Minty Fresh (Mint)

Managing your money is one of the keys to financial success. Everyone should know how much they spent last month on groceries. Think about how much you spent. If you can't come up with the number in less than a minute then you should probably create a Mint account. Mint aggregates all of your financial information (bank accounts, credit cards, loans, etc.) into one place and lets you categorize all of your income and spending. This shows you exactly where all of your money is going. I'm not exactly happy about how much I spend but at least now I never think "where did all my money go?"

Cash Back Marathon

Cash back sites are popping up and sticking around longer now than ever before. If you don't know, a cash back site is a website that gives you money for shopping at online stores that you already shop at. This might sound kind of strange at first but hear me out. Tons of companies pay money for referral traffic... for example every time someone clicks an advertisement on this site I get somewhere between 30 cents and 60 cents. Online stores will pay a finders fee for referral traffic like this and these cash back websites just split it with you. My favorite cash back sites are as follows:

1. Mr Rebates
2. Ebates
3. Fat Wallet

I love these sites because I end up saving a ton through them. Whenever I find an item online that I want to buy I just go here first and see if the store is featured on any of these sites. If so then awesome! I'll be getting money back. If not then that's no problem as I didn't really waste any effort.

If you know of any more cash back sites that I missed please post them in the comments and I'll add them to the list!

Bing Rewards (With Hack)

Bing Rewards is a program put out through Microsoft in their Bing search engine. The idea of it is to drive traffic to their search engine using rewards as a lure. Many people, like myself, already have a favorite search engine and don't want to switch over to Bing. I would never try and persuade anyone that Bing is a great unless I was talking about the Bing Rewards program.

Once you sign up for the rewards program you are able to early 15 rewards points per day by searching using Bing. They give out a few additional points here and there as well but the ones you can count on are the 15 per day. For the average month you'll be receiving 450 points if you do this every day. An example of an award through this program is Hulu Plus (625 points). Therefore if you and your friend/spouse do this (each with one account) you can essentially get Hulu Plus free forever.

Now for the fun part (the hack). There's a number of websites out there (I prefer this one) that will make the searches for you. Once a day I'll open up that link and click "Start!" and then go about my day.