The gist is, people submit coupon codes they’ve gotten via emails and other coupons, then rate how successful they were in an order. My coupon code worked just fine and was from an email I otherwise wouldn’t have known about since I try to avoid store emails like the plague. Now shop away everyone, knowing you’re not paying full price!

Robert Kuttner (Co-Editor of The American Prospect; Senior Fellow at Demos), Barry Eichengreen (Professor, University of California, Berkeley), and Eswar Prasad (Professor, Cornell University; Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution) will participate in the debate and address necessary reforms and consequences of the current recession.

For more information, follow this link.

Wonderful.

After a few angry calls with my bank concerning the notifications I’m supposed to get if my account falls below a certain amount, I got some good advice: step up a cash reserve account (money set aside to keep you from going in debt (overdrafting for instance) in the case of an unexpected expense). Sounds like a no-brainer to me. One blog suggested keeping 6 months worth of living expenses in a reserve account, but said the downside of this is you could make interest if you put it elsewhere.

But for those of us in college, a reserve account with a hundred bucks or so should suffice. Needless to say, I set up a reserve account, because I’m never spending $30 for coffee ever again.

Places Not to Go:

Detriot, MI; Riverside, C; Providence, RI; Charlotte, NC; Portland, OR.

Places to Go:

Oklahoma City, OK; San Antonio, TX; New Orleans, LA; Austin, TX; Washington, TX.

Interestingly enough, Texas was on the good side four times (out of 13 cities). Cities with the lowest unemployment rates are concentrated mostly in the Northeast and Midwest. Looks like I’m not returning to Upstate New York for a while.

“In the context of a full-blooded recovery, this report is disappointing,” said Alan Ruskin, an economist with the Royal Bank of Scotland in Stamford, Conn. “We’re still clawing our way back.”

Taken from a New York Times article from the weekend after the Labor Department released August’s unemployment numbers. According to the report, unemployment went up to 9.7 percent and the net loss in jobs was 216,000 compared to 9.4 percent unemployment in July with a loss of 276,000 jobs.

Perhaps the most important thing to note was that while this month’s numbers are an improvement from earlier this year, they’re still indicating that while the economy may be expanding again, unemployment is going to continue to be a problem. A “jobless recovery” sounds pretty terrifying to say the least — especially for recent grads and seniors entering the workforce. What’s everyone in this position doing right now? Feel free to leave a comment!

The summer of 2009 was the summer when nothing positive happened. The stock market went up but it didn’t help the economy. The classic bear market “sucker rally,” which lifted stocks by 50%, still left the Dow 5,000 points short of its all time high. In other words, those who had lost 53% of their life’s savings had now only lost 38%. Golly! Pass me another Dos Equis! Toxic assets were still on the books, mortgage refinancings slowed to a trickle, no one could get a loan to start a business. Housing starts remained at apocalyptic lows, people kept getting laid off, people kept getting furloughed. The press kept writing stories about people getting laid off and furloughed. Then journalists started getting laid off, and those that had not been laid off started writing stories about how journalists getting laid off—or furloughed—was hurting the economy because now there would be even fewer people to write stories about people who had been laid off. Or furloughed.

Read the rest (not about the economy) here.

I don’t know why I haven’t heard about this site until now. Or why I dropped $300 on books (13 books on Amazon. Used. Can you believe that?!)

But the gist of it is, you pay a pretty low price to use your books for the semester. From what I can tell too, the savings are pretty hefty. Then at the end of the semeter, you send them back for free. Chegg takes care of the shipping and their site promises to be really fast.

I was curious how much money I could have saved this semester had I found out about Chegg a few weeks ago. My most expensive book, “Law of Public Communication” cost me $100 (including shipping) because I had to buy the 2010 version. But on Chegg, it would have cost me $66.22. I’m guessing that when I try to resell this book on Amazon, I’m probably not going to get more than $50 if I’m lucky.

But for some of my books this semester, renting on Chegg wouldn’t have made that much difference. My “European Politics in Transition” book cost me $50 and on Chegg it would have been about $47 to rent. It’s definitely worth buying and reselling on this one.

Moral of the story: next semester, I’m Chegging.

I’ve been lucky when it comes to personal finance because I learned it at a very young age. For literally as long as I can remember, I worked to earn money. When I was a kid, I did chores around the house to earn an allowance of $2 each week. That $2 was my money for anything other than the necessities. When I asked for my mom or dad to buy me a toy the response always was, “You have your own money.” So I learned to save (one year of saving really paid off when I bought this).

I share this story because while money may be very complex, it breaks down to simply earning it, spending it on what’s important and saving it. Yes, when I was five years old having a Barbie Dream House was the most important thing, but college is different and our priorities are becoming that much more important.

In this blog, I hope not only to provide tools for how to save money, but to break down a bit of this complicated world of personal finance so it’s just a bit easier to understand for all of us. I still have a ways to go when it comes to money and I’ll chronicle my ventures so we can all learn from my mistakes and success.

You don’t have to know with certainty what’s right and what’s wrong, but you can know what’s stupid. … Taxing bonuses at AIG is stupid. Anything that Congress passes in a short period of time is pretty much stupid.

-Adam Davidson, business and economics reporter at NPR

at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism

on writing about business

Right now, it seems gas is going back up after a nice stay around the $1 and change mark, but analysts say (what does that even mean?) it should stay around the current national average of $1.90 (the New York state average is $2.07).

Need to find the cheapest gas in your area? Check out this handy interactive map from MSN Autos. You just zoom into wherever you’re located, and it lists all the nearby gas stations and its current price list. I checked it yesterday, at least by the gas station closest to my apartment and that was correct - but that’s all I can reallly vouch for.

Also, a sort of common sense tip from Young Money, everyone probably already knows to fill their tank when the price of gas is low - but do you do the reverse when the price is high? I’m in the habit of always filling my tank so that I won’t have to keep coming back to the pump, but if gas prices are high, there’s a good chance they’re falling, and in that case, I’m missing an opportunity for lower prices. The trick there is to keep on top of the news and anticipate when prices are rising and falling. Don’t you worry, there’s a tool for that too.

And if you can’t get enough about gas … check out The Ithacan’s new column Common Cents for an interesting argument about why gas prices should stay high.