Fitting squarely in the coveted category of young, urban person with disposable income who lives in a decent neighborhood, I get a lot of junk mail. But in that pile of junk mail, I've often been delighted to discover some pretty sweet freebies with no obligation to buy more! Here are a few I've enjoyed:

-Free Starbucks Tea Lattes (found in Safeway weekly ad)
-Free smoothies from Jack in the Box
-Free $15 Buca di Beppo card (thrice!)
-Free $20 at Palomino (a fancy local restaurant)
-Free Blueberry Muffin Frosted Mini Wheats
-Free take-out entree at Pasta Pomodoro

Of course the idea behind freebies is that you'll buy more once you're there. But guess what? Now that you know the secret plot, you don't have to fall for it, even when the server keeps asking, "Are you sure you don't want an appetizer too?" Of course, if you use a gift card, be sure to still tip on the full value of what you get!

Wishing you a mailbox full of freebies...

For the most recent podcast, FNBO wanted us to reflect on how money affects our marriage. Here's the long version of my thoughts...

How has your savings journey affected your relationship with your spouse? If it’s brought you closer together, why do you think that has happened?

When we got married and said we'd love each other for life, whether or not to combine our finances was never a question. We merged all of our finances right away and established weekly "financial dates" where we record and categorize all of our transactions. Because we know everything we have is shared, we make almost all spending decisions together. We're actually kind of an extreme case of this... we literally do most all of our shopping together.

While that would probably drive some couples crazy, we kind of enjoy it, because we've gotten to know each other in all kinds of little ways. We know what gets the other excited (I love stuff that looks like other stuff; Seth loves maps and history), we know what the other values (Seth thinks real maple syrup is worth $20; I don't mind $1 maple-flavored syrup), and we know how the other thinks (I tend to overanalyze seemingly wasted money, Seth is a little more practical). Knowing each other so well makes it all the easier to give perfect gifts... or at least write detailed love letters when we're trying to save money!

Any advice for couples arguing over finances?

I imagine one of the biggest sources of tension is when your spouse makes a purchase you don't agree with -- even if that purchase is overpriced Valentines Day flowers for you! Perhaps you've come home with the groceries only to have your spouse unpack each bag going, "Oh, what's this?" or "What'd you get that for?" While you can't expect to always value or want the same things, having common financial goals overall can ensure you're on the same page.

One way to do this is by committing to stick to a budget together. A budget gives you both freedom to make choices within the budgeted categories and an objective way to measure whether you're really spending too much or not. The rest is just trusting the other person and giving them freedom to make decisions (and even mistakes).

Another way to relieve some of the tension, without completely separating your finances, is to set aside a certain amount that each of you has full control over: "Seth's Allowance" and "Alexa's Allowance" for example. This allowance can be used however each person chooses, and the other shouldn't be able to criticize how it's used. We haven't personally tried this, but it seems like a good idea -- because it also solves the gift-giving problem where when one of us buys a gift for the other, we both pay for it. Having separate "allowances" for each of us would give us the opportunity to buy gifts for each other without sharing the cost!

With Valentine’s Day approaching, what cost-effective ways to you plan to celebrate?

There are occasions when a surprise bouquet is delightful to me, but Valentines Day isn't one of them. Since Seth and I use the "one pot" method (we combine and share all our money), it would be hard for me to look at Valentines Day flowers without thinking: "But you could have gotten those flowers for half that much any other time of the year!"

To us, the best gifts are the ones we never have to see when we're entering transactions into Quicken together: They're the handmade gifts that are labors of love. The year I was looking for jobs, Seth wrote me a "recommendation letter" on fancy paper outlining all the things he loved about me. Since I'm a designer, I once made Seth a professional-looking "enhanced CD" booklet featuring photos and lyrics from our first year of marriage. Recently, Seth made me a slideshow video with photos carefully choreographed to a favorite song. And Seth can't resist my home-made cakes and cookies (which are far better than any store-bought chocolates anyway!).

While sneaking around making homemade gifts when you live in a studio apartment can be tricky, these are the kinds of gifts that we'll remember as the years go by!

9th grade class learns about PYF

not the end!

the end?

I just checked our FNBO account today and was surprised to realize that we've already reached our 6-month savings goal, as of this week! (That means our ranking now is solely up to your votes!)

