personal finance in a coupon blog

For those of you who've been waiting impatiently fot this week's Top 10 Deals.....the wait is over! We've scanned and scoured our site like crazy for 10 phenomenal deals we can be especially proud of and we happen to think this week's Top 10 are even more Savings.com worthy than usual. Ooooo!

So without further ado:

I challenge you, readers, to find any semblance of a theme for this week's roundup. Stella warned me it would be tough, and she was right. I've got nothing!

So let's forge ahead:

Although the Christmas creep has been causing an ongoing battle between Jack Frost and Jack-o-Lanterns, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season has been the day after Thanksgiving, aka "Black Friday." But according to an article on Mainstreet, Black Friday has morphed into "Black November".

As much as I would love to write about how Andre Agassi should be praised for admitting he used crystal meth instead of being chastised, I'm gonna pass. That won't save you money because we don't have any crystal meth deals (weird, I know...). Instead I'll provide you with some deals (and hopefully some entertainment) on some very strange fitness products.

Now that the Holiday shopping season is upon us, it's time to...what's that? You thought you had a few more weeks to kill before you had to even start thinking about gift buying, long lines, and bank account breaking? Hahaha, oh no my friends! Wasting away the next few weeks can mean missing out on some of the best bargains available.

Every year it seems the holiday shopping season gets moved up sooner. This year several retailers, both online and off, started their big festive season pushes in August. For the most part, however, many seasonal deals started to appear in full force the day after Halloween. The days of procrastination paying off in last minute bargains are slowly fading away into the past.

So, in honor of slow-cooked turkey, pine needles littering the floor, festivals of light and quick kisses under strategically hung mistletoe, I'm going to give you a brief primer in getting the jump on cool holiday tech deals that won't put you in the poor house come January 1st.

Since 2006, Light in the Box has been providing customers with brand-name products at wholesale prices--making it a shoe-in for this week's Featured Store.

After my luggage was lost on my last flight, I vowed to try to make my next trip with just a carry-on. This might sound like a small feat, but for someone as indecisive as me, it isn't. ("What if I want to wear the boots instead of the flats? I'll bring both. And the t-straps. Just in case.") Sure, I packed lighter when I was younger, but I usually ended up looking like a grungy teenager.

Since tomorrow I'm headed to San Francisco for Save Up, I grilled friends, scoured the web for packing tips, and hit up fashion magazines for the best advice on packing light while looking right. As always, I found a way to make sure your biggest travel expense is your plane ticket, not your wardrobe.

Ah, Thanksgiving. Such a cornucopia of culinary delights. Such a delightful melange of seasonal flavors. So utterly impossible to match with wine.

You can pair each individual Thanksgiving dish with a wine, of course. But finding a wine to complement the whole meal is a different story. You may have herbal notes in the stuffing, buttery mashed potatoes, marshmallow-y yams, white or dark meat. And let's face it, one tart mouthful of cranberry sauce and the whole wine pairing plan gets shot to heck.

So what can you do, besides pretend you forgot to buy cranberry sauce? Choose a crowd pleasing favorite that goes with the widest range of flavors.

We've got your list here.

We're gearing up for holiday shopping here at Savings.com. Expect to see a lot in the way of Holiday sales, deals for Christmas, etc. as we edge ever closer to the Holiday season. As you traipse through the mall looking for the perfect gifts and the best deals, there's one thing that will ache more than your empty wallet.

Your feet.

Fortunately, we have a solution for that--at least for one lucky reader. We're giving away a total leg and foot massager!

Halloween's over and with it the scary season. Some would say the scary season of the bad economy is coming to a close as well. How true is this? Well, it depends on who you ask because if you're struggling financially, there's no doubt that you're going to be pessimistic about the overall economy as well. But there are some encouraging signs that the economy is coming out of its slumber. This is good news for retailers who are probably a bit worried about the spending habits this coming holiday season.

Let's look at some of the major indicators. Last week it was revealed that the Gross Domestic Product went up 3.5%. Given that a recession is defined as two negative quarters for the GDP, it would appear that the GDP is a great indicator of our new fiscal health. Still, there are those who argue that the GDP isn't that great of an indicator, and may not mean that we're in a recovery mode, just that we're effectively treading water. However, there is some evidence that we're entering a recovery as well.

This Week's Top 10 Deals are finally here! We've combed our site for the best of the recently added coupons and created our glorious Top 10 Deals list to help ease the pinch of that shopping sting. Fear not the holidays! Here at Savings.com, we want to help make sure this holiday season feels recession-free...

I've been elected to write this week's "Home Sweet Home" edition of Herding Cats--which is fitting, because I do indeed live at and work from home. Since today is All Hallow's Eve Eve, it was also fitting that we feature a few stories about ghosts.

Read on...if you dare!