Given all of the great personal finance stuff that’s being written these days, I thought I’d start publishing a list of the week’s best from some of my favorite sites. So here we go… [more]

As many of you know, I get a kick out of finding ways of generating ‘free’ money. Thus, I thought it might be fun to tally up what I’ve been able to come up with over the past year. While I’m not great at keeping records when it comes to some of this stuff, what follows is a rundown of everything that I can recall… [more]

Just a friendly reminder that stamp prices are going up on January 8th, 2006… So don’t go out and buy a boatload of stamps in the next week or so — that is, unless you want to go back out and buy a bunch of $0.02 stamps such that you can piece together the appropriate amount of postage for your outgoing mail. Take it from me, offloading a bunch of too-small stamps is a pain in the butt (says the guy who has made this exact mistake at least once).

Here’s another tip… Hop on over to Stamps.com for a bunch of free postage — you can always cancel if you don’t like it.

This looks like a great tool to use in conjunction with Amazon’s price drop policy… Drop by AmazonCreditsYou.com (see below), enter the details of your purchase, and let them do the hard work of monitoring the price on the item that you just bought. If it drops within the next thirty days, they’ll shoot you an e-mail. Then you just have to hop on over to Amazon.com (or follow the link in the e-mail) and make your claim. I haven’t used it yet, but it looks easy… You just have to enter the ISBN or ASIN (available in the item description), the price, the date you purchased it, and an e-mail address for them to contact you if the price drops. Looks pretty useful. When used in conjunction with Amabuddy, there’s no excuse for not getting the best possible deal.

See also Another Amazon Price Watch Tool.

Update: AmazonCreditsYou.com no longer exists.

Here are instructions for getting your refund the old-fashioned way… [more]

My son and I were recently in Sam’s Club to pick up some batteries when I noticed something interesting… The 32-pack of Energizer AA batteries was selling for $10.66, whereas the 48-pack was selling for $16.66. That’s right… The larger package was actually slightly more expensive (on a per battery basis) than was the smaller package. While it wasn’t a big difference, this is the exact opposite of what one would expect to see. In fact, I was about to grab the 48-pack when I did a quick bit of math in my head and realized what they were up to. Guess which pack was featured prominently throughout the store, including big displays right by the cash registers? Yep, the marked up 48-packs were everywhere. In contrast, the marginally-more-economical 32-packs could only be found in the electronics section. The lesson here is to make to sure that you’re actually getting a better deal when you buy the über-pack of whatever you’re shopping for. You might just find that the smaller size is actually more economical.

As yet another followup to my previous entry on the cost of producing the Xbox 360, I just ran across a story that claims that Microsoft is actually spending ~$715 on each Xbox 360. It’s hard to say how reliable this information is, as it’s attributed to an Insider Scoop article that cites “a high ranking friend at IBM,” but if it’s anywhere near the truth, it looks like Microsoft is taking a bath on the front end when it comes to Xbox 360 sales. And for those of you that think it doesn’t matter, because they’ll just make it up on software sales and licensing, you may be right. But check out this article first.

This past fall we replaced our term life insurance policies with new policies from Lincoln Financial. Earlier in the year we had received a letter from John Hancock warning us that the credit card that they had on file for our automatic renewal had expired, and that they wouldn’t be able to renew our policies unless we sent them an updated expiration date. No problem, I thought… We don’t want to renew anyway. Wrong. [more]

Every year my parents give our kids a variety of Christmas gifts including money for their bank accounts, some clothes, and a toy of some sort. But this year they decided to forego the latter, and give the kids gift cards instead, such that they could pick out their own fun stuff. Out of curiosity, I asked our kids what sort of gift card they’d like to have if they were to (hypothetically) receive one as a Christmas gift. I was expecting answers along the lines of Toys’R'Us, Target or Wal-Mart. [more]

I’ve written previously about my positive experiences hosting this site (and others) with Dreamhost’s “Crazy Domain Insane” plan. I’ve also posted a Dreamhost discount code (”SAVE77“) that allows you to save $77 on a year of hosting, bringing the rate down to just $3.53/month. Beyond providing you with tons of storage space (4800 MB) and bandwidth (120 GB/month) as well as the ability to host an unlimited number of domains (click here for details), I just found out that Dreamhost has sweetened the deal by adding 40 MB of storage and 1 GB of bandwidth to your account each and every week. Since they offer WebDAV (the ability to treat directories on your webspace as networked hard drives), you can easily use your ever-increasing space for offsite file storage. And on top of everything else, they offer a 97 day money back guarantee. So if you’re looking a cheap and reliable web host, hop on over to Dreamhost and check it out.

There’s just a few days left before the end of the year. That makes it a perfect time to take one last look around to see if there’s anything in your house that you’d like to clear out. If there is, why not drop it off at Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or another worthy organization? Your stuff will get a new life, and you’ll get both a bit of extra space and a tax break. Just be sure to get a receipt for your donation.