1. The Giveaway: Oprah, the generous multi-millionarire has teamed up with KFC to get everyone a free lunch.  The site has been overwhelmed with traffic and it’s quite the sensation on Twitter. What’s the catch?  Well, I don’t think there is one.  Oprah, is being Oprah and making money while giving stuff away and KFC wants you to try their new grilled chicken: here’s the link:  Free Grilled KFC
2. The Nicky Cakes giveaway.  When most bloggers give away a book or something, this enterprising young man is promoting his blog by giving away a TV.  Yes, a whole TV.  I’m not going to lie.  I entered.  As you may already know, I like cheap TVs, and free is really cheap.  The catch?  You’ve got to follow this guy on Twitter and promote his contest, which is really nothing.  Entering takes about 2 minutes, so give it a shot.  Here’s the link: Win a Free Samsung 40in 1080p TV from @nickycakes.

Good luck!  Well, with the chicken you won’t need luck, but enjoy it and invite me over to watch Lost sometime on that set, OK?

Know of other free stuff?  Enter it in the comments below…

• Tax Season.  Yup.  I had to deal with taxes just like everyone else.  This time I came up a loser.  In short, I made more money last year than I ever have (a really good thing), but didn’t quite adjust my witholdings high enough to make up for the extra taxes I’d have to pay (a really bad thing), so I had a balance due rather than a refund for the first time in my whole married life (that’s a while).  I even had someone take a second look at my finances, but they found out what I did: I had to pay.
• Sell stuff: I took some of my own advice on how to sell my stuff and am letting go of my woodworking shop.  Yup, the whole shop has got to go.  Why?   I don’t use it.  It’s really that simple.  And half of a wood shop really isn’t useful, so I’ve resolved to let the whole thing go.  I sold a saw on Craigslist, but was unimpressed with the responses there, so I’m going to list items small enough to ship on eBay this week and see what happens.
• Getting organized: It’s time for spring cleaning, so that’s what I’ve been doing.  I’ve found having a list really helps and I’ve been using Tada lists and now the free version of Highrise QH.  I’m getting more done and am adding “blog post” to my tasks so I won’t leave this place deserted!  (Frugal hint: to use Highrise for free, click the tiny “free plan” link on the right just under all the giant pay options on the sign up page).

How’s your spring going?  Hopefully tax season was better to you than it was to me.  Here’s to getting organized, staying on budget and avoiding excess taxes!

1. Stocks struggle after run: CNN Money reports that stocks are leveling off after coming back after the DOW dropped below 7,000 earlier this month.
2. Misguided Optimism?  After hearing good news about stocks, MSN Money’s Jon Markman thinks housing issues and unemployment will weigh down stocks once again.  He states that “well-armed bears in police uniforms” will lay down the law on those making bets now.  Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong, but that is the phrase of the day no matter what.
3. Pitchforks and Guillotines! Yet Another Blog About Money speaks on the unintended consequences of one attempt to punish those who’ve received bonuses after the government bailout.
4. Married to your job: Early Retirement Extreme says that breaking up with (your career) is hard to do.  Somehow I think I’d manage.
5. An excuse to use the word sexegenarian: A completely different story about an alleged Swedish countess, 43 million dollars and a post nuptial agreement.

Divorces, pitchforks, and bears, oh my! It’s another crazy week. Share your thoughts on the bailout (and links you love) in the comments below or  join Afternoon Rally and tell others what you think about the news.

I’ve posted before about LendingClub, the peer-to-peer lending network.  Unlike traditional banks, they help people loan money directly to one another via their network, and hope to get better rates to both lenders and borrowers in the proceess. 

They’ve grown in both members and as a company.  They’ve reportedly doubled in size over the past 5 months and have filed with the SEC, both very important steps.  But they also now have some major financial backing as they have closed a $12 million round of funding, which gives them a lot of strength as a lender and plenty of room to grow.

I really see places like LendingClub as the future of lending.  The recent news of bank colapses and near colapses (like Citibank’s stock falling below a dollar) has put traditional banking on notice.  But like a traditional bank, they offer a variety of loans, from debt consolidation loans to auto loans to home improvement loans. 

