Another weekend is here, and with it comes a round up of some of the best personal finance content we saw over the last 7 days or so.  We’ve got a pretty full weekend ahead, including one of the most exciting basketball games you’ll ever see (which we alluded to yesterday): The Rivalry, today at 3 PM.  ESPN once named the Hope-Calvin rivalry the biggest in Division III, and fourth highest among all rivalries in college basketball.  If you want to check it out, it’s available on satellite TV and online streaming video.

Okay, now that we’ve got that out of our system, on with the best stuff we read this week!

Money Crashers and Consumerism Commentary both provide fair insight into Andrew’s favorite topic of the week: Apple’s new iPad (obligatory blog post about this coming later this week).

Bible Money Matters has a good reminder about the perils of and 3 Reasons Why A Big Income Tax Refund Is A Horrible Thing.

Gather Little by Little asks a fairly challenging question: should a believer really contribute to IRA’s, 401K’s or other retirement accounts?

Bob at Christian PF rounds up a significant collection of tips and resources to Make Your Own Personal Budget, our #1 suggestion for getting your personal finances in order.

How to Talk with Your Spouse About Money is a thoughtful and well-written post on Get Rich Slowly from Sierra Black, the author of ChildWild.

Jim from Bargaineering tells us How to Maximize Your Entertainment Dollar, with an interesting analogy to buying vs. renting (leasing) a car.

And finally, One Money Design brings us the Money and Marriage God’s Way Giveaway.  The freebie runs until this Thursday, February 4, 2010.

That’s all for now—enjoy your weekend!

Guess what? Earn Give Save is having its 3-month blog birthday this weekend!  It has been an absolute blast bringing you new and interesting content over the last 90 days.  We want to keep this thing rolling, and in doing so, we’d love to hear from you, our readers.  So here’s your opportunity to let us know what you’re thinking: fill out the form below (it’s only going to take a minute, right?) and we’ll put your thoughts to good use in the coming months.  Here are a couple snippets to spark your suggestions:

• Specific post or type of post you’ve seen here and why it was interesting to you
• A list of topics related to personal finance that you are most excited to read about
• An idea for a future post or series
• A question you’d like to see us answer in a future post
• General feedback, comments, or questions about the site

We’re pumped to hear what you’ve got to say, so thanks for submitting it!  Also, be sure to look for our weekly personal finance roundup, coming this weekend.  Please excuse us now, we’ve got to get ready for game #175 of The Rivalry. 

Enjoy your weekend, everybody!

My job is one that requires me to wear dress clothes every day, and finding pants that fit really well is probably one of my biggest challenges.  Oh sure, laugh it up if you want, but I need to look good when I head to the office   This is particularly challenging for someone of my diminutive size, but this last fall I hit the jackpot when out looking for something else at Kohl’s.  It was there that I found the Dockers D4 line of relaxed fit khakis, and they are excellent.  I bought two pairs and they served me well all throughout my fall travel season.

Please forgive that momentary diversion from our normal content; I promise, there is a point here related to life and money.  When you decide to make all of your purchases with cash, everything that you buy takes on a new level of importance.  Add to this the fact that I’m wearing this stuff every day to work and I end up being really thoughtful about what I’m buying.

I’ve had it on my to-do list to pick up another pair of these for the winter/spring, but Kohl’s didn’t have them in the color I was looking for or on sale.  So where did I turn?  Why, the Internet, of course.  You know, that place where you never have to pay full price for anything.  I hit up Amazon first, and they had a selection of the same Dockers, but not really on sale, either.  So I headed over to Kohls online store to see if they had any in stock there.  They had plenty, and the first thing I noticed was that they had a buy one, get one half-off sale.  Nice.  Here’s what I was looking at in terms of total cost:

2 pairs of Dockers ($34.99 + $17.49) = $52.48
Sales tax = $3.15
Shipping = $8.95
Total = $64.58

Now, if there’s one thing I know it’s that if you’re willing to look for it, you can always find a promo code for free shipping.  I logged on to RetailMeNot, plugged in Kohls.com and saw that they have several codes that seemed to be working well for people.  I decided to use “SHOPNSAVE” which promised 15% off any purchase between January 26-27, 2010.  Went back to my order at Kohls and immediately noticed that it would accept not 1, but 2 promo codes.  So, I plugged in “FREEJAN” as well—free shipping on pretty much any order.

