Shop easier with Serve!

If you haven't hear about Serve, you definitely should!

Serve is an alternative to debit and other prepaid cards and has some great features:

• There are no credit checks and no monthly or annual fees.
• Shop with Serve and you can help protect eligible purchases against accidental damage or theft for up to 90 days from the date of purchase.
• When your car breaks down, Serve can send help your way for towing, winching, flat tires, battery boost, fuel delivery, or emergency lock-out in the US, Canada, or Puerto Rico.
• Enjoy access to presale tickets, reserved seats, and behind-the-scenes experiences in certain cities when you use your Serve card.

Click on the Serve graphic above to learn more!

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Check your credit report for free

It's important to check your credit report regularly!  Legally, you can get your credit report from each of the three credit agencies once per year at AnnualCreditReport.com.  To make the most of these free reports, get one free report every four months.  For instance, get your Experian report in January, your Equifax report in May, and you TransUnion report in September.

If you find an error, be sure to report it to the company as soon as possible.  Taking off incorrect information can help your credit score so that you may pay less in interest on future loans.

If you want to check more often, or if you want to get your actual score, you'll need to go to a paid site.  There are lots of great sites out there - one is CreditSesame, where you can receive daily credit monitoring alerts and get your credit score each month.  If you're trying to improve your score, monitoring it regularly is a good idea, and it's always good to have your account checked for ID theft!

Click here to learn more about CreditSesame.

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Free financial newsletter

It's not too difficult to come up with financial goals - what's difficult is sticking to them.  Reading a daily financial newsletter can keep you focused on your money goals!

Here's a great financial newsletter specifically for women: Daily Worth.

DailyWorth is a vibrant community of motivated women who are ready to take charge of their lives and their finances. Get our tips and tools delivered daily to your inbox.

Click here for more information.

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Tell your money where to go!

If you want to save money, you first need to keep track of where it's going.

And here's a site that can help you keep track of your saving and spending: Personal Capital.

Personal Capital provides free money management software so you can see where your money has gone and where you want it to go.  Some of the features include:

• You can link in all accounts to one place: checking, savings, credit card, brokerage, retirement, investments, mortgages, and loans.
• You can view cash flow, spending patterns, portfolio balance and asset allocation. 
• You can view and classify all transactions.
• You can even run a free investment check-up! 

Plus, you can download the FREE Personal Capital apps for iPhone, Android and iPad,  This eliminates one of the main problems of keeping track of your finances - keeping track of your spending while you're on the go.

Click here to give Personal Capital a try!

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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It's tax time again!

It's about time to start working on taxes!  So I thought I would review my tax strategy with you.  I'm able to save several hundred dollars using this strategy - if you're in a similar situation to me, it could help you as well.

Our situation is that we don't generally have enough tax deductions to itemize each year.  We're in year 11 of a 15 year mortgage, so there is not very much interest to deduct.  (Thank goodness most of our payment is going to principal!)  We don't have a state income tax to deduct.  And we don't have high medical or work deductions, either.

So to save on taxes, I lump expenses into every other year. For instance, in odd years, I make 13 mortgage payments; in even years, I make only 11. I pay my property taxes twice in odd years and not at all in even years. (I don't have the taxes escrowed with my mortgage payment.) I wait until January to give charitable deductions I might in December, and then the next December I give to charities the money I might have given them the next month.

Then, in odd years taxes, I itemize my taxes. In even years (like this 2012 tax year), I take the standard deduction.

For a more in-depth description of this, see this Frugal Follies post Saving Money on Taxes.

To save more, I prepare my own taxes.  I prefer TurboTax. I've used it for years, and I plan to use it again! There is a free edition for the simplest tax returns - check to see if you qualify.

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Manage your finances better

With the start of the school year upon us, this is a great time to work on new goals from now until the end of the year. Perhaps you'd like to manage your finances better - maybe Manilla can help.

Manilla is a free web based service that helps consumers better manage all of their household accounts, including financial, utilities, subscriptions and travel rewards programs, in one secure place online. Under a single password, Manilla provides customers with an automated, organized view of all of their account information, text and/or email reminders to pay bills and unlimited storage of account documents that Manilla has seamlessly retrieved for the consumer.