The rates paid to vary on a sliding scale according to the one’s credit score, with the best loan rates being well below the national average.  As of this writing, LendingClub reports rates starting at 7.88% with national averages for personal loans being at 11.43% and credit cards at 13.64%.  So why not check it out?

Already use LendingClub or another peer-to-peer lending service?  Tell us about it in the comments below…

Source: TechCrunch

Well, I’m going to go out on a limb here and give you some ideas for FREE.  Like all business ideas, I can’t guarantee you success with any of them.  That takes a combination of talent, hard work and luck that makes starting up a new business so challening – and fun.

My goal is to generate 100 ideas.  I’m starting with 10 internet/tech ideas so bear with me.  I’ll get to other ideas as I go along:

1. Fwitter: A site that’s something in-between twitter and a forum.  Get real time updates (instead of hitting “refresh” to see what’s posted) and have special rooms for event-specific chat (Say, talking about Lost on Wed 3/18) It’s also  rich version of real-time search with images and video in the stream.  (Trust me, tech people are all about the real-time search these days)
2. Stalker ads: Location-based ads that send deals to your phone when you’re in the area of brick and mortar stores.
3. Metorological modeling for the masses:  Supercomputing-on-demand: imagine a 100,000 node cluster you can use for complex math, available on-demand.  Not “cloud” computation the way Amazon sees it, but hardcore supercomputing on demand for research.  More like grid on demand. 
4. Better banner ads: A self-optimizing ad network that is free from the constraints of conceptual ads.  All advertisers try (or *should* monitor their ads to see how people are responding. How about an ad network that does it for you?  Your ads show up where they work best.
5. Virtual Business cards:  A vanity URL that points to a business card.  Think what LinkedIn does for resumes, but for business cards.  Add a social network for people to exchange cards.  Aside from the obvious printing and office products tie-ins, there’s an opportunity for geo and industry targeted ads.  Charge for premium services.
6. A national real estate MLS:  Not easy and people are trying this, but the winners will be rich.
7. My Cartoons: An animation studio that lets you create your cartoon.  Think The Sims meet The Simpsons.
8. Rental listings:  A site that provides all the features of pay sites, but is free like CraigsList.  I actually tried this.  I was too short on cash and time.  I gave up after a year.  Maybe I shouldn’t have.
9. Stock Picks: Vote on which stocks will be successful.  Think derivatives without the money.
10. Pyramid Builder: A forum or network for people who love MLMs.  There seems to be a core group who are into working them or into selling them.  Let them find and recruit each other.

I honestly have no idea how many people are doing one of these ideas.  I know some people are trying these things, but I’ve always heard that if no one is competing with you for a market, there probably isn’t a market to compete for.

I’ll get to different ideas in the future.  Some may involve the internet (well, what doesn’t to some extent) but I’d like to broaden the scope a lot.  Any ideas you want to share?  Think my ideas stink?  Let me know in the comments below…

Here’s the deal.  It looks like you have to open a new checking account, with $100 ($50 for students) for 30 days.  What would be great of course, is for you to find a new place to keep your cash and get a bonus as well.  See Wachovia for the complete details.

I have 5 invites.  Just comment to me with your email (put it in the email field so I can see it and spammers can’t) and I’ll send out invites at the end of the week.  I’m pretty sure you have to be in the US.  And yes, I make $25 for each account signed up, but that doesn’t affect your $25 reward.

FMF was kind enough to accept my entry What Makes Kids Happy as an entry and today it is in the second round of the competition.  Thanks to everyone who helped in round one!  If you like Financial Reflections and the post, please consider voting for the article. Click here to see the contest.

What makes the contest great is the number of quality entries.  You get to see the best of the personal finance blogosphere, so there’s plenty of great reading, no matter who you vote for.

