter lets you publicly post quick reports that are 140 characters in length – perfectly long to note spending, eating, a daily weight check, learning, your daily practice, and so on. If you’d like to write longer entries, starting a free blog like the one at WordPress is a great way to go. Putting it out there publicly means that some strangers might visit, but you can cover that up by being fairly anonymous – using just your first name, for example. Even better, strangers often provide great motivation in the little comments that they make.

This daily logging routine is a way to provide a check against yourself. Did you do what you were supposed to do today? Did you take that little step towards your big goal?

The real motivator, though, is letting your friends and family see it. When you start, send out that URL to supportive family and friends and ask them to take a look and keep tabs on it. Almost any caring family member or friend will happily do so and probably send you supportive notes along the way. It takes some personal courage to share things in this fashion, but the rewards are great – you’ll find yourself with a support network that’s intimately familiar with your progress, knows what your goal is, and best of all knows you well and cares about you. These people can be the best motivators of all.

How I’m Doing It
I’m actually using Twitter myself for this very thing. Recently, my wife and I made a strong commitment to get into better shape, and I elected to track my progress publicly on Twitter. I set up a fresh new Twitter account and am posting brief updates each day on how I’m doing. To up the pressure on myself, I shared the link with friends.

And now I’m going to up the pressure even higher.

http://twitter.com/trenthealth

That’s my health log in Twitter form. That’s right, I’m revealing my daily BMI, diet, and exercise progress to 50,000 readers. If you’re interested in following along, bookmark it. I estimate it’ll have 5-10 quick blips a day.

My goal with it is to use Wii Fit, the lifetime fitness ladder, and a better diet (basically following Michael Pollan’s guidance from In Defense of Food) to push myself to two goals: a BMI of 22 (which my doctor recommended as a good long-term target for my body build – I’m 6’6″ and have the shoulder width of an NFL linebacker) and to consider riding a leg of RAGBRAI next year. I anticipate both goals taking a year or more, actually.

We’ll see where I get, but I can certainly say this: the idea that there are many friends and readers watching is both an exhilarating rush and also makes me a bit nervous. Having that many eyeballs on my progress is one big motivator.

The post Using Twitter and Blogging to Motivate Yourself Towards Personal Finance and Other Personal Goals appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

One of the biggest tools I used during this process was PearBudget, which was a free Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that helped automate many of the basic tasks of developing a budget. That spreadsheet is still available for free online – it requires Microsoft Excel, but it’s still one heck of a useful tool. While I didn’t end up using that PearBudget sheet for my own budget (I used it to evaluate a lot of ideas, but I had a lot of fun hacking Excel to do things exactly how I visualized in my head – not really in a way that makes sense to anyone else), I used it a ton in figuring out my own ideas and assembling them.

Not too long ago, I discovered that the people who developed PearBudget were converting it into a web application – and I was immediately apprehensive. I am very concerned about personal information security, especially when it comes to personal finance and the modern web. Here’s what I wrote on that issue a while back when reviewing other online personal finance tools:

The problem is something I like to call “information creep.” When you use these tools, you expose your personal information to them. With Mint, for example, you transmit your account information through mint.com and then through Yodlee to aggregate your info. Intuit (the Quicken Online folks) communicates directly with your account providers to scoop in information. Wesabe is perhaps the least onerous – you don’t directly submit account information to them, ever – but their tool isn’t as robust because of this limitation and they still do create a history of your spending.

In all three cases, you’re building up a substantial data set about yourself. With Quicken Online, they don’t milk the data (at least not on the surface) but you are charged a fee for their service. With Mint, it’s free – but they make their cash by showing you targeted ads based on that data. Again, Wesabe has the best method at the moment – they’re currently handling everything via venture capital money and plan a “Wesabe Pro” to generate revenue.

If that doesn’t concern you, consider this: the more information you have out there about yourself, the more likely it is that some sort of identity theft will happen no matter how secure individual sites are. It only takes one little accident for your data to get into the wrong hands – and even the most secure of places can have a little flaw. The more places you put your data, the more “little flaws” you’re exposed to.