Why is Manilla necessary? Most people have more than 20 different household accounts, including three to four credit cards, several travel and hotel rewards accounts, multiple magazine and newspaper subscriptions, plus cable, phone, and other assorted utility bills. In order to stay on top of all this, people have to manage daily incoming paper mail, an array of online usernames and passwords, and websites in order to access important account information and take action. Manilla seamlessly retrieves all your account information - current balances, previous payments, upcoming bills due - and stores it for you in one secure place. Most importantly, you need only one password to view, manage and organize it all.

Give Manilla a try!

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Manilla.

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Free personal finance newsletter

Here's a great freebie for those of you trying to learn more about personal finance!

DailyWorth is a free daily personal finance email for women. DailyWorth tips cover self worth, net worth, saving, spending, earning, investing, taxes, entrepreneurship, financial feminism, and much more.

Subscribe to DailyWorth now!

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Learn more about personal finance

Here's a great freebie for those of you trying to learn more about personal finance!

DailyWorth is a free daily personal finance email for women. DailyWorth tips cover self worth, net worth, saving, spending, earning, investing, taxes, entrepreneurship, financial feminism, and much more.

Subscribe to DailyWorth now!

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Search online for scholarships

Frequent Frugal Follies readers know that I have a fourteen-year-old daughter.  She's completing ninth grade next month, which means that college is getting closer and closer.  And with that comes the worries about how to pay for it.

We saved a lot of money when she was first born, which was invested in a 529 mutual fund during the late 1990s tech stock boom.  And it did really well... until the recession in the early 2000s.  We continued to add money, which was good, since we bought a lot of shares at low prices.  The prices rebounded and the value of our investment grew.... until the current economic downturn, which the fund is just starting to recover from.

So we have a good amount of money saved, but it's not enough to cover four years of tuition, room, and board for a state university, and certainly not anywhere enough for a private school.  So guess what her part-time job will be this summer?

She'll be looking for scholarships on the Internet.  She'll be using scholarship websites to find scholarships that she can apply for now or that she can file away for a future year.  (Yes, you can get scholarships before your senior year of college.  You can even earn scholarships while in middle school, depending on the scholarship.)

It's just amazing what kinds of scholarships are out there.    There are scholarships for specific majors or school types, for specific ethnicities, or for people living in specific geographic locations.  For instance, I found a scholarship that is only open to students in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin.  My daughter doesn't qualify, but only a limited number of people would.  Which means the odds of winning this scholarship are pretty good if you do qualify!

You can also search by scholarship deadline.  That means you don't have to spend a lot of time looking through scholarships where the deadline has already passed, which makes the process a lot less frustrating and saves you a lot of effort.

Once she finds scholarships that she qualifies for, she'll spend more time this summer writing essays, filling out applications, or whatever she needs to do to apply.  She probably won't win most of the scholarships, but if she wins even one, her time spent on this project will be worth it.

(All opinions are 100% mine. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Plan your budget based on the calendar

Do you budget?

I know for some of you, that's a bad word.  For others, it's the most important thing you do to help you save money.

Budgets can be made in a variety of ways.  The simplest way is just a pad of paper and a pencil.  I map out our spending and saving every two weeks with a simple spreadsheet - this works for me.  You can also use expensive, complicated budgeting programs.

I just recently learned about a budgeting website that makes a lot of sense to me: Rylstim Budget.  It's a tool for home accounting that is based on the calendar.

Of course!  You can plan out your spending not just in a list, but by looking at the calendar to see what events will be coming up.  This way, future events can be accounted for.  Say there's a school carnival coming up next week.  If you were making a budget just with a pad and paper, you might forget about this event and forget to plan for it.  But you can mark important events like this on the calendar and then remember to budget for this expense.

You'll also be able to keep track of periodic expenses, like daily tolls and parking for your work commute.  You can add your vacation days to the calendar, and you won't have to budget those work expenses for those days, which means more money for your other goals.

Keeping a calendar budget really makes a lot of sense!   The software on this site would really help a lot of people who want to budget but find that money just disappears into everyday expenses.

Best of all, Rylstim Budget has a 30-day trial version, so you can try it to see if it's right for you.

