The old rule of keeping your resume under a single page is out the window for those situations where you’re submitting your resume because it’s no longer going to be seen by one person all at once – it’s going into a database that recruiters will be searching. EWeek gives a lot of helpful tips for techies (and non-techies) out there looking to land a new job but the two that I felt were most useful were:

1. Ditch the one page format
2. Use skills keywords

Number 2 is just like search engine optimization, for all you aspiring blogger media moguls, where you put your skills keywords in your resume so they get picked up by a recruiter’s search queries. If they’re looking for Java Developers, it helps to actually have Java on your resume (duh). I think the interesting thing about this article is that it gives you tips specifically designed for those resume databases recruiters always talk about and it’s worth a read.

The Koch’s, Doug and Tina, agreed that they’d spend on their wedding only as much as they’d be able to pay off within a year and arrived at $30,000. While the motivations for their budgeting is a little mixed (yeah it’s a wedding, but $30,000 on one night sure is a lot if that’s basically your savings for a year) but it did have one shining result – they budgeted. And in their budgeting they realized where their holes were, like an athlete studying his or her game, and plugged them.

They learned that they were spending $1,200 per month eating out: that’s $40 a day, every single day! They also cut back on a lot of other things, but one warning to those who plan on taking on debt because they foresee themselves being able to pay it off in X months – there are always unexpected expenses (Doug had back surgery, ring the register for a grand right there).

The lesson to take away from this is that you should budget to figure out where your money is going and re-evaluate whether you think that’s where it should go. You shouldn’t save every last penny, that’s water torture, but you shouldn’t be spending like there’s no tomorrow.

via CNN Money.

This offer has expired.

If you’ve been looking for a cheap subscription to Kiplinger’s, here’s your chance to get three years worth for only $4.91. That works out to be less than fourteen cents an issue. Click on the magazine cover (or the link above), scroll down and select 36 issues (3 years) and add it to your cart for $44.91. Then use DCMPS40D to get $40 off for a final price of $4.91! I don’t know when this coupon will expire.

If Kiplinger’s isn’t your style, they also have Entrepreneur magazine as well. You can get three years of this magazine for only $5.91. Again, click on the magazine cover (or the link above), select 3 years (36 issues) but this time use the DCMPS30D for $30 off your purchase. Again, I don’t know when this coupon will expire either.

Those coupon codes are likely valid for any magazine subscription but I figured personal finance/money related ones might interest this group more. I’ve never subscribed to Kiplingers, but at $4 for three years I will be, but I am receiving Entrepreneur magazine right now. It’s geared towards people starting (or who want to start) their own business so strictly personal finance folks will find a lot of the article irrelevant.

Google Checkout is Google’s PayPal killer and if you are a Citi card member you can get $5 or 1000 Thank You points if you register your card by August 1st, 2006 and make a purchase with your card using Google Checkout by September 15th, 2006. If you have a student loan, those 1000 Thank You points are worth $10 so go with that over the $5 cash. (pesky Terms & Conditions, but you should read them)

Need a Citi card? My favorite now is Citi’s CashReturns card because of it’s 1% cash back everywhere with a 20% bonus after your first year, no limit, no annual fee.

Claire is the voice and mind behind TiredButHappy, a personal finance blog that’s been kicking since October 2005, and today we have the chance to get to know her a little bit better. Also, we get to learn a little bit about their online book club Book Cents (”A group of people who met through the Personal Finance blog community to discuss literature.”) which isn’t necessarily about money but often digresses there.

Everyone nowadays has the novelty $2 bill with good ole Thomas Jefferson’s face scowling face staring back at you and you might even have a few of the older blue seal silver $1 notes issued back in the 1920’s (worth a few bucks), but how many of you have the technicolor $20 bill?

Do you have a cool currency bill or know of a cool currency bill (domestic or international) that you wish you had (either for novelty purposes or as a collector)? I know that having the technicolor $20, or any of the old bills honestly, would be tops on my list. Here are some ideas…

Bankrate has a Frugal U Tip of the Month Contest where you can enter in your frugal tips and if you are selected as the Tip of the Month, you get an extra hundred bucks to sock away for a rainy day. Bankrate takes thirty of the tips submitted and readers get to vote on each one, the one with the highest average takes the money.

Last month’s winning frugal tip was about “phantom load,” which is the power your appliances draw when they’re “off”:

To see your electric bill take a nosedive, make it a habit to unplug non-essential appliances when not in use. When away from home or on vacation, these appliances can add dollars to your electric bill. It’s worth the extra savings.

Anything without a hard switch (which makes an electrical connection) will draw load because the circuit is connected… unplugging it is the only way to erase that load.

Here’s an interesting article about some cashless technologies in use today in the land up North. It’s brief and features a lot of cellphone payment related technologies, such as feeding the parking meters, but it’s worth taking a peek at. I think payment via cell phones is probably a risky endeavor, as people likely lose cell phones more frequently than they do credit cards (I make that claim based on no actual evidence), but the Canadians know what they’re doing when it comes to payment technology I suppose (again, a baseless claim).

The latest Kiyosaki column on Yahoo Finance is about how mutual funds are a bad deal because the fees are just downright nasty. The bulk of the article is an excerpt from an interview with John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group, on Frontline where he reveals that mutual funds are a raw deal. Usually when I read a Kiyosaki piece (or any “expert advice”), I’m looking to rip it to shreds because that’s the way you should approach all “expert advice” until you have enough personal trust in that writer to take the quotes off. In this case, Kiyosaki is spot on, traditional mutual funds are a rip-off and Bogle gives him good ammunition as to why.

Essentially, if you get an 8% return for 65 years and put in a mere $1,000 at the start, it will be worth $140,000 at the end. Now take away 2.5%, typical management fee for a mutual fund, every year and you go from $140,000 at the end of the year to a mere $30,000 – somewhere in that mathematical chicanery 80% of the difference is lost to the financial system. Skip to the end if you want to find out where it went. So you put up 100% of the capital, assumed 100% of the risk, and earned a little over 21% of the potential return.

(click here to continue reading…)

The Festival of Frugality is up at Free Money Finance. Find frugality at its finest! (I get carried away with alliteration)