I had zero interest in using PearBudget Online unless there was a compelling solution to this issue – and their solution is actually pretty good. Basically, it doesn’t want any of your account information. None. Instead, you just enter your expenses and income as raw numbers and add them into the categories you’ve defined yourself. Since your account info there is essentially anonymous and there’s no association to your real financial data, the privacy concern is almost nonexistent.

Even better, PearBudget distinguishes itself from other such online tools by not including ads in the service – Mint, for example, uses targeted advertising to cover the bills. PearBudget has a 30 day free trial, then charges $3 a month for the service – a nominal fee if you find it useful.

So how does it work?

A Brief Walkthrough of PearBudget Online
When you first visit PearBudget Online, you’re guided through a wizard that lets you define the categories in your budget (they offer a bunch of suggestions and groupings, but let you add your own as you want). You then identify them as regular expenses (ones you have every month) or irregular ones (like property taxes), identify how much you spend monthly on the regular expenses and annually on the irregular ones, enter how much income you get (you can identify as many income sources as you want), and you’re done! It generates a spending plan for you. Seriously, try it out – it only takes a few minutes and it’s really slick. To try it out, I entered a bunch of dummy data and it took me about three minutes – but when I saw how slick and useful it was, I wanted to do it with real data – and so I did.

Once you’ve set up your categories, you basically have three modes: plan (where you look at your spending plan and possibly add new spending categories as you see fit), enter (where you enter receipts as you spend money throughout the month), and review (where you look over how your spending matches your budget).

I was genuinely impressed with how slick the software is. For most people trying to figure out a budget, it’s a great way to dig in and get started very quickly and effortlessly. It’s very flexible – you can define your own categories however you like, which is something that I think is essential when budgeting in the real world, as everyone groups their spending in different ways. PearBudget lets you group it pretty much however you want.

My Thoughts
First, the bad. I really only have one significant criticism when it comes to PearBudget Online. First, it does cost $3 a month after the 30 day trial. While that’s a nominal fee (in my eyes), some people will be hesitant to dive in and really try the tool because if they get involved with the tool, that $3 a month effectively becomes another bill. One option the creators might want to consider is to have a “free” account that displays ads or a paid account that does not. I, for one, would pay the $3 not to have the ads. Alternately, a person could just do the whole thing offline and use the old PearBudget spreadsheet for free.

Aside from that, the tool is impressive to use and handles my security concerns better than any online tool I’ve seen. If you’re trying to budget, I heartily recommend giving PearBudget Online a try. If you’re concerned about the $3 a month fee (and for people on tight budgets, this can be an issue), give the old PearBudget spreadsheet a whirl – it helped me out once upon a time.

The post PearBudget: An Effective Way to Dip Your Toes into Budgeting appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

It’s not perfect yet (there’s some limited ingredient misidentification), but the potential for an amazing amount of utility is in place. I found a wonderful simple grilled fish recipe very quickly just playing around with the tool. Quite simply, this is a wonderful online tool for anyone who cooks at home.

Naturally, I began to look at this tool through the lens of how can it save money for me and my readers. Here are some ways you can apply this tool to save money in your own kitchen.

Dig through the cupboards. You likely have some stuff buried in the back that you haven’t thought about using in ages. Plug it into this tool, add a few other seemingly compatible things you have lying around, and see what recipes this tool gives you. Ideally, you’ll come up with a number of interesting recipes.

Sit down with your grocery flyer. Find out what foods are on sale this week, then use the tool to see what sort of recipes you can make from these items that are on sale. Fish fillets, lemon juice, and potatoes are on sale? Pop all of those into this tool and it’ll spit out some recipes. Just go through the whole flyer and enter everything that seems tasty and you’ll find a big bundle of complete and nearly-complete recipes just waiting to be used.

Buy in bulk. If you have an opportunity to buy food in bulk, this tool can be phenomenal for helping you generate a ton of ideas for what to do with it. We’re considering buying a quarter of a cow for our deep freezer, so we’ve been looking at lots of beef recipes. I entered “beef” into this tool and was flooded with ideas, so I started thinking of foods that, in my mind, would be tasty with beef. There are more ideas here than I can possibly use, and I’m further convinced that the purchase is a good idea that will save us some real money.