But whatever method you use, whether it be an online site, a spreadsheet, or a paper pad, definitely give budgeting a try.  You might be surprised how much you can save this way.

(This is a sponsored post on behalf of Rylstim. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Learn more about your finances

Here's a great freebie for those of you trying to learn more about personal finance!

DailyWorth is a free daily personal finance email for women. DailyWorth tips cover self worth, net worth, saving, spending, earning, investing, taxes, entrepreneurship, financial feminism, and much more.

Subscribe to DailyWorth now!

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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4 tips to keep up your credit score

I'm a Dave Ramsey fan, but I completely disagree with him on the subject of credit scores.

He thinks that a credit score is just an "I love debt" score, and that having no credit score is just as good as having a high one.

I disagree - many things depend on having a high credit score.  For instance, many employers will pull your credit score as part of the application process.  If they don't get this information, they may pull your application out of the file and into the trash!

(I was surprised that Crystal Paine of Money Saving Mom agreed with me on this!  Check my review of her book, The Money Saving Mom's Budget.)

Here are four tips from Credit Sesame to keep your credit score high:

1. Pay your bills on time, all the time -- every time.
2. Watch your credit card balances, use as little of your available credit as possible and your credit score will thank you.
3. Avoid credit card debt, only charge what you can comfortably afford to pay off at the end of each month.
4. Maintain a good mix of credit including credit cards, auto loans, mortgage, etc., and manage them wisely.

Credit Sesame is a 100% free personal finance credit and debt management tool with no credit card required or trial period. Credit Sesame makes managing personal credit online, owing less in interest and saving on mortgage, loan, or credit card payments easy! It gives an instant view of consumer's credit, including Experian credit score, refreshed monthly and for free, as well as debt analysis with personalized offers tailored to consumer’s credit profile.

Give Credit Sesame a try!

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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HOT! Win $704 at DailyWorth!

According to the American Retail Federation, Americans spent $704 to celebrate the holidays last year.

So DailyWorth is giving away $704 to 3 lucky entrants!  Enter the giveaway here.

By entering, you'll also be signing up for DailyWorth. It's a free daily personal finance email for women. DailyWorth tips cover self worth, net worth, saving, spending, earning, investing, taxes, entrepreneurship, financial feminism, and much more.

Pay off your holiday bills with this giveaway - it ends soon, so enter now!

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Skyrocket Your Savings! Review and Giveaway

UPDATE: This giveaway has ended.  The winner will be announced soon.  Please enter any of the other giveaways on the left sidebar.

I love to read personal finance books. It doesn't matter what the subject is - getting out of debt, investing, starting a business - I like them all.

What I look for most in these kinds of books is some sort of connection to the writer. Rather than a dry list of money-saving ideas, I prefer to read personal stories about how the author succeeded with money.  I don't just want to learn some theoretical facts about how to get out of debt and save money - I want to see those facts in action in the author's life.

And that's what I found when I read Skyrocket Your Savings! by Rene Christensen, formerly of Budget Saving Mom. This e-book is full of great ideas on saving money as well as lots of personal stories and links to posts at her former blog.

For instance, in a chapter of Needs vs. Wants, Christensen doesn't just list what items in your life are needs and which are wants; instead, she lists the rules she used to determine needs versus wants at a point in her life when she lived on a microscopic budget and only had money for the absolute necessities.

Christensen doesn't just say that you should have an emergency fund; instead, she lists all the financial emergencies she had in one calendar year (including getting a new roof - twice!) and illustrates how if her family did not have an emergency fund, these emergencies would have driven them into debt.  Instead, they were able to draw on the emergency fund.  After looking at her list, I am definitely going to beef up my emergency fund as soon as I can.

The second half of the e-book lists ways that you can save money on expenses such as car expenses, child care, clothing, eating out, electricity, food and toiletries, gas, insurance, medicine, mortgage, recreation, school supplies, TV/phone/Internet, and water bill.  Lists like this, though important, can also make for some boring reading.  But Christensen makes them both entertaining and informative by including links to great deals she's found on these items and more, such as this amazing consignment shop find.

For each chapter, there's an assignment to help you implement the suggestions for that chapter.  Complete these assignments, and you're well on your way to save, save, save!

