Bonefish Grill, a seafood restaurant owned by OSI Restaurant Partners (they own, among others, Outback Steakhouse, Carrabba’s, and one of our favorite restaurants – Roy’s Hawaiian Fusion restaurant), is running a special holiday gift card offer where if you give $100 in gift cards, you automatically get a $20 gift card, valid Jan. 1 – Feb. 10, 2010, plus an entry into their Give, Get and Win Sweepstakes. If you win the sweepstakes, you could win $5,000 cash and $5,000 you can give to a charity of your choice. You can buy the certificate in a restaurant or online but you have to register the card online to participate in the sweepstakes.

A Maryland/DC/Virginia chili chain, Hard Times Cafe, always does this same type of promotion around the holidays and until they closed the one near us, we used to buy at least a $100 in gift certificates because it was any easy $20 off. If you live near a Bonefish Grill and you enjoy their food, taking this promotion is a no brainer. If you don’t, well… then it doesn’t really make much sense, now does it?

I also have a bonus today, as Bonefish Grill has given us a $25 gift certificate to give away to one lucky Bargaineering.com. First, check to see that there is a local Bonefish Grill near where you live. Then, if you have one nearby and you would like to win the certificate, just leave a comment below with the menu item you’d most likely get the next time you visited before Sunday, November 22nd for your chance to win.

Me? I’d probably get the Chilean Sea Bass in a Pan Asian glaze. Mmm… I do love me that Patagonian toothfish.

This contest is void where prohibited. Good luck!

It’s Monday and that means we have another episode of the Personal Finance Hour where JD of Get Rich Slowly and I will discuss banks! We’ll go over credit unions, commercial banks, and online banks – and everything else in between.

The show will be on live at 6PM Eastern, 3PM Pacific and will be broadcast at this page, if you want to listen to it (it’s also recorded, so you can go to that page to listen in after it airs). As always, you can call in and listen live at 347-327-9144 to chat with us or just listen in the background.

Or click play on this widget (after 6PM on Mondays it will be that week’s show, before then and you’ll get last week’s show):

We are also on iTunes and you can subscribe by clicking on this link, which will open up iTunes.

We hope you get the chance to listen, perhaps call in and chat, or just pop on into the chat room to hang out. It can get a little rowdy in there but it’s good times I promise!

As I explained in my Netflix review, one of the reasons why I became a Netflix convert was the streaming content they had available to XBox 360 owners. For $8.99 a month, you had access to their entire library of online streaming content at your fingertips. From my point of view, I saw that as the real reason to subscribe to Netflix and getting one-DVD out at a time was just a nice side benefit.

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A few weekends ago, I was listening to Marketplace Money when they ran an interview of Scrubs star Donald Faison. Faison got his big break with the movie Clueless and then followed that up with Scrubs. The entire piece was about him making bad money decisions and then turning it around. He bought a $20,000 car with the $12,000 from Clueless, then had trouble when the third car payment came around.

So he hired a business manager.
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When I reviewed the Chase Blueprint payment program, I said I believed that credit card companies were offering money management tools and payment systems to help keep defaults and late payments down. The best credit card customer is a regularly paying one, despite what mainstream media would have you think (that credit card companies love to ding people with fees and send them to the poorhouse). Even the most cynical of consumers would agree with me on that point!

Well, as it turns out, American Express also has series of tools that helps users get a better handle on their finances. It isn’t an alternative payment schedule like Chase Blueprint but more along the lines of an online budgeting tool, except it’s available only to American Express charge cardmembers (and it’s free).

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This post is a continuation of a series of reviews I’m doing for popular budgeting packages after our recent Personal Finance Hour episode on budgeting. This one covers PocketSmith, a New Zealand-based company founded by James Wigglesworth, Jason Leong, and Francois Bondiguel.

Every tool needs differentiator, a way they solve a problem that beats the competition, and it takes only a few seconds to realize what that is for PocketSmith. PocketSmith’s claim to fame, embodied by their slogan “Forecasting Made Simple,” is that they help you manage your personal finances by helping you forecast your financial future. By accurately planning and forecasting your future spending, will remove some of the mystery and anxiety and replace it with a plan you can work towards.

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With the unceremonious shuttering of Microsoft Money a few months ago, a lot of former Microsoft Money customers are looking for alternatives. If you were using Microsoft Money Essentials, Plus Deluxe, Plus Premium, or Plus Home & Business, your software will still work but support will be gone.

Fortunately, there are a lot of alternatives in the online budgeting tool chest. After a recent Personal Finance Hour show all about budgeting, I took a look at several software tools. This post will cover all of them briefly to help you decide which might be right for you (and they are not ranked in any predefined order).

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For a month or so before our wedding, my wife and I used Crest Whitestrips to help whiten our teeth. We thought about doing one of those “professional” dentist teeth whitening sessions but between the cost and the discomfort (my wife has sensitive teeth and her dentist said these were just as good… and cheaper!), we opted for a do-it-yourself kit because we figured it was a good value. In the end, we were very happy with the results.

Just this last week, a representative from Crest asked if I’d be interested in getting a box of their new Crest Whitestrips Advanced SEal and five boxes to giveaway to readers. Any time a good company is willing to send me something I can give away to readers, I take it.

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Whew, the end of yet another week. Can you believe it’s already November? It seemed like only yesterday I was trying to figure out what to get my wife for Valentine’s Day and already we’re planning for Thanksgiving in a few short weeks. It’s been a heck of a year so far, though we still have a little bit to go, and while things haven’t been too rough, I know that everyone’s been dealing with challenges this year. One thing we can be thankful for is that we’re still here, still kicking, and 2010 is just a few weeks away. Keep your head up and keep fighting, you only fail if you give up.

I hope you enjoy this week’s picks:

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If you’re an American Express cardmember, you probably recognize the annual mailings from American Express about their cardmember gifts. They usually send out a couple of these types of offers each year and if you’re like, many of them go into the recycling bin. The one I always remember is the offer of an appointment book and day planner, but they do a lot more.

This year, the offer is for a 2009 Food & Wine Annual Cookbook that has a retail value of $29.95 (you can buy it from Amazon for $19.77 plus shipping). For the cost of shipping and handling, $2.99, we can get this book for free just because we’re a specially selected Cardmember. There is a money back guarantee on the shipping and handling costs too. If I don’t like the book, I can return it within 90 days of the billing date and get a full refund.

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