Inspire yourself. Often, the one thing that gets me into the kitchen after a long day at work is inspiration – the idea that I can quickly cook something quite delicious for my family. All I have to do for some inspiration is to put in a thing or two that sound really tasty to me right now – say, chicken and parmesan cheese, and see what I can find. Then I keep adding stuff I know I have around the kitchen until I find a recipe.

SuperCook has very quickly become a part of our family’s meal planning routine, and it’s already saved us quite a bit of money by helping us figure out what to do with what we already have in the cupboard in conjunction with what’s on sale at the grocery store. Check it out.

The post Using SuperCook to Save on Your Grocery Bill appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

What Do These Tools Do?

In a nutshell, Quicken Online, Mint, and Wesabe seek to provide centralized perspectives on your personal financial situation. They do things like categorize your credit card and checking spending into groups like “hobbies” and “food,” keep track of your net worth over a long period, and can even help you define and work towards goals. They aggregate your information automatically, helping you to see your spending and saving across all accounts at once. In other words, they’re all pretty nifty and offer some serious benefits.

Quicken Online
Having tried all three, I found Quicken Online to be the most usable and useful – but that may be because I am familiar with the desktop version of Quicken. Basically, Quicken Online is a web-based version of the classic Quicken software package. It collects information from all of your accounts and lets you review it in countless ways. You can set up goals, view the changes in your spending and saving over time (as you build up the data), and even helps you manage the lag between issuing a check and having it received by the people you’re sending it to. It’s easily the most feature-rich of the three and it’s ad-free, but it’s also the only one with a fee – $2.99 a month. Out of the three packages, I’m partial to this one – if I were to commit to using one of the three wholeheartedly, it’d be this one.

Mint
Mint is probably the most visually stunning and intuitive to use, but it’s also the one that makes me the most nervous about security. Mint offers many of the same services as Quicken Online, but without a fee – instead, they target you with very specific ad offers based on analysis of how you actually spend your money. If I was having trouble getting my finances in order, this would make me somewhat nervous, as it seems to be tempting fate. Still, their interface is stunning and, minus the offers, is probably the most useable of the three.

Wesabe
Wesabe is the most established of the three, is also free, and is likely the most secure. They never take any of your account information – instead, you use a tool on your own computer to build a report without account data in it, and this report is shipped off to Wesabe. They never see your specific account data. Also, they don’t mine their data to place targeted ads – instead, their business model revolves around selling “Pro” accounts with more features. It also has a lot of social networking aspects – you can quickly find people with similar financial goals and find out, in a broad sense, how your spending compares to the Wesabe community. It’s actually quite fun.

The Big Drawback

First of all, I don’t question that each of these sites have integrity when it comes to security. In fact, Wesabe was the first of these three tools to launch and I strongly criticized their security initially – and was pleasantly surprised by the openness of the company to discuss and resolve these issues. I believe that Mint, Wesabe, and Quicken Online all intend to keep your data safe.

But that doesn’t solve the problem.

The problem is something I like to call “information creep.” When you use these tools, you expose your personal information to them. With Mint, for example, you transmit your account information through mint.com and then through Yodlee to aggregate your info. Intuit (the Quicken Online folks) communicates directly with your account providers to scoop in information. Wesabe is perhaps the least onerous – you don’t directly submit account information to them, ever – but their tool isn’t as robust because of this limitation and they still do create a history of your spending.

In all three cases, you’re building up a substantial data set about yourself. With Quicken Online, they don’t milk the data (at least not on the surface) but you are charged a fee for their service. With Mint, it’s free – but they make their cash by showing you targeted ads based on that data. Again, Wesabe has the best method at the moment – they’re currently handling everything via venture capital money and plan a “Wesabe Pro” to generate revenue.

If that doesn’t concern you, consider this: the more information you have out there about yourself, the more likely it is that some sort of identity theft will happen no matter how secure individual sites are. It only takes one little accident for your data to get into the wrong hands – and even the most secure of places can have a little flaw. The more places you put your data, the more “little flaws” you’re exposed to.

What Do I Do?

I think tools like Quicken Online are great if you have a plethora of accounts to manage and have a hard time seeing the big picture. In that case, the benefits exceed the drawbacks – tools like these can really help you get a grip on things.