1. Economic Stimulus Scams from LA Times. I love being first.  I wrote about the FTC crackdown on those “get your Obama check” style websites a whole day before the Los Angeles Times.  (I’m sure they’re scared.)  Including a screenshot they ran the next day. You can read more about the FTC crackdown here.
2. Foreclosure scams are also on the rise.  A weak economy, particularly real estate has this on the rise.  MSN Money gives you the low dow.
3. Wall Street Pounded.  CNNMoney is dead-on about this.  I covered the losses of two stocks, GM and Citigroup and how they tell the sad story of this recession.
4. Unemployment.  Ouch.  Highest since 1983.  There will be more websites to track the layoffs and mounting unemployment, I’m sure. The AP handles the bad news:
    
5. Enough bad news. Now for something completely different:  Bad paintings of Barack Obama.

Another tough week.  I hope I can write an article looking back on the tough times in ‘09 and how they all are behind us sometime in early 2010.

Got a great link?  More bad Presidential art? Share it with me in the comments below?

GM is a stock that was trading above 40 dollars just less than two years ago and is now going for about two bucks, a sharper drop than the value in a used Chevy Uplander. Without another multi-billion dollar bailout, it’s likely that bankruptcy will follow soon.

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The auto industry has been the backbone of American manufacturing, but banking makes the wheels turn (no pun intended). So when a giant like Citigroup stumbles, it creates fears of a new Great Depression.

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Citigoup’s stock chard has a dropoff that water slides at Disney World envy. Imagine buying a big screen TV for about 5 grand a couple years back and realizing it’s worth about 100 bucks now. That’s what’s happened now that “C” is below a buck.

What’s next? Both companies are trying to cling to government help to stay afloat and hope for better times. The auto industry is undergoing a sea change with alternative fuels and rising gas costs and may never be the same, and unless (in my opinion) banking laws are changed, companies like Citigroup might continue to face hard times.

Eileen Harrington, the acting director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection spoke at the conference and outlined two specific things they’ve seen online that have caused them to take action.

1. Websites: These are the types of sites that I outlined earlier, including “Jessica’s Money Blog” that I mentioned specifically.  These types of sites lead to sites that the FTC says “use photos of President Obama and Vice President Biden to give the appearance of authenticity. Sites also use logos from ABC, CBS, CNBC, CNN, FOX, NBC, MSNBC, USNews and other major media outlets to make them appear legitimate.”
   But there’s more to this.  Ms Harrington ran the numbers on all the charges that follow a cheap “trial” signup if you don’t read the fine print.  It could cost a consumer up to $1,000 in a year if they take the bait on one of these offers!  She also mentioned that canceling the offer is complicated, raising the likelihood of the company making the offer of getting more payments.
2. Emails: This is the really scary part.  I’ve talked about identity theftbefore, and this is just a classic “phishing” scam.  Emails touting a way to get stimulus money lead to sites that lure the consumer into giving up their personal information  and then being targeted for idenity theft.
   To me, this is the much more serious scam and it could lead to thousands of dollars in losses. What’s worse, is that the sites consumers are led to may try to load viruses and spyware onto the victim’s computer. Always be aware of emails that have attachments or links to other sites.  Don’t give out personal info unless you are sure where it’s going.

Facebook and Google have been running ads for companies and affiliates offering some of the website-based scams and both companies have worked with the FTC to remove the ads from their networks.  I’ve noticed them gone from Facebook and virtually elimitated from Google.  Facebook and I believe Google had reps at the press conference to answer questions.

Harrington refused to comment on any “non public investigation” that were ongoing, citing that information would be made public when charges are officially filed.  The FTC also seemed to be working with Google and Facebook to find people who ran such sites.

That does raise a question, both Google and Facebook willingly ran such ads (I pointed out a Google ad I saw just yesterday) and profited from the activity.  Will they be held accountable as well?

Harringtion did point out some valulable tips about grants, the stimulus and the FTC:

• Government sites end in “.gov”  If you’re on a site that ends in something else and tries to give the impression that it’s a government site, it isn’t.
• You never have to pay to get grant money.  In fact, you can get a list of grants at grants.gov.  
• Information on the stimulus and how the money is used is available at recovery.gov.
• If you see something online that looks like a problem, you can report it at The FTC website. 

It will be interesting to see what falls out of this conference.  Big players like Google and Facebook have gotten involved, so I think there will be prosecutions and likely a change in the way advertising is done online.