Thrifty and Thriving

Getting a ticket is expensive, and if we can help you avoid getting one that should qualify as savings!
Now that I justified posting this, troopers are planning to crack down on cell phone use beginning May 4 – May 7.
Back in 2009 this four-day project was called “Operation Hang Up”. True story.

There’s much talk lately about short sales. After listening to my fave FBHW morning show butcher the explanation (if you can call it that) I realize not everyone might know what it is. And I have to say, it’s a pretty cool concept

Short selling is when you borrow something (assets) from someone else (broker) and return those assets to the broker at a later time. In the meantime, you probably sell said assets. The kicker is that if you do it right, when it comes time to return the assets you can buy them for way cheaper than what you sold them for, thus making money. You basically profit from prices going down.

Of course, as everything in finance it’s risky and you could lose a lot of money trying to pull this off.

For more detailed explanation and some cool graphs read the Wikipedia article!

Social sharing is awesome except when everyone gets to see your credit card numbers… on google!
Read this article to learn more.

Oh, and if you use Blippy we suggest you delete any info you might have on there. Just in case.

ps: Blippy “is a fun and easy way to see and discuss what everyone is buying”. In case you were wondering what it was.

I love the idea of testers and samples. Few, however, I find pretty gross (like food samples at farmers’ markets, or lip gloss samples at Sephora. Can you say Yuck?)

Anyway, Allure is chiming in on the subject, saying that all make-up testers are contaminated with some sort of bacteria. Read the full report here

Free is not always better.

Story highlights

New $100 bill to be unveiled Wednesday at U.S. Department of Treasury
It will be the first redesign of the denomination in 14 years
Currency changes come to stay ahead of counterfeiters

Read the full article here

Walletpop.com has an interesting list of 10 sneaky daily expenses that will nickel and dime you to the annual poorhouse

My most fave from the list:

tipping
pet care
vitamins & supplements
Birds
Birthdays

What’s on your list of sneaky expenses?

BY downloading a movie/song for free you are depriving the creators from one million-trillion dollars!
According to a recent GAO, that was asked to “identify and quantify the presumed harm to the US economy from IP infringement”, none of the commonly cited numbers could have been verified.

On the government side they looked at three figures which have been widely used to argue in favor of increased IP enforcement. According to the GAO, none of the numbers stand up to scrutiny because they, “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology.”

Other reports from US Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Trade Commission were similarly criticized for being short on facts, and even discredited by the agencies themselves.

However, the report also noted that this hasn’t stopped other government agencies and a number of trade groups from citing them as fact.

And how do government officials actually arrive at these figures since they appear not to be collecting any data on the subject? According to the GAO they rely heavily on numbers supplied by various industry groups, even though those groups, “do not always disclose their proprietary data sources and methods, making it difficult to verify their estimates.”

Read the full article here

Check out this video that talks about home make over families taking out second mortgages on their houses to start a business or just pay the bills.
According to the video show producers warn families not to use their new house as a piggy bank but it still happens…