Mark your calendars because Ben and Jerry’s free cone day for 2011 is next Tuesday, April 12th this year. Procrastinators slaving away on their tax returns can take a much needed break and stop by their local Ben & Jerry’s for a free cone. As for those of you who didn’t wait until the last few moments to file, you’re welcome to just take a break from life and enjoy a free scoop. Just be warned, the lines will probably be long.

The free scoop offer is available from 12 pm – 8 pm. Here are some of the new flavors this year:

• Late Night Snack: Inspired by Late Night with Jimmy Fallon – Fair Trade Vanilla Bean Ice Cream with a Salty Caramel Swirl & Fudge Covered Potato Chip Clusters (the fudge uses Fair Trade cocoa, too!)
• Bonnaroo Buzz: – Light Coffee & Malt ice creams with Whiskey Caramel swirls & English Toffee pieces. This flavor, inspired by the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, is back by popular demand in Scoop Shops and now available in pints!
• Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream: Vanilla ice cream with fudge covered waffle cone pieces & a caramel swirl. A long time pint favorite, so popular we made it a scoop shop flavor for the first time this year!
• Clusterfluff: Peanut Butter Ice Cream with Caramel Cluster Pieces, Peanut Butter & Marshmallow Swirls

Enjoy!

(Photo: mr_t_in_dc)

Blockbuster has had a rough few years. First, Netflix was and still is eating their lunch on mail-order DVD rental. Then Redbox swooped in and started crushing their in-store business by renting movies for $1 a day, sticking their kiosks everywhere.

June 17th, 2005, shares of Blockbuster (BBI) traded at around $10 a share. Today they’re trading at 28 cents and the market cap is barely above $61 million. Netflix (NFLX), on the other hand, traded at just under $17 a share five years ago and sits pretty at around $124 today with a market cap of $6.51 billion.

How far the mighty have fallen!
(click here to continue reading…)

I don’t normally write about blog giveaways but when I’m going to make an exception today because the giveaway prizes are all pretty rich. The first is from Kelly at The Centsible Life – she’s giving away $600 of stuff as part of her site’s one year anniversary. You can win all sorts of gift cards, tax preparation software, and any one of about a half dozen books. Kelly’s giveaway ends January 24th.

The second giveaway is even larger and it’s at Money Crashers. The prize package there is over $7,500 including gift cards, books, software, and even cold hard cash. Gyutae, one of the admins, has done a great job putting this amazing prize package together and this giveaway is part of their redesign and relaunch for the new year. This giveaway ends January 31st with winners selected February 3rd.

Good luck!

Lending Club is doing it again, they’re giving away a hundred bucks to one lucky Bargaineering.com reader! How can you beat that? (two hundred bucks? hint hint!)

For those that aren’t familiar with Lending Club, they’re a social lending network. Investors can join and invest in 3-year loans, with Lending Club handling all the interest payments, at interest rates far superior to what banks offer. Borrowers can join and borrow at rates that are usually better than the banks, especially in this lending environment. It’s really a win win situation for all involved.

So how do you win the hundred bucks? Very very easy, you must:

• Leave a comment on this post before noon, May 22nd, and,
• Become a free registered member of LendingClub. If you signed up already, no need to do it again and you are still entered into the giveaway.

The second requirement, to register for free at LendingClub as a lender, is so that they can deposit the $100 directly into your account. You can withdraw that money immediately (or invest it, your choice).

On May 22nd, I’ll select a winner and they’ll take home a hundred bucks!

Congratulations to Eric! Eric is now the proud new owner of a hundred bucks deposited into his Lending Club account.

This offer has ended.

Oprah is giving away free digital copies of Suze Orman’s Women & Money until 8pm (7pm Central) tonight (February 14th). (Direct download link) A Spanish translation of the book is available as well.

This book is copyrighted. You may view and download the file, but you may not copy the file or share or forward it to any other person.

I have a bunch of books lying around that I’ve been meaning to give away and I thought I’d reward some of the more frequent commenters on this site (such as the commenting machine that is Tim), so if the following folks could email me their #1, #2, and #3 (plus their address) choices from the following three books I’ll try to match it up with them.

The choices are: The Big Money by Frederick Kobrick, The Single Best Investment by Lowell Miller, and The Maui Millionaires by David Finkel and Diane Kennedy.