Between direct depositing Seth's paycheck and regularly transferring part of my paycheck, we were able to reach what we thought was an ambitious goal even faster than I imagined! I guess paying yourself first really does work. (But we are certainly walking on a fragile cloud of blessings that we can't take credit for at all... we didn't have to use a penny of the $1000 we budgeted for car repairs last year, and we both made more in commissions/bonuses than expected.)

This doesn't mean we're going to stop saving, of course! Besides the fact that saving is practically on auto-pilot, our recently completed 2009 budget continues to set aside all of Seth's paycheck and $500 of mine each month, before we divide up what's left among our monthly expenses.

If you're curious, here's our 2009 budget:

We took what's left of my monthly salary after taxes, 401k/IRA contributions, and the money we set aside for our church and giving, and we used Quicken to allocate the ~$2750/month left over precisely between these major categories:

• Savings: $500/month (pay yourself first! that's in addition to saving all of Seth's income, of course)
• Auto: $75/month (gas and Bay Bridge tolls)
• Electric & Gas: $23/month (the nice part about living in SF's moderate climate!)
• Rent: $1575/month (the bad part about living in SF... but that's $100 less than last year, a huge surprise and blessing!)
• Clothing: $25/month per person (this category is new! Last year we lumped it in with "Everything Else," but spent a lot more on clothing than we expected, since we both started working full time last year)
• Eating: $100/month for dining out; $175/month for groceries (our most useful decision-making category)
• Household and Personal Care: $49/month (we can get pretty precise since we have averages from 5 years now!)

• Gifts: $500/year (including gifts for each other)
• Emergencies (Auto Repair, Medical, etc): $1000/year
• Travel to See Family: $2000/year (a significant amount... but it's what makes living so far from the families we love bearable!)
• Vacation: $500/year (I foresee another KOA Kampground vacation)

• Everything Else: $105/month (these last two categories are the ones that we squeeze if we don't have much leftover... fortunately, we often make money on the side to cover things like vacations and big one-time purchases!)

So that's our plan for 2009! I hope this is inspirational and helpful as you create your own!

I realize it's a little late for year-end advice, but since this blog will probably be archived somewhere, I wanted to share my end-of-year checklist as well as my New Year's to do list for your reference.

End of Year

Check the balance of my Healthcare Flexible Spending Account and make sure I used it all. If your company offers a Flexible Spending Account, you might know that you can set aside a certain amount, pre-tax, for use on approved medical-related expenses. But don't forget that this money is "use it or lose it" -- and with most FSAs, you have to use it before December 31st. MyMoneyBlog listed a few tips a few tips for using up any leftovers you might have. Your FSA may have a grace period through March 15 -- but you'll want to check to make sure!

Clean out my closet and donate stuff to Goodwill. Did you know you can actually get a tax deduction for donating stuff to Goodwill? I used to think "Bah, how worth it could it be to list that kind of thing on my tax return?" But this year we did a pretty thorough closet-cleaning, and we decided to see what it would add up to. Here's how easy it turned out to be:

1. Used TurboTax Online's free "It's Deductible" tool as a guide. It lists an estimated value for all types of clothes and adds it up for you -- all you have to do is enter how many of each type you have!
2. Sorted clothes by quality (High, Medium, Low) based on the quality standards described in It's Deductible (and by the IRS) and took a picture of each pile of clothes.
3. Counted up how many of each type of item of each quality we had and entered it into It's Deductible.
4. Printed out the summary and photos for tax records.
5. Dropped off the clothes at Goodwill and had the person receiving the donation sign the summary form.
6. Saved $30 by donating about $100 worth of clothes!

It took less than half an hour and will save us $30 on our 2008 taxes. That's $60/hour (tax free!) for sorting clothes? Sign me up!

Make sure any other tax-savings donations and actions are completed. Mint.com posted a nice list of ways to save on taxes before the end of the year.

Beginning of Year

Max out our retirement savings before April 15th. Did you know you can save money for retirement in more ways than your company's 401k, if they have one? A Roth IRA is one of the best ways to do this. If you make less than $101,000 (single) or $159,000 (joint), you can each put up to $5000 per year into a Roth IRA account. It's not pre-tax like a 401k or traditional IRA, but that means you can withdraw your contributions at any time penalty-free -- so why not save as much as you can? You can learn more about Roth IRAs at Vanguard, which is where Seth and I have Roth IRAs (invested in Vanguard Total Stock Market Index and Vanguard Total International Index funds respectively; to learn more about investing, read my previous post). You can also open an IRA through a user-friendly broker like Sharebuilder.

