According to TowerGroup, the gift card industry was worth $87 billion in 2009 alone. However, 6 percent of this huge figure – nearly $5 billion – was wasted due to gift cards that went unused. To help consumers take advantage of this five-billion-dollar untapped resource, CardHub.com is pleased to announce the launch of the Social Gift Card Exchange. This is the first gift card marketplace to cut out the middleman and provide a trustworthy environment for direct user-to-user interaction.

Card Hub brings a new level of innovation to the industry with its Social Gift Card Exchange that not only includes the primary functionality of other gift card depots, but also provides a platform for users to trade their gift cards directly with their friends, neighbors, colleagues, and trusted companies.

This is a guest post written by Erik Folgate, an editor at Money Crashers.

Yes, you read the title right. You’re probably thinking that it’s ridiculous to suggest that you pay cash for a rental property (which I’m defining as a property you buy for the purpose of renting it out), because it’s unrealistic to think that someone has enough cash to pay for a rental property outright.

Google supports net neutrality when it comes to Internet Service Providers, staunchly insisting that ISPs should not be allowed to preference their own content. In an article concerning net neutrality, Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, argued that regulation is needed to prevent abuses of the availability of internet content by ISPs and “to combat incentives for carriers to pick winners and losers online.”

It would make sense for Google to adopt a similar stance towards its own actions. Instead Google straddles the fence, nodding in support of net neutrality and regulation for ISPs, while employing sneaky business strategies that preference its own content over anyone else’s.

This guest post was written by Manny Davis. Manny is President of Back Taxes Help, LLC, a tax resolution firm that helps businesses and taxpayers pay back taxes. Visit BackTaxesHelp.com for more information on various IRS tax settlement solutions.

Every year millions of Americans find themselves with back taxes or tax bills they cannot afford to pay all at once. Whatever the cause, the IRS is willing to work with taxpayers and offers a variety of Installment Agreements (IRS Payment Plans), depending on the total amount they owe. An IRS Installment Agreement (IA) will allow you as a taxpayer to pay off your taxes through monthly payments that can last anywhere from three to five years depending on the amount you owe.

The only two sure things in life are death and taxes. We all know that April 15th is looming, so I thought I’d look at the other side of my opening truism. We’re all going to die, sure, but how can we encourage our survivors to make our own post-life existence as eco-friendly and “green” as possible? Will greener choices save money? And, let’s be real: what is the “ick” factor?

The only thing I knew about green funerals was what I saw on the last-season episode of “Six Feet Under.” One of the men who ran a family funeral home died, and his brother pushed the family to follow a greener, more eco-conscious funeral plan. The scene was awkward and a little more hands-on than appealed to me.

So, April 15 is right around the corner, and with it, the dreaded looming day to pay Uncle Sam. If you earned too much money last year and are looking for some ways to trim your tax bill now, as well as next year, look no further.

If you need a break now and have a few extra thousand dollars kicking around, now is a great time to invest that spare cash in a traditional IRA. Make a regular (NOT a rollover) contribution and see how it reduces your adjusted gross income. This will lower your tax bill across the board, though the maximum deduction is dependent upon your modified adjusted gross income total and also your filing status and cohabitation situation (where applicable).

When I pitched the idea of “how to get a better deal on a car” to the illustrious Wallet Blog editor, he came up with a sneaky strategy to make sure you drive down the price as low as possible.

Get a car loan from the dealer, even if you don’t need one. Allow the dealer to sell you a loan with a ridiculously high interest rate, but MAKE SURE that there is no penalty for paying off the loan ahead of schedule. The dealer will make a higher commission on a loan with a higher interest rate, which will make them more likely to agree to your low-ball offer on the car.

I remember reading a profile of the now-dearly-departed Fred Rogers in Esquire magazine about 12 years ago. Mr. Rogers was looking up at a clock and commenting on how big it was, and wouldn’t it be nice if we would all wake up one morning and concentrate on doing something small, not big. Quiet, not loud.

Shortly after that, I heard the first rumors of a new-wave of cooking, called “slow food.” Italians had a festival celebrating the time-consuming recipes of their grandmothers; they held the festival outside a McDonald’s, as I recollect.