In my opinion, though, it’s not the best solution. The best solution is minimizing your accounts so that you’re not bogged down in account management. Do you need eight credit card accounts? Kill the ones you don’t use, save for perhaps your oldest one, and try to get down to two or (at most) three. How about five different retirement plans? Roll them together if you can – spend the time to see what your best option is and you’ll find yourself with a lot less effort to manage accounts.

Right now, I have one checking account, one savings account, two credit card accounts, one investment account, and one retirement account. It’s simple enough that I don’t need to use a tool like Quicken Online to see all of this information, and I don’t spend much time with account management either. I keep my net worth calculations in a spreadsheet – and it’s pretty clear from that data whether I’m doing well or doing poorly.

If you keep things simple to begin with, you don’t need complex tools to manage it. Quicken Online, Mint, and Wesabe are nifty tools, but you can often get just as much benefit by just simplifying your money – and then not expose yourself to even a tiny security risk, monthly fees, or highly targeted ads.

Other Perspectives

I felt it appropriate to include some additional viewpoints on these products from other blogs that I trust.

J.D. at Get Rich Slowly thinks Quicken Online looks promising, likes Mint with some caveats, and thinks Wesabe is a stellar Quicken supplement.

Lifehacker offers screenshot tours of Quicken Online, Wesabe, and Mint.

The post Online Personal Finance Analysis Tools: Some Thoughts on Quicken Online, Mint, and Wesabe appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

What are they? These tools are basically online versions of Quicken. They allow you to aggregate all of your personal finance data in one place so you can get a clear picture of how you’re doing. Most of them have very slick user interfaces, too. Even better, they allow you to share some aspects of the data so you can compare goals with other users.

Yet, even though the features of many of them are amazing and I can easily see the usefulness of them, I haven’t yet reviewed any of them in detail, nor do I plan to.

Why not? All of these systems have one key issue that concerns me: personal security. I’m not talking about whether your data is safe from hackers. What concerns me is trusting my key personal finance information to a Silicon Valley startup company. Almost all of these products come from relatively small, non-public startups that are currently running on venture capital money.

To me, this is a giant red flag waving around in the sky. I watched an awful lot of dot-coms blow up in 2001 and their data went away to … who knows where. Where will the data go if these companies go under? Will the owners dispose of that data ethically? Will they sell it? Most of them have privacy disclaimers, but a legal document doesn’t really help if your bank login information and your credit card data is floating around on a laptop in Armenia.

The one key piece that these organizations forget is that your personal information and logins are extremely valuable. Your logins provide access to your money and your personal data, and if these logins fall into the wrong hands, bad things can potentially happen – lost funds, identity theft, and so on.

The best solution to this is to minimize the number of places that have your key personal data. I trust my banks and my credit card holders – and that’s pretty much it. The fewer places that my personal data resides, the better.

This sounds like an indictment of these tools, but it’s not – they have a lot of potential. But that potential lies with integration with the banks themselves, like ING or HSBC. Make it so that the access to your accounts lie with the bank itself, the entity that already has your information, and the risk to personal data issues is reduced. These tools shouldn’t be a separate entity from these institutions, but integrated into their online interface.

In other words, Mint et. al. should evolve to be the front end for online banking services. I like the ING Direct interface (after all, it’s my primary bank), but if that site had the interface of Mint, with all of the interesting tools and such and was already within the secure environment of a bank that already had my data, I’d feel far more secure about trying out such a tool.

In the future, I hope to jump into such a tool head first – my enthusiasm would know no limits. But the security issues keep me from signing up with this first generation of Web 2.0 personal finance tools.

Want to see what I’m talking about? Here are three of the best Web 2.0 online personal finance tools. I recommend looking at them, but I don’t recommend giving them any personal information.

Mint is the “hot” one at the moment, having recently won the TechCrunch 40 “contest.” I also think their user interface has the most potential if used in the ways I describe above.
Wesabe is probably the most personable of the lot – the CEO will directly answer your questions. I also think their security model is the best of those out there right now, but it still makes me nervous.
Yodlee is the most established of the group, but the interface isn’t nearly as slick.

The post Web 2.0 and Personal Finance: Why I’m Not Using Yodlee, Mint, or Wesabe – Yet appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

One of the most valuable things that a person can do when learning about personal finance issues is to get a diversity of perspectives and ideas. The more ideas you learn about and the more perspectives you get, the better your undersanding of personal finance will be and the more likely you are to make strong choices.