Keep track of deadlines for rebates, returns, gift certificates and vouchers. If you bought things over Christmas with rebates, have presents you'd like to return, got gift certificates for presents, or got flight vouchers thanks to horrible holiday travel, make sure you know when the deadlines are! I'm sure companies love people who buy things because of rebates then forget to send them in. But if you're good at keeping track of deadlines, you can even beat marketers at their game. (I've gotten lots of free money for signing up for free trials -- like Blockbuster Online -- where, as long as you remember to cancel, you can get free money or other free stuff without losing a penny! The best was when I signed up for "Great Fun!" -- a promo ad that popped up on Cheaptickets.com after I bought a plane ticket to Italy. I researched them and they seemed legit, and all was fine! I got $200 cash back from Great Fun... all I had to do to avoid trouble was cancel by the deadline, which wasn't a problem at all!)

Adjust our withholding. Do you tend to get really big tax rebates? Do you remember the W-4 form you filled out when you started your job? That form determines how much estimated tax is taken out of your paycheck each month... and if it's wrong, you could end up loaning the government more money than you need to (until you get your rebate). Especially if you have two incomes, getting your withholding just right can be tricky. Fortunately, there are a lot of resources online that can help. We know we need to adjust ours already, since we plan to both work full-time all year for the first time since Seth graduated, but you may want to wait til after tax season to see if your rebate is too much or too little to decide if you need to make an adjustment.

Cancel unused credit cards. MyMoneyBlog pointed out that some credit card companies are closing people's unused cards, which may not be good for your credit reports. So if you aren't using the, read this article then consider closing them yourself. It also reduces identity theft risk.

Make a 2009 budget. We like to create a new budget every calendar year. We use Quicken to copy last year's budget, then adjust the amounts we've budgeted based on what we spent last and what we anticipate spending this year. We'll share more when we've finished the 2009 budget, until then, read about how we create a budget here.

The Island of Misfit Toys lives under my desk at home: A dust-collecting assortment of products that need to be replaced or returned. Some of them have been waiting for half a year. Others are wedding gifts with lifetime warranties that I've been putting off returning for several years (lifetime warranties lend themselves well to procrastination). As part of my New Year's cleaning, I decided it was about time to stop procrastinating and start calling those 800 numbers.

Processing these misfits has yielded amazing success thus far, and I wanted to share a few triumphs to inspire you to be a proactive and creative consumer:

Broken lids = free replacement set of Reynold's tupperware

Last year we decided to augment our lunch-packing tupperware with a $20 16-piece set from Reynolds. Within a month, several of the lids were cracked simply from taking them on and off. I finally got around to calling the number on the box, and while the package doesn't say anything about warranty or guarantee, all it took was one phone call, and the gracious customer service rep offered to mail us a new set, no questions asked and no return required. Impressive!

Wrong size hat from a retailer = hat for half price from the wholesaler

Another sad story was that my mom got Seth a classy dress hat for Christmas. It cost her quite a bit and then, to our dismay, it was the wrong size. I looked at the package and noticed an old label indicating that the retailer mom purchased it from had received the product from an outlet elsewhere. I called that outlet and discovered that I could get the same hat directly for almost half as much! By requesting a refund from the retailer and purchasing the hat elsewhere, I saved mom $40 (Too bad about the sunk shipping/return shipping costs. Next time I'm buying from http://www.shoebuy.com -- free shipping/returns!).

Terrible flight = $200 in travel vouchers from United

Now here's the grand finale. If you followed the 24-hour-Christmas-flight saga in my previous post, you better believe I had a bone to pick with the airlines! But then again, I figured, so did thousands of other people. Still, while friends who listened to my sob story warned me it was pointless to complain to the airline, I figured being proactive was worth a shot. Although I was almost deterred by the fact that both airlines insisted you EMAIL instead of CALL, I ended up writing the following email to United Customer Relations using their online form. My first draft was much less cordial, but I finally realized that the airlines probably get enough angry emails -- and I read the "Contract of Carriage" (it was a 3 hour layover -- I was bored) and knew that they weren't obligated to do anything for me -- so I figured politeness was better:

To Whom It May Concern,

Seth and Alexa Andrzejewski

To my utter amazement, within one day, I received a reply:

Dear Ms. Andrzejewski,

Amit Madan
United Airlines Customer Relations

I was delighted! Instead of looking back at this trip as a frustrating sunk cost, I'm a happily compensated and satisfied customer. After all, if they'd asked me in advance if I'd be willing to endure an overnight delay in exchange for $200 in vouchers, I might have willingly taken them up on it.

