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.

Bargaineering Store Technical Issues from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

In addition to being varied in our experiences, I can confidently say that each writer in the network is a nice person. I know I’ve called on several of them for a hand and they’ve lent it without hesitation. So if you have a problem, chances are you can email them and they’ll be eager to try to help you. So, who are the members of the Money Tips Network?

Money Tips Network Members

MTN blogs collectively reach more than 5 million visitors a month and over 200,000 subscribers.  These blogs represent the best of what the personal finance blogosphere has to offer.

1. Bargaineering - Written by me, Bargaineering is a blog that chronicles his personal finance life. I’m also co-host of the Personal Finance Hour podcast with JD Roth of Get Rich Slowly.
2. Consumerism Commentary - Created in 2003 by Flexo, Consumerism Commentary has been honored by Kiplinger as a must-read blog and named as one of Yahoo’s “Ten Money Blogs Everyone Should Read”.  Flexo runs the original (and still the best) PF blog aggregator pfblogs.org, and recently started the Consumerism Commentary Podcast.
3. Five Cent Nickel - Written by a man who has been meticulously recording his finances since 1997 (stored in Quicken), Five Cent Nickel is one of the oldest and most respected blogs around.
4. Free Money Finance - This site is about one simple thing: growing your net worth.  The 5 Principles of Free Money Finance is a PF blog classic. Business Week says Free Money Finance “offers an inspiring mix of timeless investing wisdom and money-making ideas”.
5. Generation X Finance - Jeremy Vohwinkle is the blogger behind Gen X Finance, a Chartered Retirement Planning Counselor, and the editor of About.com’s Financial Planning section.
6. Get Rich Slowly - Get Rich Slowly, recently named “most inspiring money blog” by Money magazine, is devoted to sensible personal finance.  JD Roth is the other half of  the Personal Finance Hour podcast.
7. No Credit Needed - NCN started this blog in 2005 to track his debt reduction efforts, and has since been inspiring others in their debt reduction efforts. In addition to the blog, check out theNo Credit Needed Network and the No Credit Needed Podcast.
8. Squawkfox - Making frugal living sexy, delicious, and fun. “Fox” has a new book coming out in 3 weeks! 397 Ways to Save Money will help you spend smarter and live well on less.
9. Stop Buying Crap - Despite the title, Cap doesn’t preach being cheap.  Stop Buying Crap is about understanding your unlimited wants and how you may fulfill it with your limited resources.
10. The Digerati Life - You can always count on Silicon Valley Blogger (SVB) to churn out practical, comprehensive, and helpful advice about personal finance and small business.
11. The Frugal Duchess - Miami Herald columnist Sharon Harvey Rosenberg offers a fun, frugal and fashionable way to save money & live well.
12. The Simple Dollar - Trent Hamm is arguably the most respected personal finance blogger today. There’s a great new article on The Simple Dollar everyday, and Trent’s book reviews are legendary.  Get a copy of his recently published book, 365 Ways to Live Cheap: Your Everyday Guide to Saving Money, that helps you save money every day of the year.

Money Tips Network from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

So what do you get when you sign up for the email newsletter?

• You’ll get an eBook containing 100 easy ways to save money. With the recession in full force, we’re all looking to save some money on the things we don’t care about so that we can spend it on the things we do. The book will have a hundred ways to save so you’re bound to find something you can use, or your money back! (look at how snazzy and bendy that cover looks!)
• Second, there are plenty of things that I want to write about that are too long for Twitter and too short for a blog post. These include interesting things I find on the internet, especially poignant topics in the forums or just commentary on subjects in the news today.
• I’ll also be using it to giveaway all sorts of goodies like the dozens of personal finance books I have on my shelf and announce any sort of timely promotions I find.

Sign Up Today!

Name:
Email:

If you get an error, please try again. The sign-up form seems to be a little flaky and we’re working on it.

As always, you can contact me with any questions whatsoever!

Bargaineering Email Newsletter from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

This month I’ve been doing a lot of food blog reading since I’ve been writing about a variety of cooking topics, like making bread crumbs and pizza crusts, so I found a couple foodie blogs to share with you all. I hope you like this new monthly feature!

Personal Finance

Now that we’re in a recession, one of the best things you can do for yourself is to get additional training. Jeremy at GenXFinance had a fantastic article in March outlining 20 Free Online Finance Courses worth checking out. You can do them at your own pace and they’re offered by very well known schools like Yale and MIT. Remember, the key is to augment yourself, not your resume; but do so now!

Dave Ramsey is a pretty big name in the personal finance world, having penned a few books, built up a large following, and helped many a person out of debt and onto the right personal finance track. In March, Pinyo of Moolanomy broke down his Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps. There are 7+1 steps (7 listed by Dave Ramsey and then Step 0), and Pinyo does a great job discussing them all.