The advent of blogging has made this much easier than before – it used to be that you would have to read lots of personal finance books and magazines to get a variety of perspectives. Now, with just a mouse click or two, you can read lots of different perspectives and ideas for free from the convenience of your own computer.

I encourage you to spend an hour digging into the archives of a personal finance blog so you can really begin to learn the basic perspectives of a particular site. Here are some things you can do, using The Simple Dollar as an example at first, then giving you some pointers to other sites if you want to look for excellent ideas and opinions elsewhere.

Read the “About” page. Find out what kind of perspective the blogger is offering. Quite often, this will clue you in to some of the assumptions of the writing on the site.

Sample some of the “best” posts. Look for a “best of” section and, if you find it, sample a few of those articles. This will give you some very tasty morsels to start off with.

Dig into the archives. Most sites provide an archive of some sort that’s easy to browse through; on The Simple Dollar, the best place to start is probably the one page chronology of all posts. I usually find it best to start from the beginning with a site, not necessarily reading everything, but focusing on those articles that are interesting to me.

Ask questions. Don’t hesitate to leave a comment or directly contact a blog if you have questions. I strongly urge you to be complimentary if you write to someone, though – if you look through a blog’s archives, recognize that all of the writing is a labor of love by a single person (or a small group) and they’re basically giving the material away for free for you to read, paying for the server space where that information is stored.

Here are a few blogs that are worth digging into that I particularly enjoy:

Get Rich Slowly has an about page and has a wonderful single page archive to get you started.

Money, Matter, and More Musings has an about page, a page of the most popular posts, and also a single page of extensive archives.

Generation X Finance has an “about” page and a extensive, well organized archive.

Any of the other sites listed in the sidebar here are also worth digging into.

The post The One Hour Project: Dig Into A Personal Finance Blog appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Below, I picked out ten articles from all the submissions that I enjoyed the best, labeling them Editor’s Choice. From these, I picked out one sentence and included it in this post, so you can get a flavor of the writing style before you click!

After the ten Editor’s Choice picks, you’ll find a long list of entrants from various personal finance blogs. I strongly encourage you to visit articles that interest you!

Editor’s Choice

Sometimes I get really mad when I think about the 13 years that I have been working and not saving because I was financially ignorant. I have a 17 year old brother that is looking for his first job and, knowing my parents, is just as clueless as I was.
Saving A Sibling In Debt (@ one snarky chica with issues)

I’ve compiled a comprehensive collection, organized by category, of 110 personal finance calculators and helpful tools. They’re free, found online and designed to help you find fast answers to your financial questions.
110 Personal Finance Calculators (@ millionaire mommy next door)

Small companies, like small ships, carry a high risk in the stock market and are more volatile. While investing in small company stocks, or small caps, can double your money, a single bad news can tank the stock. Big companies, like big ships, do not move as fast in the stock market but they are generally less responsive to the daily market fluctuations.
Understanding Stock Market Risk Tolerance: Big Ships vs. Small Ships (@ growing money)

You have a cellphone that works? Great, you are better off than most people in most other countries. You know what those newer ones do that yours still does? Make calls.
Want What You Have, Not What They Have (@ my two dollars)

In Silicon Valley, a lot of people have been fortunate enough to do quite well financially. And having worked as an engineer around here for almost two decades, I witnessed both some highs and lows in the technical and financial front.
Top 10 Wealth Building Ways Of Ordinary People (@ the digerati life)

The media feeds the frenzy that the sky is falling because that’s what the media does. But the hyped-up fear of the unknown is usually worse than reality. And the market is currently reflecting the full force of the (unknown) bad news.
Going Against The Flow (@ free money finance)

I had lunch with a friend who likes to talk money with me. She has financial savvy, but her partner mismanages almost every cent he earns. During lunch she howled, “Why doesn’t he just burn his money in a pile right in front of me? It would be the same thing as what he does with his money!”
Sleeping With Money: Navigating “You Did What With Our Money?” Moments (@ queercents)

Since both my and my wife’s parents live in Ukraine (as well as many relatives) the topic of international phone calls to Ukraine has never been off the table and we have probably tried every possible way to save on international calling. Here are a few tips that will help you call Ukraine (and other ex-Soviet countries) without braking the bank.
Calling To Russia And Ukraine – Money Saving Tips (@ pro bargain hunter)