Thank you United, Hatco and Reynolds!

(P.S. While all this might sound time-consuming, I was able to get it all out of the way in one morning before work. If you have an island of misfit toys, you can do it too!)

Customer Service Success - very impressive!

Written from the airport on December 21

After enduring four layovers, four security checkpoints, an unexpected overnight stay in Charlotte, overpriced airport food, and 20 hours (and counting) of travel, I should probably be kicking myself right now for buying the cheapest airline tickets from SFO to PIT. I just generally hate paying for "convenience." I'm willing to go the extra mile to save (or "make," as I like to think of it) some extra money. But this recent trip has made me reevaluate the cost of convenience and ask:

When is convenience worth paying for?

1) When there are more worthwhile things you would be doing (financially or otherwise) if you weren't dealing with the inconvenience. The other day, I spent an hour in line at Costco when I could have ordered my contacts online for $10 more. I thought at the time, "I couldn't make $10 using this time otherwise, and I'm not particularly busy right now, so why not?" But I've been thinking since -- is there something more worthwhile I could have done with that evening than stand in line at Costco? Practice fiddle? Serve others? Now, I probably wouldn't be serving at a soup kitchen on a Wednesday night... but I could be getting other things out of the way so I'd have more time on the weekends.

2) When you wouldn't want to deal with the inconvenience, even if someone paid you. When I frame convenience decisions in terms of getting paid for my troubles, the savings often seem more compelling. For example, "If I could get paid $10 to stand in line at Costco for an hour, would I do it?" Maybe! In the airline tickets case, instead of thinking, "A $400 flight isn't much different than a $500 flight," I thought, "If I could get paid $100 to take an extra layover, would I do it?" I chose the $100.

3) When it costs you something you value more. Taking a longer flight often means having less vacation time to spend with my family. So when I thought, "Would I rather have $100 or an extra 4 hours with my family?" it became a little more nebulous. I decided that 4 hours still wasn't worth $100, but when our delayed flights ended up costing us far more than 4 hours, I did choose to spend $190 to extend our trip an extra day (along with other benefits). And that seemed worth paying for.

4) When it would inconvenience others. When it comes to things like airline tickets, I must always remember that I am not the only stakeholder. Taking Greyhound may be cheaper than renting a car, but while we don't mind enduring Greyhound, our parents might mind dropping us off and picking us up at odd hours. When other people are involved, I have to consider them too, and ask whether I'm trying to save money at others' expense. (Now if I offered to split the savings...)

On this past trip, our inconvenience was multiplied far beyond our calculations: The extra layovers led to the demise of our entire itinerary. One delayed flight threw off the rest of the connections, so here we are in Charlotte when we should be home. But even as we stood amidst the hoards of people waiting for the courtesy shuttles to nearby hotels, I posed to Seth, "So... if you'd known how much trouble we'd go through in advance, would you have paid $100 to avert it?" And maybe we're ridiculous... but when we thought about it that way, we still preferred the $100. After all, we wouldn't have been spending family time during those hours -- we would have been sleeping.

Regardless of what your choice would be, asking yourself the questions above and framing the problem in different ways can help you make the optimal choice for you.

Contact lenses are one of the more complicated comparison shopping challenges. (They're up there with toilet paper, which never ceases to confound us with its seemingly infinite configurations and sneaky fine print: Which is a better deal? More sheets, single ply? Fewer sheets, triple ply? Double roll or quadruple roll? 8 pack or 24 pack?) While it's easy to order contacts online (simply ask your optometrist for a copy of your prescription, visit a reputable site like 1-800-CONTACTS, and enter the info), finding the best deal can be tricky.

Fortunately, I learned a lot from my recent contact lens shopping experience, and these lessons apply to all comparison shopping situations -- not just contacts.

Here are some traps to watch out for:

"Low Price Guarantees"

Don't assume that "low price guarantee" means the marked price is automatically low! When a store or site advertises a "Low Price Guarantee," it's easy to feel falsely assured that by simply shopping there, you're getting the best deal. 90% of people probably just pay the marked price, simply assuming it's the lowest. But read the details. Here's how 1-800-CONTACTS Price Guarantee works:

"If you are able to find a lower price online, click here to have a representative call you immediately and beat that price by 2%!"

By advertising the "guarantee" and making it sound unlikely that there's a lower price out there, they're sneakily discouraging you from comparison shopping. Why look elsewhere if they guarantee the lowest price??

