Here and There around the Web

Are you ready for this one? It’s huge. Over at Surviving and Thriving, Donna Freedman is celebrating her one-year blogiversary by running amok with the giveaways. Donna, as we all know, is already the giveaway queen. Last week she sent me a copy of Personal Investing: The Missing Manual , a widely admired guide to retirement planning and investing, and she threw in a wacky calendar adorned with Alaskan moose photos—just for doing what comes naturally, posting a comment on one of her articles.

To mark her one-year blogging anniversary, Donna is giving away not one, not two, nay not even three gifts, but twenty-one of them. What can you hope for? Well, she’s offering…

A $100 Amazon.com gift card
Three $25 Amazon.com gift cards
A $25 Barnes & Noble gift card
An entire coffee-lover’s package that includes two pounds of fancy coffee, a Mr. Coffee café frappe machine, and two Savings.com coffee mugs
A subscription to All You magazine
An EnviTote folding canvas tote bag
Two copies of Wisebread’s 10,001 Ways to Live Large on a Small Budget
Two of Liz Pulliam West’s books, Your Credit Score, Your Money, and What’s at Stake(five copies) and Easy Money: How to Simplify Your Life and Get What You Want out of Life (two copies)
Carol Host and Peter Whybrow’s Get Satisfied: How Twenty People Like You Found the Satisfaction of Enough
Malcolm Gladwell,’s Outliers: The Story of Success
Dana Stabenow’s latest Kate Shugak novel, Though Not Dead

Donna points out that even if you don’t shop at Amazon or B&N, you can sell these cards on the secondary market. Same is true, I expect of any of the other goodies. But who would want to part with them?

Another extravagant giveaway is going on at Stoopid Success: try one or all of the 14 ways to enter the $300 giveaway slated for May 15.

The Outlier Model just moved off WordPress.com, launching a self-hosted site with a classy new design.

Boomer and Echo got an offer on their house and accepted it. They had to agonize a bit, but it looks like this was a smart decision.

Interesting article over at Canadian Finance Blog: Tom explains all those rules of thumb we’re supposed to apply to figuring out how much to save for retirement. Hmmm… Read all the way down through this post and you’ll see how much a typical Canadian can expect to receive from their equivalent of Social Security. Don’t hear any screaming about how their system’s going broke or how it’s time to short the old folks, and this is a far cry from the pittance Yanks receive… D’you suppose their legislators refrained from raiding those funds? Naaahhh….couldn’t be. Could it?

At Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured, NicoleandMaggie get a great string of comments going about breaking our addictions.

Check out these posts from my friends in Money Sisters:

Save Money on Food, from Mrs. Money at Ultimate Money Blog
Bargain Babe has found a deal for free prescription glasses!
At Money Crush, Jackie reflects on money and contentment.
The Digerati Life hosts an entertaining piece by guest blogger Cap on fighting the urge to splurge.
Struggling with a new round of tough times, Mrs. Accountability discovers a treasure trove of fresh veggies at bargain prices.