The recent mine disaster in Huntington, Utah, in which 6 miners are still missing, has again brought national attention to the dangers of mining and other hazardous jobs. While there have been several mining disasters in the United States over the last 2 years, according to the United States Department Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, mining is not actually considered the most dangerous job in the US. In fact, it is not even in the top 10.
Is A Job Worth Your Life? (@ cash money life)

There are some burdens in life you carry forever. These are memories of things you wish you hadn’t done, but did nevertheless. Here is one such burden that I have been carrying for years.
The Weight Of Stolen Money (@ money, matter, and more musings)

Other Entries

5 Key Strategies For Getting Out Of Debt (@ the happy rock)

Current Mortgage Rates for Mortgage Refinance and Purchase Loans in US. (@ Mortgage Rates)

5 Signs You Might Be A Rate Chaser (@ online savings blog)

5 Things I Will Spend My Dimes On (@ lazy man and money)

7 Costly Retirement Savings Mistakes To Avoid (@ moolanomy)

7 Ways To Improve Your (Golf) Game On A Budget (@ life in the rough)

37 Tips, Facts, and Rules For Trading Stocks In A Bear Market (@ falk investing)

Attention Costco Shoppers (@ insureblog)

Best Cash Back Credit Card List On Gas, Groceries, Restaurants, Etc. (@ hustler money blog)

Blogging About Personal Finance Changes The Way We Think And Use Money (@ money ning)

Budgeting for Dummies, Part 1: Creating A Budget (@ i’ve paid for this twice already)

Car Dealer’s Worst Nightmare: Cash Or Pre-Arranged Loans (@ saving with me)

Car Purchase: Confessions & Justification (Cont.) (@ grad money matters)

Caveat Lector! PF Blogs Are For Fun And Entertainment (@ mapgirl’s fiscal challenge)

Classifying Your Debt: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (@ clever dude)

Debt Reduction Is For Everyone (@ living real)

Do You Have an Emergency Fund? – If Cash is King, Then Don’t Neglect His Good Looking Brother, the Prince of Credit! (@ teaspoon finance)

Emergency Funds: How Much Is Enough? (@ million dollar journey)

Envelope System Video Tutorial (Step By Step Guide To Using The Envelope System To Manage Your Cash) (@ no credit needed)

Features That Add Resale Value To A Home (@ everything finance)

Financial Cliché VI: Leveraging Is (NOT!) Only for Rich Individuals (@ the financial blogger)

Financial Decisions With The Right Information (@ to one million and beyond)

Flying On The Cheap (For The Airlines, Not For You) (@ brip blap)

FNBO Blunder: Due Diligence 2nd Request Email (@ home finance freedom)

FNBO Direct Is Scary (@ the sun’s financial diary)

GOYB Challenge: Help Your Husband Make More Money (@ sahmmy says)

How Do You Manage Your Financial Life? (@ quest for a million)

How I Keep My Sanity When The Equity Markets Are Volatile (@ ask mr. credit card)

How Real Returns Get In The Way Of A Good Plan (@ advanced personal finance)

How To Know Instantly You’re Being Conned (@ dough roller)

How The Subprime Problems Heare Affected Retirement Funds In Japan (@ journey 2 retirement)

How To Make Your Money Greener (@ gather little by little)

How To (Not) Ask For A Raise (@ money and such)

I Will Never Be Wealthy If I Am Not Already Rich (@ family finance blog)

It’s Not All About The Money – The Baglady On Evaluating Job Offers (@ the baglady)

It’s Okay To Spend Money (@ five cent nickel)

Job Search (@ college of cash)

Keeping The Right Balance Between Money And Leisure (@ mortgage blog)

LendingTree Review: Do You Really Win? (@ blueprint for financial prosperity)

Make Money From Credit Cards: 0% Balance Transfer Profit Calculator Tool (@ my money blog)

Making A Big Fuss Out Of An Adult Shopping In A Junior Section (@ around the sun)

Married Money (@ my money and my life)

Money and Apartments (@ indebted 2 you)

More On Buying Your Own Health Insurance (@ being frugal)