Whether you're a novice to saving money or a frugal pro, you'll find lots of great information and tips that will help you further your money-saving goals!  I highly recommend Skyrocket Your Savings!

Want to check out a chapter of this book?  Just click here and give a shout-out about Skyrocket Your Savings! on Facebook or Twitter, and you'll receive Chapter 18: Save on Phone, TV, Internet.

Skyrocket Your Savings! retails for just $4.99, making it affordable for everyone.  But I have a special deal just for Frugal Follies readers:

Go to the Skyrocket Your Savings site and add the e-book to your cart.  When you enter the discount code FrugalFollies on the shopping cart page, you'll save an additional 10% off!

Or would you like to get Skyrocket Your Savings for free?

Frugal Follies is holding a giveaway for one copy of Skyrocket Your Savings!

To enter the giveaway,  leave a comment on this post stating which money-saving tips (car expenses, child care, clothing, eating out, electricity, food and toiletries, gas, insurance, medicine, mortgage, recreation, school supplies, TV/phone/Internet, or water bill) you'd like to learn more about.   This entry is mandatory. If you're the winner, I will post your username (but not your email address) and your comment in a future post announcing the winner of the giveaway. By entering, you are giving me permission to post your comment.  If you're posting a comment and don't have a Google account or OpenID, please leave an email address in your comment so that I can reach you if you've won!  This contest is only open to readers 18 or older worldwide.

To get more entries (optional), you can do one or more of the following and then leave a separate comment for each action:

• Follow Frugal Follies on Twitter (1 entry)
• Subscribe to the Frugal Follies RSS feed. (1 entry)
• Become a fan of Frugal Follies on Facebook (1 entry)
• Follow me with Google Friend Connect (find it on the left sidebar) (1 entry)
• Follow me via e-mail (find it on the right sidebar) (3 entries)
• Post this giveaway on your own blog (3 entries)
• Tweet about this giveaway using the following wording (1 entry per day): I just entered to #win Skyrocket Your Savings! #giveaway via @FrugalFollies
• If you've previously done any of those, leave a comment saying you've done so.

Good luck!  This giveaway will end on Thursday, January 19, 2012, at 11:59 pm Eastern time.  Any entries received after that date and time will not be entered into the giveaway.  I will choose the winner with random.org at the end of the contest and contact the winner via email. 

But if you can't wait that long, buy Skyrocket Your Savings! now and use the code FrugalFollies to get 10% off!  Click here to purchase Skyrocket Your Savings!.

(Disclaimer: I received a review copy of Skyrocket Your Savings!.  All opinions are mine.)

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Help for your financial New Year's resolutions

Are you making a New Year's resolution to get your finances under control?

LearnVest is running a 10-day Take Control Bootcamp. This 10-day email program gives you daily to-dos to achieve your financial goals.

• Discover where you're really spending
• Create a budget that you can actually stick to
• Dream big and set financial goals you can achieve

I'm taking the bootcamp - I'm on Day 4, Discovering Your Spending Patterns.

This is a big problem at the Frugal Follies household.  We are pretty frugal on the big-ticket items, but still tend to spend money on small items here and there, particularly food eaten out of the house. I'm hoping this lesson will help me figure out which expenditures help us meet our life goals, and which ones are dragging us down.

Please join me as we learn to take control of our expenditures!

Click here to sign up for the boot camp and the LearnVest newsletter.

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Financial boot camp

Need some help getting started with getting your finances under control?

LearnVest is running a 10-day Take Control Bootcamp. This 10-day email program gives you daily to-dos to achieve your financial goals.

• Discover where you're really spending
• Create a budget that you can actually stick to
• Dream big and set financial goals you can achieve

Each day, you'll receive an e-mail with a to-do list.  You'll do the items listed, using LearnVest's interactive tools and calculators.  And you can review any day's items at any time.

LearnVest has other boot camps as well, including:

• Personal Finance Basics
• Cut Your Costs
• Get Out of Debt
• Build Your Career
• Priceless Style
• Baby on Board

I'm signing up for the boot camp.  Want to join me?

Click here to sign up any of these the boot camps and the LearnVest newsletter.

