Hack the planet(’s bank account)

Spend $1000 in three months on the Discover Business card and a hundred dollars is yours for the taking. That’s the richest offer of its kind right now and one that you shouldn’t pass up if you think you have the spending to back it up. Read more about Discover Business’ $100 cashback bonus promotion.

One of the struggles you will face when planning you wedding will be between time and money. Weddings are financially expensive and so you’ll feel pressure to cut costs whenever you can. Weddings also take up a considerable amount of time, both in planning and preparations, and so you will need to be careful where you cut costs, where you trade in some of your time in return for savings down the road.

An example of this is in making your own invitations. If you get them entirely printed, they will be more expensive than if you get some of it printed and put it together yourself. The same goes for a lot of the things at the wedding. You have to balance the savings with the effort it takes to achieve them.

Where does the savings make sense? My bar is always my own earnings after taxes. For example, if I earn $10 an hour and I can only save $5 an hour to get something done, then I will pay for it. If I do something myself and I can save $20, then I’ll do it.

That’s a very simplistic view so here’s another wrinkle. Consider the frustration savings. Cutting paper and gluing them together to make invitations is a pretty low stress activity, transporting a cake is more stressful right? Let’s say you told the baker that you’d do the transport to cut a few dollars off the price. You might save more than your salary (plus gas), but you have the stress of transporting the cake in your car. What if something gets messed up? That unknown is stress and is it worth it to save a few dollars? Probably not (depends on how far away it is, how many free hands you have, etc), but that’s ultimately up to you.

Oren Etzioni is the brain behind Farecast, a predictive engine for airline tickets, and he shared eight tips for finding the best fares. To give you an idea of the magnitude of Farecast, if you’re not familiar with it, it tracks 175 billion fares at 79 airports. That’s a lot.

So what’s the advice? Don’t buy far in advance unless it’s a peak time like Thanksgiving and Christmas, otherwise the best fares are between eight and two weeks away. If you see a price drop, buy ASAP because it’ll likely be gone in two days. Midweek flights are cheaper than weekends and price drops come most often at the beginning of the week. Lastly, add an extra day and you can save some money.

Tracking Air Fares: Elaborate Algorithms Predict Ticket Prices [Wired]

Weddings, babies, engagements, what do they all have in common? Apparently in our consumerism driven society, they all have gifts in common. Getting married? Wedding shower! Having a child? Baby shower!

As with all potential gift giving occasions, retailers have registries! And with registries come one of the best inventions of the 21st century - the 10% coupon for completing your registry after the event. For example, Target will send you a coupon for 10% that you can use to buy anything off your registry. The nice little hack to go with it is that you can add things to your registry even after the event has been completed. This means that you get a 10% off coupon at Target, though Target’s return policies have become more and more restrictive.

So, after your event, get the 10% off coupon and have a field day at places like Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn, and Restoration Hardware where you can stuff much cheaper than usual.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s really simple. It lets you subscribe to everything that gets posted without actually having to visit. If you are familiar with feeds, the links are below. If you’re not, may I recommend getting a feed reader like Bloglines and getting your content that way. It’s a great way to get your daily fix.

If RSS isn’t your think and you’d prefer email, there’s a subscription form below. I won’t send you anything and Feedburner will send you one email a day with daily money hack that day. I will never send you anything else - the only exception is if we do a giveaway and I select an email subscriber, then I’ll email you to tell you that you won! That’s a good email right?

To subscribe to the RSS feed, simply click on the RSS icon below and Feedburner will walk you through it.

Blog Feed By Email

If you want to get the feed sent directly to your email, Feedburner also offers an email digest service as well. Simply enter your email in the box below and click submit.

Yahoo has a Yahoo User Research program where participants can earn up to $100 or more depending on the research.

Our goal is to make Yahoo! the best and the easiest-to-use place on the Web. We understand that talking to our users helps us better understand your needs, issues and concerns. And when we understand your needs better, we can continually make Yahoo! the best it can be.

We are looking for all types of people: Web novices and experts, Yahoo! users and non-users, people who use Yahoo! at home or at work, adults and teenagers … everyone! Feel free to ask others to sign up too, especially those who are not yet on the Web!

