Remember Book It? I used to love that program… free personal pan pizzas from Pizza Hut just for reading. I used to read Encyclopedia Brown and Hardy Boys and all those books for free. When I learned I could get free pizza for reading… it was like Christmas in June. It was incredible.

Well, it’s almost summer and TD Bank is once again offering a summer reading promotion in which customers with a Young Saver account (kids) can get $10 if they read 10 books. All you need to do is have your child read ten books, fill out the summer reading form, and take it to the bank. They’ll get $10 deposited into their account and the fun of reading ten books.

If you aren’t a TD Bank customer, this isn’t that great of a promotion if you’re promotion hunting. Most banks offer closer to $100 for you to join them, though their promotions aren’t as easy to fulfill as this one. They usually require direct deposits and minimum balances.

If you are already a TD Bank customer, and your kids don’t have a savings account, this isn’t a bad time to consider introducing them to saving. And reading.

$10 will be deposited into a new or existing Young Saver account. One coupon per Customer during the promotional period. Cannot be combined with any other offers. Valid May 5, 2012, through September 29, 2012. Must be 18 years of age or younger to participate. Bring form of ID for child for new account opening.

This is a guest post from Michael of Financial Ramblings.

Editor’s Note: I was chatting with Michael the other day when he told me his story about buying a suit at a major men’s retailer. He told me how he walked in expecting it to be your typical retail experience, that is you pay what’s listed, but discovered that it was closer to buying a car. There’s a lot of wheeling and dealing involved and I was surprised so I asked him to share his story – being able to negotiate the price of a suit is something the stores probably don’t want you to know!

A couple of weeks ago I had to dress for success. Actually, I had to dress because of success. I was receiving a work-related award and I was expected to wear business attire.

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I was watching CNN’s list of the big-name college commencement speakers and saw that there were a few names on that list I’d love to see. Bill Cosby is delivering the commencement speech at the University of Baltimore on May 21st. President Obama is speaking at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis on May 24th. And Cal Ripken Jr. is speaking to the graduates of the University of Maryland on May 19th. All within fifteen minute driving distance, these all hold great promise. While they may not not be as powerful as Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2008 or The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch from my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon, they all have the promise of being entertaining.

There’s just one problem… I’m not graduating from any of those schools. So how do I get in?

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I’m not a big fan of moving. Every year for the first six years of my marriage, I moved. We moved across the country twice, and we moved houses in town. It was not pleasant. However, we’ve been in our current home for almost six years, and mu husband is applying for university jobs.

This means we might be moving. Even though we’ve tried not to get weighed down with too much stuff, the reality is that we’ve got more stuff now than we had when we schlepped it to Syracuse, New York for grad school.

So, I’m digging deep, and trying to remember the things we did to save money during our several moves earlier during marriage. Here are 4 of the frugal ways I came up with to move:

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a post talking about a weird charge on my bank statement and how it’s important to review your statements every month. For many people, ourselves included, reviewing credit card and bank statements are a monthly ritual because we are aware of much identity theft is out there.

What we don’t often think about is less obvious fees and charges that companies stick on bills. I download my internet/cable bill from Comcast each month in order to fill out an expense report. When I looked at my bill, I noticed that it was a little higher than normal. About forty dollars higher.

I did some digging and here was the culprit:
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Probably not… but I tried!

We recently put in an offer on a new home and one of the fun parts of the home buying process is getting a mortgage loan. One of the fun parts of getting a home mortgage loan is finding out whether or your not you can get on in the first place and how much it’ll cost you!

When the lender pulled our credit, we found out that the bank would be taking the our median credit score and using that as our score. As cruel fate would have it, our middle score happened to be 739. 739 puts it exactly one point under 740, which would’ve made us eligible for the best possible interest rate. The difference between the two rates was 0.125% APR, which equals thousands over the thirty year life of the mortgage.

Since we didn’t have an accepted offer and we weren’t locking in the rate, we still had a chance to try to boost our score just a little bit in the next month in order to get the best possible rate. We needed just a single point. Here is what we were going to do:

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Have you ever met someone who said they loved their cable company? I haven’t. We pay them a lot of money to watch television, surf the internet, and give us access to entertainment options we otherwise wouldn’t have access to. Most of them hold monopolies and they all act like they do.

One of the best things you can do for yourself, when it comes to negotiating monthly fixed costs, is review your options when it comes to cable and internet services and go with whomever is cheaper. The services are near perfect substitutes so why not pay less for the same thing? The only thing really stopping anyone is how much of a pain in the ass it is to switch. We recently switched from Verizon to Comcast in part because Comcast offered us cheaper service, plus faster internet, and around two hundred and fifty bucks in statement credits. You can’t go wrong with cheaper and free “cash,” so I switched.

With cable bills, you actually prepay for service. So you that bill you received in March goes towards April’s monthly payments. When you cancel, the cable company actually owes you money and you need to get that back (it’s almost like a security deposit on their equipment). I returned their equipment, saw they owed me $135 and now goes the annoying process of getting my own money back.

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New research out of the University of Kansas’s School of Business is showing that those who consolidate their savings into a single account, rather than spreading it out across several, encourages saving. Led by assistant professor Promothesh Chatterjee, the study was actually four separate studies with a total of 566 participants. In these studies, participants could earn money for doing things and spend it on products. They discovered that those who maintain one account versus multiple accounts had a higher rate of saving. The theory was that people are predisposed to spending money, rather than saving, and that this is facilitated by vagueness. If you have multiple accounts, it’s not readily apparent how much you’ve saved. When you know exactly how much you have saved, you are less likely to spend the money.

So the issue isn’t so much one bank account versus five, it really comes down to knowledge and understanding how much you’re saving. It’d interesting to find a way to do a study in which you replicated this scenario but offered them a Mint-like financial aggregator that collected all that information for you and find out the impact of that knowledge.

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