After writing about how we love making pizza, we’ve learned that we’ve been fools to buy Boboli pizza crusts. In fact, Karen at MSN’s Smart Spending even said we were cheaters! Having learned the error of our ways, we’ve decided that the next time we make pizza we’ll be making our own pizza dough, which appears to be fairly simple.

Oh, I also had a revelation the other day. I was walking through Trader Joe’s (they sell 200 Cone #4 coffee filters for $1.69, cheaper than any other place I know of) when I saw they sold fresh pizza dough for 99 cents. 99 cents! What the heck have I been doing buying Boboli pizza crusts???

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When you leave your job, one of the decisions you may have to make is whether or not you should rollover your 401(k) into a Rollover IRA. The process of rolling over your 401(k) is easy, so don’t let that be a deterrent, and the benefits of rolling over your 401(k) can be pretty substantial. However, it’s not always correct to rollover your 401(k). It was the subject of my Devil’s Advocate post on why you shouldn’t rollover your 401(k) but I thought of three more excellent reasons why you might want to avoid, or at least put off, rolling it over.

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I remind our fair readers that the second episode of the Personal Finance Hour will be on at 6 PM Eastern, 3 PM Pacific tonight! Please join JD Roth of Get Rich Slowly and me as we talk about emergency funds. We will discuss how we’ve set up our emergency funds, answer reader questions, and take calls. If you have a question but don’t feel like calling in (or can’t), please email me before the show and we’ll try to answer it on the air.

To listen, you can call (347) 327-9144 or go to the show’s page here and hit play. To ask a question, you can go to the show page and ask in the chat box or if you’re on the phone, hit “1″ to light up the siwtchboard. There are other ways to get our attention like Twitter (@jdroth, @bargainr, or @pfhour) and AOL instant messenger but the phone is the best way and chat is #2. (If you’re on the phone and want to tweet one of us to get our attention, that’s cool too!)

There’s also a chat room on the show page where you can interact with other listeners and bloggers. There was a lot of activity in there during the last show and every had a great time, or so they said.

We hope you hear from you tonight!

Liz Pulliam Weston is the most-read personal finance columnist on the Internet, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, and last week I had the opportunity to ask her a few credit score related questions because she has a great new book out, Your Credit Score: Your Money and What’s at Stake; How to Improve the 3-Digit Number that Shapes Your Financial Future. Liz was very gracious with her time, giving very detailed answers to five questions you’ll want to know the answers to.

I asked her about how she became interested in credit scores, how the importance of your score has changed in the last year, what you can do to stop companies from closing your lines of credit, what is the most damaging myth about credit scores, and what are some things you can do right now to help improve your credit. You’ll want to read the answers!

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When I was a kid, my parents taught me that my job was to do well in school so that I could get into a good college. In college, my job was to do well, earn my diploma, and then get a good job. Once I started working, I was told that leaders take leadership training classes and took rotational assignments in areas others didn’t. I, of course, wanted to be a leader (that’s what’s next right?). I started signing up for all these classes that had great names and interesting content but really lacked any application in my day to day activities.

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April 15th is only a couple weeks away! If you haven’t filed yet and don’t think you’ll make the April 15th deadline, all you need to do to procrastinated another six months is fill out IRS Form 4868, Application for Automatic Extension of Time To File U.S. Individual Income Tax Return. You don’t have to provide a reason unless the IRS denies your request, which they don’t do very often (at least from what I hear), and you can file your return anytime before October 15th, the new deadline for those approved for an extension.

The only gotcha is that you are still required to pay taxes owed. The extension is only for filing your return, not for payment. If you owe taxes and can’t pay, start the process of setting up an IRS payment plan today because the extension won’t help you.

If you’re supposed to get a refund, I recommend that you file ASAP so you can get your money back!

I’ve been using TradeKing for a while now and one of the many things that separates them from their competition (E*Trade, Zecco, etc.) is the wealth of information they offer you, especially with options education. TradeKing has a free ebook, they call them “intelligence reports,” about taxes and the stock market. The Tax & Trading Intelligence Report is free and it’s a seven page document that discusses a variety of stock investing topics from retirement accounts to wash sales.

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Oooooh yeah, you didn’t think I could let a Your Take go by after the uproar over AIG paying out their bonuses to the very division that caused their financial malaise, did you? Well, I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I’m curious what you all think of the situation and whether the public outcry was unfair or justified.

To recap, AIG paid out $165 million in contractually obligated bonuses to executives in the Financial Products division. The public, and subsequently the congressmen and women, were upset because AIG received billions of dollars in bailout funds to prevent a bankruptcy. People protested outside AIG headquarters in New York, Congress grilled CEO Edward Liddy, and Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert made light of it nightly on their shows.

If you are eager to carry a pitchfork, I invite you to read this letter from from former executive vice president, Jake DeSantis.

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After this morning’s post about cons, I thought I was getting conned when I started reading about the new 2009 Louis Braille Bicentennial Silver Dollar because I didn’t hear a single thing about it until today. Made me think of those Obama coins with a sticker on them! (don’t worry, these Braille Bicentennial Silver Dollar coins are real)

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Spring is almost upon us and you know what that means, carnivals! In the spirit of this morning’s post, which was about long cons, let’s talk about some short cons… carnival games. That’s right, most, if not all, carnival games are diversions designed to separate a fool from their money… one dollar at a time.

For this article, I have to give a shout-out to one of my friends, John, who used to work the carnival that come into town (for anyone from the Stony Brook area of Long Island, it was the carnival that used to come into town and set up shop near SUNY Stony Brook). Back then, we used to visit him all the time as he ran all the stupid games and he told us the inside scoop on a bunch of the games. If it weren’t for John, I’d probably still think those carnival games were fair and that I really did have a chance to win that five foot tall bear.

In this article, I’ll point out some carnivals games, what the con is, and how you might be able to beat it. But remember, just like the lottery, the only way to win is if you have fun while you do it because chances are you won’t win much.

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