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Time to start organizing your finances

I'll soon be posting my last Elevate Your Finances in 2011 post, and it will be time to start setting some goals for 2012!  What will yours be?

If you're like me, you want to do better in handling your finances next year. Maybe Manilla can help you meet your goal.

Manilla is a free web based service that helps consumers better manage all of their household accounts, including financial, utilities, subscriptions and travel rewards programs, in one secure place online. Under a single password, Manilla provides customers with an automated, organized view of all of their account information, text and/or email reminders to pay bills and unlimited storage of account documents that Manilla has seamlessly retrieved for the consumer.

Why is Manilla necessary? Most people have more than 20 different household accounts, including three to four credit cards, several travel and hotel rewards accounts, multiple magazine and newspaper subscriptions, plus cable, phone, and other assorted utility bills. In order to stay on top of all this, people have to manage daily incoming paper mail, an array of online usernames and passwords, and websites in order to access important account information and take action. Manilla seamlessly retrieves all your account information - current balances, previous payments, upcoming bills due - and stores it for you in one secure place. Most importantly, you need only one password to view, manage and organize it all.

Give Manilla a try!

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Manilla.

(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Manilla - manage your finances!

The end of the year is coming, and it's almost time to start making some resolutions. What will yours be?

If you're like me, you want to do better in handling your finances next year. Maybe Manilla can help you meet your goal.

Manilla is a free web based service that helps consumers better manage all of their household accounts, including financial, utilities, subscriptions and travel rewards programs, in one secure place online. Under a single password, Manilla provides customers with an automated, organized view of all of their account information, text and/or email reminders to pay bills and unlimited storage of account documents that Manilla has seamlessly retrieved for the consumer.

Why is Manilla necessary? Most people have more than 20 different household accounts, including three to four credit cards, several travel and hotel rewards accounts, multiple magazine and newspaper subscriptions, plus cable, phone, and other assorted utility bills. In order to stay on top of all this, people have to manage daily incoming paper mail, an array of online usernames and passwords, and websites in order to access important account information and take action. Manilla seamlessly retrieves all your account information - current balances, previous payments, upcoming bills due - and stores it for you in one secure place. Most importantly, you need only one password to view, manage and organize it all.

Give Manilla a try!

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Manilla.

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(This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more information.)

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Manilla - organize your household accounts!

I pay bills every two weeks. As bills come in, I put them in a specific mail holder in the kitchen. When it's time to pay bills, I sit down and make a spreadsheet of all of our income for the two weeks, all of our current and projected expenses, and all of the money we want to save for various goals. Then it's a matter of setting priorities to make sure that everything balances out!

This system works for me, but maybe you're looking for a way to organize your accounts and bill paying. You might like to give Manilla a try.

Manilla is a free web based service that helps consumers better manage all of their household accounts, including financial, utilities, subscriptions and travel rewards programs, in one secure place online. Under a single password, Manilla provides customers with an automated, organized view of all of their account information, text and/or email reminders to pay bills and unlimited storage of account documents that Manilla has seamlessly retrieved for the consumer.

Why is Manilla necessary? Most people have more than 20 different household accounts, including three to four credit cards, several travel and hotel rewards accounts, multiple magazine and newspaper subscriptions, plus cable, phone, and other assorted utility bills. In order to stay on top of all this, people have to manage daily incoming paper mail, an array of online usernames and passwords, and websites in order to access important account information and take action. Manilla seamlessly retrieves all your account information - current balances, previous payments, upcoming bills due - and stores it for you in one secure place. Most importantly, you need only one password to view, manage and organize it all.

Give Manilla a try!

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Manilla.

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Neat new personal finance site

I'm always searching the web for interesting sites and blogs about personal finance.  I love the topic - even though I admit I don't always practice what they preach.  So I was excited to hear about a new site called Plentii.  I took a look around and signed up.

Plentii has lots of articles and videos about earning, spending, and saving money.  There's a weekly newsletter.  It has a Twitter-like interface where you can chat about financial topics.  But what I think I like best are all the quizzes.  I've got to admit that I'm a sucker for them, and there are lots of lots of different financial topics to do.  I can see myself wasting a lot of time at that site.

So go take a look and check it out! 

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