This is a guest post by Joshua Heckathorn, who runs Creditnet.com and holds an MBA and B.S. in Finance. Creditnet is a free resource for anyone who wants to learn more about credit or debt and compare hundreds of the best credit cards online. When Josh isn’t glued to the screen of his Mac, you’re bound to find him at the nearest rock-climbing wall or sushi joint around Seattle.

It’s been just over a month since new rules took effect requiring free credit report sites to prominently disclose that there’s only one place to truly get your credit report for free—AnnualCreditReport.com.

If you’ve had a kid recently, you’re probably torn between delight in your babykins and astonishment at the astronomical costs of childcare. Yeah, me too. Here are some tips for keeping at least part of your salary in your own pocket.

1) Neighborhood co-operative: If you have neighbors who are in the same boat, get everyone together to discuss ways you might be able to share the childcare burden. Taking one day off a week in exchange for two or three days of childcare can be a good deal. If you have even one neighbor who stays home with his/her kids, talk about whether they might be willing to accept a pittance in exchange for a morning/day/days of watching your own little one.

Credit cards are a great addition to any trip, especially when traveling overseas. They offer some of the best exchange rates and the convenience and security of carrying around as little cash as possible. Using a credit card also ensures that you won’t be stuck with left over foreign currency at the end of your trip.

Knowing this, imagine that you go on a trip to Europe and spend $3,000. You use your credit card for most of your purchases because, in addition to the advantages above, you earn rewards in the form of extra cash or airline miles for every purchase you make. At each point of sale, the merchant asks if you would like to convert your transaction from the local currency into U.S. dollars. You say yes every time, and are satisfied with seeing your transaction in a currency that you are familiar with.

With the onset of spring blossoms comes the yearly fervor to transition one’s wardrobe from winter to summery looks. Here’s the best possible process for taking care of your closet.

Empty it. No cheating here. Take every single thing out of your closet. This is best accomplished with a not-too-complimentary friend. As you are taking things out, divide them into three piles: Keep, Donate, Throw Away. The Donate and Throw Away items should be placed in black plastic lawn-and-leaf bags, which are taken immediately to the porch once filled so as to minimize what I call “stuff-divesting remorse.” I love Peter Walsh’s tip: The garbage bags are hungry. Feed them often.

A couple of checking accounts that come with worthwhile incentives might be of interest to you: one offers tunes, the other, cash.

Florence Savings Bank has a “FreeTunes Checking” account with no minimum balance, no monthly fees, and nationwide ATM refunds. On top of those bonuses, FSB offers free iTunes® downloads at sign up and then monthly, so long as you maintain qualifying status. Pretty neat. The account is only available to those who live in Western Massachusetts, though.

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.

As you might have heard, the new credit card law (i.e. the Card ACT) went into effect yesterday. The provisions of the new law that will impact most of us are the ones around interest rates, overlimit fees, payment allocation, and monthly statements.

Here is a quick summary of what you should know so that you can take full advantage of these pro-consumer changes:

Nobel Prize-winning economist and Columbia Business School professor, Joseph Stiglitz argues in this interview that we are headed for another collapse.  His arguments are sound and should be listened to.

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Back in August of 2009, Yian Mui of the Washington Post reported that “sales of bottled water have fallen for the first time in at least five years.” Its meteoric rise to popularity was astonishing: sales of bottled water “swelled 59 percent to $5.1 billion between 2003 to 2008, making it one of the fastest growing beverages.”

So, economically, if you owned shares in a company that sold bottled water, you probably received a tidy return on your investment.

I pay my bills on time, have a cushion in my savings account, and don’t spend-and-burn. I’ve also worked with Card Hub since the beginning of time. So, I can honestly tell you I know that secured credit cards can be a super way to build or repair your credit history, and that I never imagined having one in my wallet, given that I have excellent credit.

This goes to show that one should never say “never.” Citibank has a cute little offer going, one that rewards account holders with a 4.07% annual rate of return, and rewards itself with a new base of no-risk credit card holders.

It is frustrating that American banks, post bailout, are paying out record bonuses given that many of those banks would not be in business if they hadn’t received a handout at the tax payers’ expense.  In response, President Obama is now threatening to heavily tax these bonuses to send the banking industry the message that the American people will not stand for such behavior.  The depiction of these banks in the media and by the government, however, is far too simplified.  Not all banks are the same.  Some banks simply didn’t need the bailout and other banks received aid indirectly when the government bailed out their debtors.

For a company like AIG, the issue is quite clear.  They would have failed had we not bailed them out.  As a result, we now own most of their company.  AIG clearly shouldn’t give their executives a bonus.  Moreover, as shareholders, we have every right to demand that those executives don’t get a bonus.  On the other hand, some banks didn’t need a bailout.  Capital One, for instance, was forced to take the government’s money so as to help stabilize the economic disaster.  Their cooperation helped conceal the real problem areas (i.e. Citibank and Bank of America), thus preventing investors from cutting and running on companies that desperately required the bailout to stay afloat.  Those banks which didn’t need the bailout repaid that money almost immediately and they shouldn’t be penalized.  If anything, they should be rewarded for helping the American economy stay afloat and for having a sustainable business model when, all around them, other giants of their industry were toppling.