The winners are:

• Tim (20)
• MoneyNing (14)
• plonkee (11)
• Patrick (10)
• saladdin (9)

Please let me know by this upcoming Friday what your choices are (if you don’t want the books and want me to donate it to my local library, let me know too).

A while back I started researching lasik eye surgery because I was starting to get tired of the whole contact lens routine. Well, today I learned that LasikPlus is offering a free eye exam along with their consultations so I figured I’d give it a shot. My current contact lens prescription expires in April of next year (they’re typically good for two years) and I was interested in lasik so I might as well get a free eye exam out of it.

I’ve lately heard a lot of ads on the radio about Lasik, mostly from TLC Laser Eye Centers because they’re in the D.C. area and performed Tiger Woods’ lasik procedure, and it’s piquing my interest more and more. In fact, a couple people at my work just had the procedure done and it sounds like it’s come a long way from when they first started doing it. While you still can’t drive yourself home right after the procedure, apparently your vision is pretty much back to normal by the next morning and 100% (20/20) within a couple days. Considering your eye just had a piece sliced off and reattached, that’s a pretty quick recovery time if you ask me.

What I’ve tried to do is search online for reviews about LasikPlus but couldn’t really find anything. I did discover that they, along with practically every other company that sells big ticket items, is offering 0% financing for 18 months, haha, everyone is jumping on the “instant gratification” bandwagon. If you have any information about LasikPlus (or lasik in general) or you’ve used them, I’d really be interested in what you thought… the idea of getting a laser to the eye is pretty scary so I’d like to be armed with as much information as possible.

You ever wonder what it takes to get into the television audience of any of your favorite shows? I always think of those cooking shows where the camera pans the audience of starving attendees and wondered what it took to be a part of that evil evil experience. Or, what about getting onto a show where the participants get all sorts of free goodies from guests? Television tapings are almost always free and usually the demand is much more than the supply of tickets so you have to be patient (or able to wake up early and be lucky) if you want to get to see a show, but invariably, from what I’ve heard, a lot of these shows are very entertaining between the actual taped segments (during the commercials). I scoured the websites of all the major television studios (and some of the bigger name shows individually) and here are their ticket policies:

Oprah – As you’d expect, the demand far exceeds the supply and they do most of their stuff on the phone so be patient.

ABC – The View and Good Morning America in New York; According to Jim, America’s Funniest Home Videos, Dancing With the Stars, Jimmy Kimmel Live and more in Los Angeles.

NBC – Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Saturday Night Live in New York. The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Last Call with Carson Daly, and others in Burbank, CA.

Food Network – For Emeril Live, there is a once a year lottery (info from last lottery) that gets announced on the website. There isn’t any other information for tickets to other live tapings so you’ll have to navigate to each show’s page for more info.

Rachael Ray – She’s blowing up! Getting on her show is fairly straightforward so follow the link for more details.

Martha Stewart – That link may not work in the future but basically navigate to marthastewart.com, find her show section and there is a Get Tickets link where you can find out more details.

CBS – Want to see the Price Is Right before Bob Barker calls it quits? Check out their ticket information page. How about Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson? All you have to do is navigate to the page on CBS’ website that is for the show and there should be ticket information if it’s available.

I was unable to find any official information on the TBS or CW websites for their policies.

There are smaller private outfits that offer tickets to shows as well including Audience Unlimited (NBC links to them but they are not affiliated with NGC) and TVTix, so do some searches online and you should be able to find something.

Oh, and if you know of any other resources for scoring free ticket information, please do share!

I have several copies of You Call The Shots by Cameron Johnson (read my review) to giveaway and you can be one of the lucky winners! To make this more than just a “leave a brief comment, win a prize” contest, I’m going to ask that you list one topic you wish personal finance blogs would write more about. It can be as specific or as broad as you want, as long as it’s interesting. Be funny, be creative, be outlandish, but don’t just leave a “I hope I win” comment before next Wednesday and you’ll be in. Laffy taffy type jokes are an acceptable substitute as long as they haven’t appeared in the 500,000 unique visitors contest comments before.

This contest is now over.

H&R Block gave me five 256MB USB keys to give away right before I left for China and so I didn’t get the opportunity to list the competition and be able to mail them out so I’ll be holding the competition right now. To enter, simply leave a comment on this post and be sure to leave your email address in the form, I’ll pick five lucky winners at the end of the week and send along your shiny new USB keys.

Good luck!