Surviving the Recession: 9 Sites to Help You Save Money

Find cheap gas or a less expensive cell phone plan, track your mileage, find a good loan. These sites will help you cut costs for home and office.

By Mark Sullivan
Thu, October 02, 2008

PC World — We found numerous sites that are full of good advice on how to save money and protect your financial interests. In a sour economy, sites like these are getting more attention (and site traffic) than ever before.

GasBuddy: GasBuddy is actually a network of local sites (such as sanfrangasprices.com for the San Francisco area), each of which allows consumers to find and report high or low gas prices around town.

Fuelly: Fuelly is a cool little Web tool that lets you track and keep a history of your vehicle's gas mileage and compare your results with those of other drivers.

RetailMeNot: Find coupons (about 85,000, the site says) for thousands of stores nationwide. Many of them are sent in by site users, for others to use. It's not the only online coupon community, but it's the biggest and probably the best.

BillShrink: A big chunk of your money probably goes to your wireless carrier every month. BillShrink asks you for your locale, wireless usage habits, and current plan, then recommends other plans in your area that might be better deals for you. It's a small way to trim the fat, but every little bit counts.

Prosper: Prosper is like a dating site that brings people who want to borrow money together with people who want to lend it. Borrowers post their borrowing requests, and prospective lenders bid on the interest rate at which they're willing to loan part or all of the money.

Kiva: Kiva follows roughly the same business model as Prosper, but adds a philanthropy aspect. The site allows you to extend a loan to a person in the third world who needs the money to get a small business off the ground, for example.

Bankrate: This is the largest and most complete aggregator of financial rate information that we've seen on the Web. The site constantly surveys 4800 financial institutions in all 50 states to provide real-time rates on around 300 financial instruments--mortgages, credit cards, car loans, money market accounts, and certificates of deposit--so you can find the best rates and save money.

Pageonce: You've accumulated numerous online accounts--everything from banking sites to Netflix to shopping sites to social networking--and they all have separate log-ins.

PageOnce brings all of your accounts together in one dashboard where they're easy to access. But it does much more than store passwords: Once the site is linked to the accounts, it notifies you of any changes at them--from payment alerts to new-friend requests on Facebook.

AnnualCreditReport: Since 2003, the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act has made it possible for individuals to obtain one free annual credit report from each of the three major credit reporting agencies per year. AnnualCreditReport.com is the only site that provides them without strings attached.

What is Tech Briefcase?
TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more
Bookmark content
Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.
Search and Store
Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.
View Anywhere
Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.
Don't have an account yet?
Gartner's report affirms the key role of web content management as part of a larger digital marketing strategy for engaging and serving customers/citizens. In this must read Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM, analysts evaluate technology providers based on their ability to execute and completeness of vision.
The web content management (WCM) market is growing based on customer experience (CXM) needs, including multichannel delivery, content targeting, analytics, and integration with other CXM technologies.
HP is driving the evolution of what we call the Instant-On Enterprise. It is an enterprise that embeds technology into everything it does to better serve citizens, partners, employees, and clients. We believe that today's Instant-On Enterprises need to think differently about how they source and deliver services that are enabled by technology. They need to take advantage of a hybrid delivery model-one that truly optimizes the mix between traditional IT, private cloud, and public cloud.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.
As you know, everything is mobile, connected, interactive, and immediate. This is exactly why organizations need a highly agile IT infrastructure in order to keep pace with extreme fluctuations in business demand. This book will help you understand why infrastructure convergence has been widely accepted as the optimal approach for simplifying and accelerating your IT to deliver services at the speed of business while also shifting significantly more IT resources from operations to innovation.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.
This white paper describes the major requirements for network management solutions to help the organizations become more profitable, efficient and reliable.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.
One of the key strategies that IT teams are pursuing to reduce capital costs while boosting asset utilization and employee productivity is the transition to highly virtualized data centers. However, IDC finds that expectations for further boosts in IT asset use and operational efficiency often surpass the actual results for a variety of reasons. These problems can quickly overwhelm any hoped-for benefits as the scope of virtual server deployment expands.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.
As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.
Business users increasingly demand 24x7 availability of their data while IT departments face the challenge of ensuring maximum availability while operating with limited budgets.
Learn how to get the most from your cloud investment in our on-demand webinar from BMC and InformationWeek. You'll hear how integrating the cloud into your production workload brings critical business benefits.
Date: May 31, 2012
Time: 1 PM EST

Organizations are reaping the benefits of simplifying IT, lowering costs and dramatically improving transactional throughput by deploying optimized application-to-disk solutions. These pre-tuned, tested solutions encompass a wide variety of applications and use cases. Hear from industry experts, and IT executives, how these full-stack solutions can achieve three times faster deployment times and up to 75% reductions in acquisition and operational costs.
Find out when you join EMA Senior Analyst, Torsten Volk, for a discussion on the 2012 trends in workload automation and how these trends contribute to better connecting workload automation to business processes. These trends are derived from EMA's empirical research work conducted for the 2012 Workload Automation Radar Report.
What if you could run financial and operational planning cycles 10 times faster? Or monitor and adjust marketing campaigns in real time? What if you could instantly visualize how a price change would impact the profitability of thousands of products?
Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter
  1. View all Newsletters | Privacy Policy
Sponsored Links

Master the cloud with the power of convergence from HP

Connect with IT leaders redefining mobility at the Enterprise Mobile Hub

Choose New and manage one device instead of 170

Choose New for 8x the firewall and NAT performance

Check out a smart way of mobilizing your business with enterprise-ready Samsung Mobile.

Redefine your data center with HP servers.

Enhance your business with Windstream IT Solutions. Speak to someone local.

BlackBerry® Mobile Fusion. Different mobile devices. One platform.

Click to see how Accenture has delivered high performance to clients

CYBERMARYLAND | Learn Why Maryland is the Epicenter for Cybersecurity

Get Ethernet speeds from 1 Mbps to 10 Gbps - Comcast Business Class

Cognizant. Leading in Business, Application & Technology Services

Collaboration: driving better business outcomes

Gain cutting-edge insights at MIT in 2-5 day executive programs.

Complimentary Gartner Report on BYOD: Media Tablets & Beyond. View Now

Elevate storage agility and efficiency with HP 3PAR storage.

Choose New and slash the number of devices you manage

Customized information views & Twitter events at New Fulcrum Point

Splunk translates machine data into "aha" moments for IT and the business.

ManageEngine Desktop Central - Automate and Audit Your Desktop Management! Learn More...

Cloud Readiness Starts with Intel® Technology

High performance. Delivered. Click to see Accenture's client successes

Visit the Virtually There Learning Page to learn how to use virtualization to your competitive advantage.

Free: Hunter Muller's "The Transformational CIO."

Join us for an upcoming Microsoft 365 live online demo event.

Discover your easiest path to unified communications

Virtualizing Your Infrastructure Just Got Easier

Connect with global CIOs now at Enterprise CIO Forum

Resource Center