When you think of prepaid cell phones, what do you think of? If you’ve watched The Wire on HBO, a gritty drama about life in Baltimore, you associate them with drug dealers. If you were a fan of the Sopranos, you knew they were good for avoiding wiretaps. If you haven’t seen either, chances are you don’t associate them with anything. Most people don’t use prepaid cell phones because we naturally think to a nice buffet-type minute plan with a major carrier.

For our vacation to Europe, we used a pay as you go phone. We couldn’t use our own phones since we didn’t have compatible technology but our friend lent us her old phone. We went to a local Orange store (a pay as you go service company, bought a Sim card, and loaded it up with some minutes.

The cost of the chip? £0.

We put £5 on the phone and we now had cell service without a commitment, without any huge up front payments, and we only pay for the minutes we needed.

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Calling family and friends overseas is very affordable and very easy, if done correctly. In this article I am going to reveal three affordable international long distance calling options to the old expensive standby, direct dialing. I’ve been doing a lot of research in this for my own needs so I hope you find this article valuable. Each option has the potential to save you more and more money, though sometimes you have to sacrifice a bit of convenience. Naturally, it’s always easiest to pick up the phone can call directly, instead of using a phone card, but only one of those two options is used by millions of people every week at a savings of up to 95% on every international phone call.

Why is this post focused on international long distance calls? Today, very few people have to pay extra for a domestic long distance call that there really is no incremental cost for a domestic long distance phone call. Cell phones charge by the minute, with no consideration of local or long distance. For that reason, we’ve ignored the domestic long distance calls.

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As the sugar-fueled, much anticipated mischievous holiday of Halloween draws near, frugal families are trying to figure out how they can save money on Halloween candy. Unfortunately for the money conscious, this year’s Halloween falls on the worst possible day, a Saturday. A Saturday Halloween means trick or treaters will be out earlier and longer than if it were on a workday and that means there will be more ghosts, pumpkins, and football player zombies wandering up to your door asking for candy.

However, if you’re smart about how you approach Halloween, you can save yourself some a little bit of money and every little bit counts.

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It doesn’t take a genius to know that compound interest is a pretty remarkable thing. When your interest earns interest… and then earns some more, it can make for some large numbers over a long period of time. That part isn’t so difficult to understand even though plenty of people have written about it.

So why did I make a video about the “true power” of compound interest? Watch.

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As you might remember from a few days ago, my money vice is vacations. So I’m always on the lookout for things that will make our travel cheaper, which included signing up for the Travelzoo Top 20 deals email newsletter.

I’ve been getting the weekly emails, plus some unscheduled last-minute offers or promotions, for the last few months and the deals have been pretty astounding. I think it has to do with the recession and the last minute nature of many of the offers. If you’re flexible, you can get some amazing rates on cruises, flights, hotels, and shows.

Dunhill Vacations is another company like Travelzoo. They’re not a travel agency but a deal collector and publisher. Their main website lists a bunch of offers and while they don’t have a “top 20″ list, they do have plenty offers listed. There isn’t much more to say other than that I signed up for their free newsletter and you can to if you’re interested. I haven’t received one yet but I think it’ll probably be a lot like Travelzoo’s emails. (and like Travelzoo, they don’t sell your information, which is very important)

If you’re already a subscriber, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. I figure that it’s free and I can unsubscribe whenever I want so I might as well. You never know, you might save a few bucks or find some insane last minute deal that makes it all worth it.

My wife and I have been trying to cook more of our meals at home, rather than going out to a restaurant. Part of it is frugality, cooking at home is simply cheaper than eating out. However, an even bigger part has to do with being healthier. Restaurants tend to use way too much oil, fat, cheese, and salt (among other things) and eating out all the time can expand your waistline as quickly as it thins out your wallet. So when I was offered a copy of The Frugal Foodie Cookbook by Lara Starr and Lynette Shirk to review, I was eager to see a cookbook that had frugality, rather than a particular cooking style or cuisine, in mind.

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By his own admission, Phil Villarreal is a stingy scoundrel. I didn’t know much about him before I received his book, other than how he also wrote articles for The Consumerist from time to time, but his book – Secrets of a Stingy Scoundrel is an awesome and educational read.

The book contains a hundred little tricks and hacks that will save, or earn, you some serious money. He admits that while his advice does contain “a few splashes of innovation,” much of it is common sense – and it is. However, if the Darwin Awards are any indication, common sense is in short supply and we could all use a little refresher.

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This is a guest post from Vic Magary of GymJunkies.com. Vic helps everyday people like you to build muscle and lose fat with short, but intense circuit training and strength training workouts

Eating on a budget is no easy task. You could eat at Mcdonald’s 3 times a day and probably stay under $10 but is that really want you want to do? You’d feel awful, your productivity would go way down and chances are you medical bills would go up.

The best way to eat on a budget, at $10 or so per day per person, is to employ a few of the “sneaky” strategies I use when picking up my own groceries. Here’s a few of my favorite ways to eat healthy on a budget.

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Josh Chan, a student at Stanford University, sent me a video he submitted to Stanford FCU’s video scholarship contest. It’s a superbly done stop-motion video that explains how saving a penny a day can yield you hundreds of dollars after only a short while. I was impressed by the stop motion (I imagine this took a lot of work) and the fact that Josh is financially savvy enough to recognize the value of compounding interest while in college. I wish I was that financially cognizant at his age!

Check out the video:

Contest details

The winner of the contest will be based on the number of votes he or she gets so if you have a moment, register and vote for his video. You can vote once a day until the end of September. If you’re as impressed as I am by the video, I know you’ll join me in voting for him.

What did you think?

I’m not a pessimist but I know enough of them to know that being a pessimist can save you a lot of money. A pessimist is someone who sees a glass filled halfway with water as being half empty. In a beautiful blue sky, they see the clouds in the distance and ready their umbrella. They see insurance not as a protection against the unknown but as an investment in the future.

As much as society may frown on being such a negative Nancy (sorry in advance to all the Nancy’s out there), I think sometimes being pessimistic can save you money.

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