There has been some talk about a ‘Cash for Caulkers’ program that would refund homeowners 50% of their costs to renovate their properties in order to make them more energy efficient.  The program,officially called Home Star,  is unofficially being dubbed ‘Cash for Caulkers,’ and represents another effort in getting us out of the recession.

The program is obviously trying to emulate the Cash for Clunkers program, which helped stimulate the auto industry.  While I agree that Cash for Clunkers was a great idea, it was not without its faults.  Most notably, though it put people into new cars, it did nothing at all to make America more competitive on the global market.  What Cash for Clunkers did, essentially, was to tell the American people, “don’t worry about the recession; buy a new car!”  The day after buying their new car, however, Americans saw more unemployment, more banks failing, and more homes going into foreclosure.  It didn’t solve the real problem.  The money set aside for the Cash for Caulkers program will likely have the same effect:  it will make Americans spend money, but it won’t do anything to really end the recession we’re in.

Food is one of the major line-items in my family’s budget. In my goal to save more money this year, I’ve been trying different ways to slash-and-burn my grocery bills. Allow me to share my hard-earned do’s and don’ts with you. Some might sound strange. It’s OK; when saving money is concerned, I have no pride.

Do shop at non-grocery stores: Many of the big-box stores have been increasing their grocery offerings. Seems you can hardly turn on the TV without seeing an ad about money-saving groceries at Walmart, but I’ve found another big-box store with surprisingly good grocery deals; if you have a Big Lots store in your area, check out their grocery aisles. They offer name-brand breakfast cereals, as well as canned and snack-food items you may never have heard of. They’ve been a particularly good source of canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, and canned beans, at prices at least $.25 less than my typical grocery store. (It’s better to go in with an open mind rather than a set menu, though I found black-eyed peas there in time for New Year’s Day, which was a pleasant surprise).

Pets can be a serious line-item in your yearly budget. A yearly vet physical can set you back anywhere from $30 to hundreds of dollars, depending upon whether the veterinarian finds anything wrong with your fuzzy, feathered, or scaly companion, to say nothing of the unexpected costs that arise when your pet is ill or suffers an accident.

I first became aware of pet insurance when my kitten, Maxwell, got into a scrap and had to have his face drained (sorry, TMI). I never signed up for it, though. It just sounded like a hassle and I wasn’t convinced the benefits would outweigh my assumptions.

In a recent Market Watch article, David Weidner commented that Citibank is attempting to create a new product, the CLX, which acts as insurance against financial collapse.  The product sounds, as Weidner deftly points out, a lot like the Credit Default Swaps that helped cause our current recession.  It involves the same risks and is being endorsed using the same shaky justifications.

The problem with financial products like the CDS or the CLX is, first and foremost, that it is unclear who covers the ‘bet.’ If financial collapse does happen, and Citibank is to make good on their CLXs, what guarantee is there that Citibank will be in a position, post-collapse, to honor its obligations?  And if it isn’t in a position to honor those obligations, who does?  What’s clear after the fallout of the CDS scandal is that the responsibility of paying off the debts of ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions inevitably falls on the American tax payer.

Recently I received a brochure from Capital One’s credit card division that summarizes the changes made on their monthly statements, as a result of the new credit card regulations. All credit card issuers have made similar changes, therefore I thought that a visual representation of the “new credit card statements” would be helpful in showing everyone what to expect.

There are 5 types of changes:

The current Job Bill being debated on Capitol Hill, in its most recent form, holds at its core an incentive to hire people who have gone more than sixty days without a job.  Businesses that hire these workers are allowed to forgo paying their social security taxes throughout 2010.  The extent of this benefit depends both on the employee’s rate of pay and on the length of their employment.  The hope is that this will provide employers incentives to create new jobs.

Whether the bill passes or not, it’s unlikely to do much by way of solving the unemployment problem in this country because it’s built upon a faulty premise: that the reason employers aren’t hiring is because they can’t afford to pay social security taxes—which only amounts to about 6.2% of the employees paycheck.  The truth is that employers hire people because they need the help.  If there is no demand for their products, then they certainly don’t need more people to help them manage their dwindling operations.  To put it plainly, an incentive of 6.2% simply doesn’t address the problem of dried up demand.