We conduct research in many ways, such as:

* Visiting you at your location in a field study
* Inviting you to come into a Yahoo! office to participate in a usability study
* Speaking with you in a telephone interview
* Participating in an online focus group study
* Connecting with you with an online survey

You may choose which of these you prefer when you sign up.

Please provide as much information as possible (name and telephone number are required), since it helps us ask you better questions. We will contact you by email or phone with more information about our next study. (Yahoo! User Research will not use the e-mail address you provide for any other purpose.) You may not hear from us right away, but don’t worry — you’ll be on our list!

Please note: Entry into the Participant Database does not guarantee participation in our research studies. When we plan for upcoming studies, we will query our database for potential participants. If you fit our criteria, we will give you a call or send an e-mail to schedule a time for you to come in to meet with us (or, for field studies, a time to come visit you).

One of the other smaller incremental costs of a wedding is in the invitations. If you’re inviting 100 people and each invitation costs $5, that’s a $500 expense that you can’t spend on something else. If the invitations cost $10, that’s a cool thousand bucks (plus how much it costs to mail them) you can’t spend on your wedding. As with any other incremental per person cost, the key to make some trade-offs so you can get what you want and still stay within budget.

The easiest way to lower the cost of invitations is to do it yourself. Home printers are sophisticated enough to produce high quality invitations and all it takes is a trip to the local office supply store for paper, envelopes, etc. There are plenty of resources online for you to lean on for ideas and instructions.

If you don’t want to print it yourself, you can always print part of the invitation and assemble it yourself. In our case, we had a square card printed, because we wanted a particularly delicate design, and then bought some red card stock and some glue sticks from Michael’s to assemble the invitation ourselves.

The last and most expensive option, since you won’t be trading your labor for cost, is to have the entire package printed and assembled. While it will be more expensive, it is one less thing on your plate at a time when you’ll likely be planning the biggest event of your life. It’s better to manage the costs on the front end than be stressed out and make a costly mistake later.

When my wife and I were on the Big Island, we rented a car from Hilo (eastern side) that would eventually be returned in Kona (western side). Since it was a one-way rental, meaning the car wouldn’t be returned to where it was rented, there was a $50 surcharge. Boo!

A tip I picked up, unfortunately too late for that trip, recently was that you can avoid the one-way surcharge if you request a car that was originally from your destination. In our case, I could have requested a car that originated in Kona and avoided the charge. There’s never a guarantee that such a car would be available but if it was, I could avoid a $50 fee. I imagine that scenario happens a lot in Hawaii, since they’re all islands, and less so elsewhere but it’s always worth a shot!

With the Fed standing pat on rates, the only high yield savings account interest rate jockying will be for new deposits. Last month there were only two rate changes, FNBO Direct upped the rate to match HSBC’s 3.50% APY and WT Direct ticked up their rates by a tenth of a percent.

The only word of caution I’d throw in there is that benchmark rate, 3.50% at HSBC (but also available at lesser known FNBO Direct) is available through August 15th, 2008. There’s no saying where it will go after that.

When we were looking around at caterers, one of the most surprising things we learned was that your food choices would be more expensive if you gave people the option of what they wanted to eat. That’s right, if you have more than one option, it will end up being more expensive than if you just gave them dual entrees.

At our wedding, we had a dual entree of steak and fish which ended up costing the same having a single entree of steak. The portions were smaller (4 oz. steak and 4 oz. fish rather than a 6 oz. steak) but the cost was the same because it’s so much more expensive for a caterer to factor in choice.

This makes sense though. The food cost is only a small portion of the per place price. The linens, tables, chairs, clothes, and labor make up the bulk of the cost whereas the food is just one static portion. Another reason is because they have to make extra portions for on-the-spot changes. If you have an option, someone who sees their choice as unappetizing will just report a different selection. Those extras have to be factored in and thus drive up the cost.

If you want to save some money on the entree and still give a choice (people can simply indicate they want a double portion of steak if they are allergic to fish), go with a dual entree rather than a choice.We