More On Retirement (@ the amatureist financial journey)

My Personal Experience On Getting Out Of Debts (@ journey to financial freedom)

New Or Used? You Make The Call (@ how i will be rich)

Other People’s Money (@ plonkee money)

Personal Finance Isn’t Rocket Science, It’s Self Motivation (@ saving advice)

Power of Association (@ money monk)

Retailer’s Anger Reveals How You Can Make Money On eBay (@ money smart life)

Shorting Stocks – For Experienced Traders Only (@ my wealth builder)

“Smart” Computers Are Turning The Stock Market Upside Down (@ breaking the shackles of the 9 to 5)

Snooping To Find The Value Of Someone Else’s Home (@ one frugal girl)

Take A Peek Under The Hood Of My Savings (@ saving explained)

Ten Interest-Saving Typs Your Credit Card Company Doesn’t Want You To Know (@ frugal underground)

The Big Idea (@ 1 man’s money)

The Complete Newbie’s Guide to Buying Your First House, Part 3 – Shopping for a Mortgage (@ make your nut)

The Dow Is Falling Through Support Levels – Is The Worst Yet To Come? (@ generation x finance)

The Infrequent Bills Account (@ chief family officer)

Top Business Credit Cards (@ hustlerama)

Top Personal Finance Books: A CompleteKit (@ fire finance)

Volatility and Mr. Market (@ financial reference)

What Do I Need To Retire? (@ financial dominance)

What Happens When Your Mortgage Lender Goes Out Of Business? (@ the finance buff)

What Is A Yen Carry Trade? (@ money relations)

Why You Should Keep Your Money Invested In A Declining Market (@ finance is personal)

When Your Mutual Fund Speaks For You, What Does It Say? (@ money and values)

Wild Week In The Market Causes The Fed To Intervene (@ smart money daily)

You’ve Left Your Job, Should You Rollover Your Retirement Funds? (@ moment on money)

The post Carnival of Personal Finance #114 appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

I thought I’d give this free document a walk-through similar to one of my book reviews, but shorter since you can download it and read it for yourself for free.

What’s Inside The Consumer Action Handbook?
The handbook is actually composed of four separate parts, though the first one provided the most interesting reading by far. The actual readable content is only about sixty pages; the last one hundred pages or so is a list of addresses and contact information for various consumer advocates and corporate customer service departments.

Part I – Be A Savvy Consumer
I found this first section to be an enjoyable read. It’s about fifty pages in length and is tightly jammed with basic information on tons of different consumer issues. A brief rundown: general buying tips, banking, cars, credit, education, employment, food and nutrition, health care, housing, insurance, internet, investing, phones, identity protection, privacy protection, home shopping, telemarketing and junk mail, travel, television, utilities, and wills and funerals. Each subject has about three pages or so devoted to it in a highly compressed fashion.

I learned a lot of interesting things from this part of the document – one item in particular saved me money right after I read it. We were about to purchase house insurance at the time I downloaded this and I realized that we were indeed insuring the lot’s value as well. This saved us a nice little bit on our home insurance.

Part II – Filing A Complaint
Many people have little idea how to appropriately handle a bad product or service. There are many techniques and avenues available to consumers who have purchased defective products or been exposed to faulty services and this section effectively summarizes these in just a few pages. This is excellent reference material to read if you purchase a faulty product and don’t know where to go in order to get a replacement or to make others aware of the issue.

Part III – Key Consumer Information Resources and Part IV – Consumer Assistance Directory
The rest of the document is an extremely thorough collection of contact information for consumer assistance of all kinds. The PDF is updated regularly to keep these addresses current, which means that it may be worthwhile to re-download this PDF on occasion. At the very least, once you’ve identified a useful contact from this list, visit the web site of that organization.

Is It Worth Downloading?
It’s an interesting read. For me, some of the information was almost common sense, while other pieces were quite intriguing. I’ve downloaded it and saved it in my reference materials folder on my desktop because I can see myself utilizing the information in the future, if for no other reason than to get a good starting place when seeking out who to contact about a consumer issue. If that’s of interest to you, download it and save it; if it’s not, the document is at least worth a perusal.

The post A Look At The Consumer Action Handbook appeared first on The Simple Dollar.