A coworker of mine always brings in a box of Tootsie Roll Pops, and every time I take one, I can’t help but check to see if “I’m a winner”. I remember getting so excited when I found the “Indian and Star” on my wrapper when I was a kid, thinking that I could mail the wrapper in for free candy.

Sadly, my suspicions of fraud were true - it’s nothing but a hard to kill rumor, and Snopes confirms. I wonder why that rumor was so prevalent when I was younger. Anyone else been exposed to this rumor when they were younger? I guess it’s time to stop stockpiling them.

This past weekend, Jenni and I went to the Rahr & Sons Brewing Company in heart of Fort Worth. Amazingly, they give away free beer and a tour of the brewery from 1-3 pm every Saturday. This isn’t you typical free beer “samples” either - you bring your own glass/pint/mug/stein and they will fill you up four times before they cut you off. Their setup is simply in an old warehouse that is about a third full of brewing equipment. Everyone packs in and gets their (free) beer and listens to live music - an all around good time. Not sure how they do it exactly, but I’m certainly going back.

Rahr & Sons Brewing Free Brew and Tour Breakdown:

The Good

Free beer #1, free beer #2, free beer #3, and free beer #4. Yum. Good music, lots of people, bring a driver - after four of these suckers you are gonna need it.

The So-So

You end up waiting the the beer line for most of the two hours. You pretty much get a beer, get about 1/3 of the way done, then hop back in line so that by the time you are done with your beer, you are at the front of the line begging for more. This is made better by the live music and the social aspect of it all.

The Ugly

Two bathrooms + Hundreds of people + Four Free Beers each = really long lines for the bathroom. To make sure you don’t explode, you need to think ahead when you get that spider sense goes off that it’s tinkle time and jump in line right away.

According to Simon Owens, January 30 is international ‘Delete Your MySpace Account Day’. This started off as a blog rant of his that seems to have gained at least some momentum across the internet. Of course, within MySpace’s largest competitor’s website, Facebook, a group has been created to help gain some momentum for this event.

As for me, I will be joining them. I have never been fond of MySpace, and I find that I encounter several of Simon’s ‘wonderful’ MySpace Experiences, such as:

1. You rarely log in to MySpace except to delete spam friend requests from nude webcam girls.

4. You visit someone’s MySpace profile only to suddenly have music start blasting out of your speakers. (What irritates me most about this is that there is no global “no music” setting within MySpace…)

5. You have to make redundant clicks to perform simple tasks because MySpace keeps taking you to advertisement pages where you have to click on “return to MySpace profile” in order to continue what you’re doing.

6. You visit someone’s profile only to have your eyes bleed because of terrible page layout with non-matching designs and font colors.

Overall, I much prefer the semi-conformity of Facebook - although I tend to think that the advent of Facebook Applications has pushed it down the road of the MySpace Annoyances just a bit more.

Adios MySpace.

Growing up, I would constantly hear about the pains of paying bills each month - and it was something I feared was a necessary evil of growing up. Now that I am supposedly there, paying bills each month is not really something I have to actively think about - everything is paid with automatic funding. If I had to actually sit down with each of the monthly bills and write a check and mail it out and make sure it was on time, I would certainly loathe paying bills each month. Most of these automatic transactions are set up on the Internet, and major financial transactions seem to still scare some people. Here are just a few of the online financial tidbits I’ve acquired since I have ‘grown up’.

Open an online savings & checking account

Lately, my wife and I have moved as much of our finances as we can to non-’brick and mortar’ locations. We have a savings and checking account at ING Direct, and another savings account at HSBC. These accounts are purely online, and offer a much higher interest rate than our local brick and mortar does. Currently, ING’s savings account rate is at 4.1%, and HSBC’s is at 4.25% - much more than the 0.5% than the typical brick and mortar offers for savings accounts.

An online checking account can also give you a decent rate. ING’s is currently 3.15%, as compared to the typical brick and mortar’s rate of 0%. Assuming you have about $5,000 in you regular checking each month, thats a nice extra $157 each year just from cash temporarily sitting in your checking account.

We have set up both of our paychecks to be direct deposited to these online accounts, and once a month, we have an online account transfer funds over to our brick and mortar so we can write our rent check and any other small checks we write each month. All the rest of our monthly bills get automatically deducted from these accounts when they are due. No worries of late fees, and a maximum return on our money while it sits there each month.

Track where your money goes…automatically.

There are some great sites out there that help you see the larger picture of your financial situation. I have been trying out Mint.com lately, and have been pretty impressed with it. You essentially point it to your other accounts (via your online logins and passwords - no worries here though, they use Bank Level Security and SSL 128-bit encryption goodness). You can see your overall financial picture, and it automatically gives your breakdowns of where your money goes each month, as well as advice on how to save more.

If you feel as though you really need to expose your financial situation to peer critique, you can also try out Wesabe. This is similar to Mint, but here you reveal some of your spending trends and choices to the Wesabe community and they can opening critique some of your spending trends and give you (hopefully helpful) advice on how to better your financial situation. While I haven’t tried this one out fully, I can certainly see the appeal.

Don’t be afraid to lend or borrow money online

One of the most interesting concepts I have come across is Prosper. Prosper is essentially a person to person lending site that cuts the middle man (a bank) out of the loop. Think of it as the Ebay of online lending. Users have the ability to create a listing for a loan, and other users then bid to fund that loan. Once the loan is fully funded, the users then bid the interest rate of that fund down. For those that find themselves covered in 15-20% interest rate credit card debt, they can find loans for 9-14%, saving them bundles. From a lender’s standpoint, if they can get a 9-14% return on their money, they are doing great. Lenders typically bid on loans in small increments ($50) to reduce their risk. If a borrower can get 40 lenders to each lend them $50, they can pay off their higher rate credit cards with a lower rate loan via Prosper.

One idea that struck a chord with me is suggested by a Credit/Debt Recovery blog is that concepts like Prosper and Wesabe should be merged into one site that has community critiques of spending trends coupled with individual to individual loans. This would essentially create a form of community credit counseling - and with the current credit crunch, it sure seems like many people could use this.

The Bottom Line

Don’t be afraid to try out some of the online financial services that are out there. You can pay your credit card bills, track your checking accounts, open online-only accounts and spend much less time doing the old fashioned paperwork each month, and end up ahead financially each month. If you have any other suggestions of online finances, let me know in the comments!