It’s been quite some time since we’ve done a Roundup here at Bargaineering and I thought I’d start doing them again. Roundups are lists of links to other sites that I read and I scour the web for interesting posts that I hope you’ll find interesting as well. This week takes on the theme of Frugality, which is fitting since I also steward the Festival of Frugality, a blog carnival focused on squeezing pennies out of dollars.

Without further delay, here were a few posts I found interesting this week:
(click here to continue reading…)

Every so often I like to remind new visitors and commenters that we have a pretty sweet rewards system here at Bargaineering, this is one of those reminders. I call them Bargaineering Bucks and they’re worth absolutely nothing in terms of real money but they can be used to bid on items in the Bargaineering Bucks auction store.

You can register here to start earning bucks today. Be sure to register at least once every few months as I clear out accounts that haven’t logged in recently.

The most common way to earn bucks is by commenting on posts (you also get points for visiting each day and logging in) and the most common way to spend them is in that there store.

If you are already a registered user, thanks! If you could be so kind as to share why you like the program so much and what you’ve gotten out of it, I’d appreciate it!

Depending on when you read this, it’s either New Year’s Eve’s Eve, New Year’s Eve, or sometime in 2011… regardless of when you read it, I hope you had a fantastic time ushering in the new year with friends and family. A new year brings new opportunity, a chance at something bold and exciting, and I hope you’re ready to take advantage of it. The last few years have been tough but things are starting to turn around and it’s time to make the most of it!

(Photo: hisgett)

I wanted to wish you and yours a safe and happy holiday. To those who celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas. For those who had celebrated Hanukkah, I hope you enjoyed the Festival of Lights earlier this month. For those who celebrate neither, may you have good times and safe travels wherever you may be. We’ll return to semi-regularly scheduled program next Monday.

(Photo: tunruh)

Thank you to all the brave men and women who have given everything so that we may enjoy our freedoms. Often times the social and political discourse around the use of military force overshadows our utmost respect for the men and women put in harms way, hopefully that doesn’t happen on this day.

We won’t be publishing anything for the remainder of the day but will be back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow morning.

(Photo: tonythemisfit)

The Shorty Awards is an awards ceremony for the “best producers of short real-time content.” At the moment, in the Finance category, there are investing gurus, forex gurus, and stock trading gurus all over the top 20 list.

There isn’t a single regular personal finance blogger on the entire list… that just isn’t right!

If you have a few moments and would like to get a personal finance blogger (unless you consider Suze Orman, who leads the voting, a personal finance blogger… which I don’t) onto the list, please vote in the Shorty Awards!

How to vote (voting ends soon so every vote matters!):

• First, you’ll need an account on Twitter because that’s how votes are registered.
• Then, either visit this voting page or Tweet out “I nominate @bargainr for a Shorty Award in #finance because…” with a reason. Votes that end in “because…” won’t be counted.

That’s all you need to do, thank you!

As an added bribe incentive, if you do vote, send me a URL of your tweet along with your Bargaineering.com username and I’ll deposit 20BB in your account for you to spend in our lovely Bargaineering Bucks store. This applies even if you tweeted out a vote before you saw this post, it’s just a small token of my appreciation for supporting me!

To those who are celebrating Thanksgiving today, I hope you and yours have a festive Thanksgiving day and weekend. I hope you celebrate the merriment and cheer that is Thanksgiving, enjoy the time with loved ones, and stuff yourself full of food prepared with loving care. To those who aren’t celebrating Thanksgiving, eat something decadent.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I want to thank you all for visiting today and every day. So often people think that I’m an expert because I write a personal finance blog. The reality is that while I may be more knowledgeable than the average Joe on money matters, it’s because I’m constantly being educated by the you guys. I see this as a community, not as a podium, and I’ve learned as much from you as, hopefully, you have from me. I hope we can do this for a long time together.

I don’t want to take too much of your time because today should be spent off the computer and with real live human beings.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We’ll return with regularly scheduled programming on Sunday… when I unveil another themed week!

(Photo: voght)

To everyone who has been bidding on the Bargaineering Store auctions, there has been a technical glitch this morning. It’s powered by an auction WordPress plugin that I edited, to use Bargaineering Bucks, and apparently when you deactivate the plugin, it deletes every auction and every bid in the entire database. I have NO idea why someone would design the application that way (you gain no benefit by completely purging the database!) but unfortunately I lost all new auctions and all bids since Saturday. I normally back up the database every single night but the recent WordPress upgrade disabled my daily upgrades… so the end result is a perfect storm where all bids and auction activity since Saturday was lost.

All restored auctions will be honored as they are but anything not restored will not, unfortunately. (I don’t delete completed auctions so all completed auctions have been restored)

Thank you for understanding and hopefully we don’t run into any more problems.