Haggling. So many people thinking haggling is a dirty word, fortunately I wasn’t born with that particular disability! Haggling is like a sport, it’s where you pit your wits against the vendor and may the best man or woman win. In other countries, haggling is expected. Prices start high to catch the tourists who don’t haggle. If you aren’t good at haggling, I recommend you read a post by my friend SVB that contains some haggling tips.

Finally, Liz Pulliam Weston listed her top hundred most useful websites and I’m very honored to have made the list.

Food

Omnomicon is a great foodie blog and Aleta posted a great story early in the month on where you can buy spices and herbs on the cheap. She found that going to a local organic store netted huge savings over the grocery store. My wife and I go to a local Asian grocer to get some of our spices because the prices there are ridiculously lower. Ever buy sesame seeds? If you get it from spice aisle at your local grocery store, it’ll be a fortune. You can get it for a fraction of the price (and a much larger quantity) from an Asian grocery if you can find one nearby.

Laith Hassan at BrokeAssGourmet, another one of my favorite foodie blogs, posted a shopping list if you wanted to put together a budget bar for around seventy bucks. He doesn’t recommend brands of spirit but a $11 750mL of vodka can’t be all that great. Either way, still a good article.

Fun

I tweeted this when I found it (please follow me if you want them as I find them), but if you’re a fan of The Wire then you’ll really enjoy these episode scripts and David Simon’s show pitch to HBO.

Tim Ferriss, author of the Four Hour Work Week, recently published a copy of Seneca’s On The Shortness of Life, including a bolded “abridged” edition. If all you know about Ferriss is that he wrote the book, then you’ll might be surprised to learn that he’s a walking, talking liifehacker. The value of the FHWW isn’t in doing your 40 hours in four, it’s in nurturing the parts of your brain that let you turn your 40 hours of work into four, so you can enjoy the difference… because life is too short.

(Photo: wohnai)

April 2009 Roundup: Finances, Food & Fun from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

I think we need to extend the idea and simply treat everyone as if they were a good friend. Good friends do favors for each other without any expectations of a return. Good friends treat each other with respect and give each other grief. If you treat everyone like a friend and they do the same, the world would be a better place.

Time to grab a beer!

Pay It Forward & Treat Everyone Like A Good Friend from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

The video is that of Wallace talking about how he decided he’d seek out and try all the world’s most expensive things, from Kobe beef to ridiculously expensive golf clubs, from fancy olive oil to a $65,000 bed, and even the Veyron 16.4 ($1.5 million). Well worth the fifteen minutes.

Expensive doesn’t always mean better.

What are you thoughts on this?

Can Money Buy Happiness? from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

Everyone Loves Forums!

In addition to the name change, the eagle eyed among you may have noticed a new “Forums” link the navigation menu above and those two follow me on Twitter may have heard me mention it, but last week, with the help of Jeremy from GenXFinance, we launched a new section to the site, the BFP Forums. The forums are a place that I hope many of us can congregate, share information, ideas, tips, tricks, and other nuggets of wisdom.

As regular readers know, I’m a regular person just like you. I’m not an expert, just more knowledgeable about certain topics because I spent the majority of my day reading about it, and so I am often stumped by particularly complicated problems or scenarios. That’s where I hope you can all can come in and lend me a hand. I know there are experts out there in various arenas whether it’s investing (Khyron, Matt, George, just to name a few) or banking (Joe) or gardening (Jon) or frugality (Dawn) or pets (seems like everyone, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout to my long time friend Nick), so I’m hoping you will all join the forums, ask and answer questions freely, and, above all, become friends with one another so we can all learn and grow together.

A Bribe!

After the emotional appeal comes to bribe, right? It’s starting to be tax season, I’ve already received many of my 1099’s and my W-2’s, and we’ve partnered up with Intuit to give away several Quicken and TurboTax products. I’ll be tying in the forums and forum posts to some of the giveaways so sign up today and join in the spirited conversation.

Another Bribe!

Finally, as an added bonus/bribe, and heretofore unannounced (though some of the top commenters can attest to this), I ask readers for ING Direct referrals to put on my ING Direct referral promotion page. At last estimate I believe I’ve consumed 750+ referrals (30 accounts worth of referrals) on that page. As a reward to frequent forum users, I’ll start asking them, in addition to top commenters, for their ING Direct referrals next (and their spouses and relatives, I just use referrals until they run out!).

If you have any suggestions about the name change, about the forums, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

Bargaineering Name Change & New Forums! from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

On this site, the feed contains full articles, not summaries, so you get the whole thing as if you were actually at the site. Sometimes the images I put into the post that don’t appear entirely correctly and you will still have to visit to leave your comments (I hope you do), but RSS makes reading much quicker and easier. You can use your favorite RSS news aggregator (My favorite is Bloglines) or just have them piped into an email address.

