One of the Quicken/Turbo Tax Giveaway winners, Victoria, and I have been emailing back and forth on a variety of topics the last week or so and she put together a very comprehensive case as to why I should buy (my wife) a Kindle. She spent so much time on the email that I thought it was worth sharing in case you were considering a Kindle for yourself or a loved one. (and this is just the first part of the email!)

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Certificate of deposit rates are abysmal, high yield savings account interest rates are worse, and the stock market is insanely volatile… which is why so many people have started to turn towards social lending networks like LendingClub, Prosper and Pertuity Direct.

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Banks offer a lot of services and features. You probably know most of the popular ones. Heck, you probably know most of the not so popular ones. However, I am pretty certain that there is at least one thing on the follow list that you didn’t know about before. And if I’m wrong, I invite you to look at these 7 Unwritten and Often Forgotten Credit Card Secrets, and hopefully between the two you’ll learn something new that will save you some money in these difficult times.

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For the longest time, I thought that $25 spent on an Entertainment Book was wasted… until last night. Last night we went to Nichi Bei Kai, a Japanese steakhouse and sushi joint, with friends of ours and enjoyed a little Teppanyaki/hibachi dinner. Teppanyaki, also called hibachi (that’s what we call it), is where they cook the dish at your table and give you a little demonstration of knife skills, flames, and cooking. If you’ve never done the hibachi thing, you should give it a try because it’s a lot of fun and the food isn’t bad either. At the end of the meal, my friends pulled out a coupon they pulled from an Entertainment Book that scored us $18 off our meal!

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This episode of the Bargaineering VideoCast will discuss a concept I call Bank Account Firewalls.

ING Direct no longer has the top interest rate among online banks but no other bank makes it easier for you to start new accounts. They are the ideal candidate for a bank account firewall because of this simplicity but you can use any account at any bank.

In the last few weeks I’ve several email and IM conversations with readers who owe tax this year and are concerned they will be penalized for it. In the case of one reader, TurboTax told them they owed a $120 penalty when they didn’t, because he never told the software that he filed last year and didn’t owe any tax.

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The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Value Investing is exactly what it sounds like, a book that will teach you how to be a value investor, how to analyze industries and companies, how to dig deep into financial statements, and how to filter analysts (among other things). It’s written in the same easygoing style of the series and has little graphical clues to help anyone understand value investing. Value investing is one of the most popular investing “styles” out there and works off the notion that you can find good, solid companies that have had their share prices battered by the market. Their fundamentals are still strong but they’ve fallen out of favor in the marketplace so their share prices offer a good value, hence value investing.

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During a recession, the flow of credit tends to tighten up as banks and lenders take fewer “risks.” The result of this is that people who are credit-worthy but have no credit history, such as students, are caught in the middle. Without a credit history, they can’t get credit cards and loans. With credit cards and loans, they can’t establish a credit history.

An old standby practice, piggybacking, was recently eliminated as the new FICO score rules changed how it treated authorized users. In the past, someone with poor or no credit could “piggyback” as an authorized user on an account of someone with good credit. Many parents put their children on their credit card accounts to help them establish credit, the parents were “co-signing” their child’s debts, so it was perfectly acceptable. Unfortunately, people started abusing this and selling “authorized user positions” on their accounts, some for as much as $500 or $1,000 a piece, so FICO had to respond.

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