So, here’s how my purchase ended up:

2 pairs of Dockers = $52.48
15% off = -$7.48
Tax = $2.68
Shipping = FREE
Total = $47.29

Without any promotions and pants at regular price, the total would have been $83.13.  With the discount and promotion codes, I saved 44%, which is just excellent if you ask me.  Do your research—your pants will thank you.

Each year we make a pilgrimage to Julie’s parents’ house to complete our federal and state income tax returns for the prior year.  They generously provide us with use of their TurboTax [affiliate link] software, and with our less-than-complicated life, it’s a fairly quick and smooth process.  We usually do this around the first week of February (relatively early in the tax season), but we won’t be heading out there this year until late February or early March.

With the influx of W-2s, giving statements, and the like, we have just been itching to get some idea of whether we’ll be cashing a refund check or paying the piper (we’d rather pay, but that’s another post altogether).  Then I stumbled across TaxCaster Mobile, a free iPhone/iPod Touch application from Intuit, the makers of TurboTax and Quicken personal finance software.

The app is relatively basic, but it allows you to input your income and deductions (with specific categories and suggestions included), and then receive an estimation of whether you’ll be owing the government or receiving a refund.  We should not that this is for federal tax estimation only, the app does not include a state-specific tax estimation tool.

Don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch? No worries, TurboTax offers an online version of TaxCaster which will work in pretty much any web browser.  They also offer a variety of other tax tools to get you going in the right direction.

Online version of TaxCaster

Our advice?  Don’t wait to get started with doing your taxes.  It might be a little painful, but you’ll be glad you’ve gotten it out of the way, instead of waiting until the last minute on April 15.

Another weekend, and more links to great stuff we read this week! We kicked off our weekend on Friday night with friends, enjoying a guys and girls movie night.  The girls watched a chick flick favorite, and the guys headed out to see Avatar in IMAX 3D.  I can’t speak to whatever the girls watched, but Avatar (as you probably know) was amazing—probably one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time.  Alright, less movie gushing, more linking!  Here we go:

Flexo at Consumerism Commentary shares about the true cost of owning a credit card, giving insight to rising interest rates, and even the fees that are levied on retailers by the credit card companies.  It certainly gives one pause to think about how rapidly credit card companies can change their rates. Be sure also to check out some great discounts on Quicken products that CC has available as well.

Speaking of Quicken, Bob at Christian PF details 10 great software options for managing your personal finances.  As we mentioned before, our software of choice is current Quicken for Mac 2007, and we’re thinking about potentially upgrading to the new Quicken Essentials for Mac.

We began estimating our taxes this weekend, and Jason from Bible Money Matters has us covered when we do the real thing.  He’s compiled a list of the most common tax deductions.  Look for a post upcoming about our tax preparation process!

Wow, April at Get Rich Slowly has a substantial post about planning a debt-free vacation.  We’re in the process of planning for a vacation in early 2011, so this should be an excellent resource for us.

Nickel at Five Cent Nickel has totally impressed us with a post about paying off their mortgage in just 10 years.  Quit thinking about your mortgage as a 30-year plan—imagine the cash flow that having your mortgage paid off would bring and how you could bless others.

Erik from Money Crashers links out to a video overview of Dave Ramsey’s steps to financial success.  It’s what we believe, and it works—we know that firsthand!

Jim over at Bargaineering has a great post about measuring and tracking your net worth.

Billshrink has the most comprehensive comparison of the major cell phone plans that we’ve ever seen.  Yeah, owning a cell phone is a pretty expensive proposition.