It’s been estimated that over 130 million Americans will shop on Black Friday (and Saturday) this holiday season. Black Friday is a time when all of the retailers in the U.S. run sales for their entire stores as well as offer a limited amount of heavily discounted items which they usually take a loss on to get shoppers in the stores. The term Black Friday comes from the fact that most retailer are in the ‘red ink’ as far as profits go for most of the year but the day after Thanksgiving sale gets them back in the ‘black’ so the Friday after Thanksgiving was dubbed Black Friday.

Surviving Black Friday with your shirt still on takes a bit of effort, a bit of financial sense, and a lot of common sense. We’ll tackle a game plan so that you can be better prepared for Black Friday this year!

To Sleep In, Or Not To Sleep In
The fact is, you don’t even have to participate in Black Friday if you don’t want to. If you don’t have money to spend then I would highly recommend skipping the day and weekend altogether. You’ll clearly need some cold hard cash along with a game plan before you even step a foot in the door.

This is the busiest shopping day of the year and you can bet there will be long lines well before you even step foot in a store; not to mention the nightmare of being trampled on, being pushed and shoved, along with the super long lines at the registers. Don’t forget about the traffic as its going to be one busy day!

Freezing your credit report will prevent anyone (excluding you) from accessing your credit reports at the three major credit reporting agencies (bureaus) – Experian, Equifax, and Transunion. Freezing your credit reports has many advantages and a disadvantage as well. You must weigh the good and the bad to determine if freezing your credit reports is right for you.

Why You Should Freeze Your Credit Report
If your credit report is on ice or is frozen, nobody (including yourself) can establish new credit in your name. The freeze prevents hard inquiries on your credit report as well as prevents full credit reports from being pulled by lenders, banks, or anyone else for that matter. Certain entities will still have access to your credit file such as existing creditors, collection agencies acting on behalf of old creditors, government agencies seeking child support payments and/or taxes.

The primary reason to freeze your reports is prevent identity theft. With a frozen report, even if a thief were to obtain all of your information they couldn’t open any loans or accounts with it.

You can still obtain credit by lifting a freeze or “thawing” your reports for a specific number of days. This should give creditors with whom you want to seek new credit with, enough time to pull your reports or credit scores so that they can give you an answer.

At one time when I went to the mailbox to get our mail on any given day, it would be stuffed with catalogs from department stores, jewelry stores, and about every other store that we had ever been to. Some of them, my wife may have subscribed to and as for the others, who knows how we are receiving them. Catalogs in the mail are bad for two reasons;

1. Not Green – 99% of catalogs received in the mail are NOT green or made from recycled paper or products. Can you imagine how many trees could be saved if we all canceled our catalog subscriptions that we probably don’t even look at anyway.
2. Costs – You thought those catalogs were free, right? No, they actually cost you money whether you pay for the catalog or not. Think about it, why would all of these companies be sending you a free weekly catalog when it costs them to produce the catalog and mail them? By receiving a catalog, you are MUCH more likely to purchase a product via the catalog or by going to the store. You are also more inclined to visit the store of the catalog which we all know can lead to an impulsive purchase or a purchase at another store.

Catalog subscriptions and mailings from stores are up two-fold now that the economy is attempting to recover and Americans are spending more again. Don’t fall victim to these marketing tactics and keep your hard earned money in your pocket!

Yeah, you’ve seen the ads on TV of the pirate that got his credit report free at “My Free Credit Report.com” and many of you may have went there only to find out that you must subscribe to something before you even get your free credit report. That’s not free! What I will be showing you today is a completely free, no cost, and nothing to signup for way to get your credit reports from all three major bureaus; Transunion, Experian, and Equifax.

How They Are Completely Free
The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) which has been a law since 1970, only recently was amended back in 2003 to provide consumers with the ability to receive one free credit report a year by telephone, mail or through their government website. Now for the statistics; over 25% of Americans have NEVER requested a copy of their credit report either by free or paid means. Over 80% of credit reports contain some form of errors be it an account that’s been charged off that you’re not responsible for or simply addresses and phone numbers that are incorrect. There is also 25% of reports that contain serious errors that would result in being denied for credit.

As for the credit scores, they are provided by a third party web site which in exchange for your credit scores you are subject to advertising that is geared towards your credit score range. They make money by selling advertising and you get your credit score free. There are two sites that I know of which do this and I will be showing you both along with the advantages and disadvantages.

One of the biggest expenses on any household budget is definitely your TV service, at least it was in my household. We were paying upwards to $85 a month for TV service that we actually found that we never really used to begin with. We found that all of our favorite shows and even most of my favorite Football games were broadcasted on the local channels anyway such as NBC, CBS, and ABC so there really wasn’t a need for 250 other channels that we never watched anyway. Sure, we enjoyed watching Mythbusters, Dirty Jobs, and Deadliest Catch and my wife enjoyed watching Lifetime but we didn’t have to pay the satellite company $85 a month for it!

To Cut, Or Not To Cut?
I love my football and I love my HD so I wanted to both save money but still have the great experience. We also have a two-year-old that watches Disney in the morning times so we wanted to keep those channels for him if possible. After taking a look at my satellite providers programming I found the cheapest package for $29 offered everything we wanted and plus more. Our previous package was $75 which instantly gave us a savings of $46 bucks! The best thing of all, we only lost a couple of channels that we “sometimes watched”. The way I look at it is that we were paying $23 a month for each of those two channels which definitely isn’t worth it!

One of the easiest ways to build a large nest egg on meager money is to learn how to pay yourself first. Pay yourself first means save or invest some money before you even look at paying your other everyday expenses. In no way shape or form am I telling you not to pay your bills, debtors, and any other financial obligations I am simply saying that you should find ways to pay yourself first and make sure it works in your budget. Once you have determined the amount that you can pay yourself first, then you shouldn’t really have to even budget for anymore by taking my recommendations below.

Take Advantage of FREE Money & Tax Shelters
One of the best ways to pay yourself first is to signup for the 401k account at your place of employment. Most companies still offer a match up to a certain percentage. For example, my place of work offers a 100% match up to 6% so if I put in 6% they put in 6% giving me 12% total of my yearly salary going into retirement. I always tell people that you should invest up to the maximum that your employer matches regardless if you have credit card or other debt. This is FREE MONEY – 100% clear and clean – you can’t ask for a better return on your money than 100%.

American’s love their paper towels and as matter of fact they use over 700 pounds of paper towels a year per person! Not only is this not green but it’s also very costly to consumers. For example, my family would go through about $20 worth of paper towels a month which comes out to $240 a year. It’s not a lot but it can definitely add up, especially if you were to invest the $240 that you could begin saving. If you were to save the $240 a year for 25 years and placed it in a mutual fund earning 10% you would have over $24,000 bucks instead throwing away $6,000 bucks on paper towels over the 25 years.

So we know that using paper towels are bad for the environment and we know that we could save enough money to buy a nice new car instead. So what do we use instead of paper towels? We use something that our grand parents and possibly even parents used back in the day, an old dirty rag. You know what I’m talking about, that old dirty rag that we always saw hanging over the faucet or beside the sink in the kitchen. The one that was used to dry our hands, plates, and even clean up spills and messes. The same one used for dusting and everything else imaginable.