To subscribe to the RSS feed, click on the HUGE orange icon below and Feedburner will walk you through the process:

Blog Feed By Email

If you want to get the feed sent directly to your email, Feedburner also offers an email digest service as well. Simply enter your email in the box below and click submit.

Twitter Too!

Twitter is a microblogging tool that lets you connect with people on a 140 character by 140 character basis. It’s a lot of fun and you should give it a try! I tend to post quick little 140 character ideas and posts to it from something crazy I saw walking around to giveaways and freebies to what I’m eating (ok, just kidding, I don’t twitter what I eat). It’s free, it’s fun, and everyone’s doing it. Please sign up and follow me @bargainr.

Here’s a brief video on Twitter:

How to Subscribe to the RSS Feed from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

The presenter is Jennifer 8 Lee and this video is just a brief presentation of the types of things she researched in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, a tome that chronicles Chinese food!

Brief History of American Chinese Food from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

Well, as Murphy’s law has always tried to warn me, the day after we booked, my wife received an email offer from Disney. Disney had been watching her account and saw she was considering a vacation. We never booked through her account, we booked through mine. Anyway, Disney had no idea so they sent her an offer. Book four days and get three days free plus a $200 Disney gift card.

Wowsers, that’s a heck of a deal.

We booked a five day with nothing more than the publicly available discounts. My wife said I should call to see if they could match the email offer. After chatting with a very nice CSR, we were able to change our package to the “private” offer. The fifteen minute phone call dropped the price of our vacation by $200 plus gave us a $200 gift card. $400 for a 15 minute phone call? No problem!

Nothing about our itinerary changed, it was just cheaper. Disney didn’t have to do match the offer but they did. A lot of vacation type places are offering fantastic discounts but they usually aren’t willing to make a change to a package you’ve already signed up for and paid a deposit on. This was certainly above and beyond what I would’ve expected, but it just shows that it always pays to call!

Thanks Disney!

(Photo: expressmonorail)

Disney Matched An Offer It Didn’t Need To! from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

Depending on when you read this, it’ll either be New Year’s Eve or New Year’s day (or some random day during the year!), but I wanted to wish you and yours a happy and prosperous new year. We’ve had a pretty rough 2008 but hopefully things can turn around in 2009!

If nothing else, be thankful you weren’t involved in the Madoff ponzi scheme!

We will be returning to your regularly scheduled programming on Monday, January 5th.

(Photo by Mr. Magoo ICU)

Happy New Year! from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

Turn off the blackberries, shut off the computer, kick off those boots, and hang up your jacket, it’s time to grab a beer (or a glass of wine or a cup of eggnog) and spend some time with the people who love you for who you are and not how much you add to the bottom line.

We’ll be taking the rest of the day and tomorrow off but be back on Friday with a lighthearted holiday Your Take, something I hope you’ll contribute to if you find yourself on the Interwebs on Friday. If not, I’ll see you all on Monday!

(Photo: ~BostonBill~)

Happy Holidays! from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

Well, none of them came close to the world record holder. Yu Makajima can solve a Rubik’s cube in 8.72 seconds when he has two hands:

The dude can solve it in 14.56 seconds when he has to do it one-handed:

The most amazing part is that there’s no rushing, no sense of panic as time elapses, just calm and collected twisting of the edges.

(Photo: farnea)

I Can’t Solve A Rubik’s Cube from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

In addition to interesting news and stories that I find, I’ll start running contests to give away books, maybe some gift cards, who knows. If you want to win any Twitter only giveaways, be sure to follow bargainr (me).

Since 140 characters forces me to be brief, I’ll also be using it to publish anything particular useful and simply too short for a blog post. Good deals and awesome freebies certainly fit the list, but also any particularly hot financial offers that might be extremely timely. Blog posts tend to be longer, I’ll be using Twitter for the shorter stuff.

I won’t be posting updates every time a post is published here unless I feel it’s an especially good or timely article. I get irritated when I follow someone and just get updates about their blog posts, since I’m usually subscribed. If you aren’t subscribed to this blog, I really think you should because this blog is freaking awesome… just ask the 7000 people already subscribed, they wouldn’t have if this blog weren’t so unbelievably useful and good. Full subscription options and instructions here.

As always, if you want to reach me, the easiest and fastest way is to email me but I think we can have some fun with Twitter too. If you’ve been waiting to join, consider this an invitation.

Tweet Tweeeeet: I’m On Twitter from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

If that stroke of luck isn’t good enough, read this story about Michael Paul Larson learning the patterns of the board in Press Your Luck, an 80s game show, and walking out with a bunch of cash and prizes. First, the story is absolutely true. Next, read the amazing story about how he won $110,237 in cash and prizes back in June 1984 (that’s $229,782.08 in today’s dollars and back in an era where the prizes were much much smaller).

See? It’s not all bad news and schadenfreude here.

The Luckiest Guy on The Price Is Right from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.