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tips
Put Impulse Spending To Work As A Savings Builder
By 10.24.07
If you’re the type of person who thinks “discretionary spending” means “I can buy what I want, when I want,” read this person’s idea for how to create an Impulse Buy Savings Plan. It gives you a methodology where you can effectively trap your impulse purchases in a cooling-off period, while also seeing how that money would look if it were saved instead.
Use Halloween Candy To Educate And Annoy Your Kids
By 10.24.07
Sometimes parents like to drive their kids crazy by showing up on Facebook, or listening to rap music, or professing that Zac Efron is a cutie-patooty, but Grad Money Matters suggests a whole new level of annoyance: use their Halloween candy to teach them about money. Here’s how: on Halloween night, you buy all their candy off of them, then give them a pre-set limit of how much they can spend each day to buy choice pieces back, and as the days go along, you drop the “prices” on the candy so that they can purchase more if they want or forego the sweets in order to increase their savings.
How To Carve A Pumpkin Without Severing An Artery
By 10.22.07
Its’ pumpkin carving time, folks, and while fake blood is cool—real blood isn’t.
Make Changing Credit Cards Across All Your Accounts Easier
By 10.19.07
If you’ve ever had to change your credit card number across a ton of different accounts, you know it’s a major hassle.
How To Have A Low-Budget Halloween
By 10.19.07
Are you too broke to go trick-or-treating this year? Good! More candy for the rest of us! But even though Halloween brings out the competitive sweet-tooth in us, we want to share Kiplinger’s tips on how to have a cheaper Halloween.Two of them—”get creative on costumes” and “follow a…
Take Action On Money Tips You Read Online
By 10.16.07
David over at MoneyNing urges us to all take action on the money tips we read online—not just read them and then forget them, or dismiss them as unrealistic, or tell ourselves they don’t apply to us. “We read the tips, agree that it makes so much sense, then we sit there and flip on TV to watch other people make money while we spend money watching them.”
How To Find An Executive's Phone Number Or Email Address
By 10.15.07
So you’ve exhausted the normal customer service routes and want to shoot your complaint to the top, but you don’t know how to reach that CEO or executive. Our resident contact info bloodhound, Dyan Flores, put together the tools and tricks she uses to sniff out executive customer service information.
3 Ways To Improve Your Online Shopping Experience
By 10.12.07
SmartMoney offers three tips to improve some of the most common down-sides of shopping online: too many results, not enough discounts, and dreaded shipping fees.
Budgeting Tip: Use What You Buy
By 10.12.07
A columnist at Get Rich Slowly describes how her family learned to focus on getting the most use out of the things they purchase, rather than using them once or twice and then moving on to the next new thing. While it sounds like an obvious tip, it can be a little harder to practice in real life—but, she writes, the results can be eye-opening.
6 Online Shopping Scams To Watch Out For
By 10.11.07
1. Missing Auction Goods – Auction fraud represents over a third of Internet scam complaints every year. Your safest bet is to pay with plastic so you gain the protections of the Fair Credit Billing Act. When plastic’s not an option, setting up an account through PayPal or BillPay that connects to your credit card is the next best bet.
Upgrade Or Repair Your Home With Eco-Friendly Products
By 10.10.07
Despite all the media attention, buying well-made, affordable products that are also environmentally sound is still a difficult task. Kiplinger’s “Shopping Guide to Eco-Friendly Products” offers several suggestions to help you buy green and get a solid deal on major appliances, lawn care, building supplies, and home maintenance.
What's The One Thing You Hate To Spend Money On?
By 10.9.07
WiseBread asks an interesting question this week: what’s your frugal obsession? You know, that one thing you can’t stand spending money on: “Some people refuse to pay for bottled water; others refuse to shell out $4 to rent a movie when they can get them from the library for free.” Responses so far include software, soft drinks at restaurants, and gift wrap.
A Little Tax Preparation Now Will Save You Headaches In 2008
By 10.5.07
Now that 2007 is drawing to a close, it’s a great time to take stock of this year’s income and expenses and see what you can do to lessen your tax burden for the year. Reuters offers several tips to help you increase your refund check (or reduce what you owe, if you’ve had one of those years). They also point out a couple of regulatory issues you might not be aware of that could trip you up if you’re giving gifts or funding retirement accounts.
WorldCat Turns You Into A Library Power User
By 10.4.07
We’ve written before about the money-saving goodness called your local public library, but a lot of readers may not know about a powerful online search tool, WorldCat, that lets you search the holdings of 57,000 libraries in over 100 countries. Even better: “Tell it what book you’re looking for and your zip code or city, and it will pinpoint the nearest library that has the book.”
Look For Travel Bargains On Country-Specific Websites
By 10.4.07
When you’re looking online for flights or car rentals, consider trying the country-specific versions of popular travel websites, suggests the New York Times. In at least some cases, the price difference can be more than 50%.
By 10.4.07
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If you’re drinking on the plane and tip your flight attendant, they’ll be extra attentive and maybe throw you a free round. But you have to keep insisting they take the money, they’re not allowed to accept it on the first attempt. [BudgetTravel]
Online Guide To Home Energy Savings
By 10.1.07
The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has just updated its Consumer Guide to Home Energy, which “draws on the latest research on home performance and energy use, translating research findings into the practical steps consumers can take to cut their energy consumption.” The guide is offered for purchase, but you can also access highlights from it fro free online.