But the reality is, if you actually do take the time to comparison shop, chances are, you WILL find a lower price out there! You then have to be proactive and call the retailer -- who will happily match the price -- to actually take advantage of the "low price guarantee."

(Even then, to truly get the lowest price, guaranteed, you have to be sure that the price you found IS the lowest price out there and that no other retailers offer a BETTER price matching deal -- VisionDirect will beat competitors' prices by 5%!)

Rebates

Often, for expensive things like contacts, advertised prices are "after rebate," which makes comparing prices even more tricky.

Don't assume rebates DON'T apply to you: If Store A is more expensive but offers a great rebate and Store B is less expensive but doesn't mention the rebate, don't assume you can't get the same rebate at Store B! Often, rebates are offered by the MANUFACTURER, and the manufacturer doesn't always care which store you bought the lenses from. You have to read the rebate details to know for sure. If the manufacturer doesn't care, then buy the cheaper product from Store B and get the rebate from the manufacturer anyway!

Don't assume rebates DO apply to you: Retailers will also often hide the small print attached to rebates. It turns out that one popular contact lens rebate out there now actually only applies to people who order contacts within 90 days of their last exam. Unfortunately, I don't fall into that category, so these rebates don't apply to me at all. But retailers don't want you to know that.

Online Shopping

Finally, don't always assume that online is cheaper. I've gotten used to assuming that the best prices on earth are at Amazon.com. But a recent experience shopping for some bakeware (loaf pans are $10-15 online, but only $3-5 at a local retailer!) made me think twice about my assumption.

So as I was about to place my price-matched order at VisionDirect's website, I took a moment to call up my local Costco. And to my surprise, the price they offer is lower than ANY retailer I saw online! Even considering the cost of gas to drive to Costco, it was a significantly better deal.

While I did consider whether the convenience of ordering online would be worth the extra dollars, I ended up closing my browser, jumping in the car, and dropping off my prescription at Costco.

Being a smart shopper means watching out for assumptions. Whether you're ordering contact lenses or wrapping up your Christmas shopping, try to become more aware of what you assume. You might be surprised!

P.S. Were you hoping to learn more about contact lens shopping? There's already a great article all about it! Check out:

Where Should You Buy Contact Lenses?

I used to wonder why in the world things like boxes of cereal had, "For questions or comments, call 1-800..." I used to think about calling those numbers just to keep the poor people on the other end company. But in the past few years, I've found that these 800 numbers are a secret weapon against buyer's remorse!

Most consumer products come with satisfaction guarantees -- even if the packaging doesn't say so! So if the cereal is stale, or if you buy a bottle of shampoo that makes your hair dry and horrible, or if the inserts you bought for your shoes wear out in 2 weeks, or if the batteries you bought from Duracell drain unusually fast, just take a moment to look up the company's customer support line and give them a call!

Every time I've done this, I've gotten through to a cheerful customer service rep super quickly (how many people think to call Gillette?), and they've been glad to send refund or replacement product vouchers without a hassle! It takes all of 2 minutes and makes me feel like I didn't waste my money.

I even returned something I purchased in Japan by corresponding with Dr. Scholls Japan via email: The customer service rep was incredibly gracious and apologetic, and Dr. Scholls even reimbursed the cost of shipping the product back to Japan!

Satisfaction guarantees alleviate the risk of trying new things: If the new shampoo doesn't work out, I can just get my money back!

Don't assume wasting money has to be part of life. Consumer product-makers want you to be happy. Take advantage of it!

I really enjoyed our Thanksgiving vacation. For people like Seth and I, who live carefully-managed lives, especially when it comes to money and food, learning to see vacations as chances to be care-free has been refreshing.

Letting go isn't easy for me though. It always seemed irrational to me to say stuff like, "It's my birthday, so I can spend whatever I want or eat whatever I want!" Because don't you always have to pay someday? What's to keep those calories and dollars from catching up to you, just because it's your birthday?

But I've realized that the point of developing good habits is ensuring that when you're set free, you won't stray far from those habits, even if you're not thinking about it constantly. I mean, by now we have an innate sense of what's reasonable and what we can afford, so letting ourselves mentally vacation every now and then isn't going to break the bank. In fact, it's probably even healthy.

So before our trip home for the holiday, we made a deliberate decision to simply not worry about money and just live freely. We gave good gifts, enjoyed eggnog milkshakes and shopped with siblings -- and saved a lot of time and mental energy because we weren't analyzing every spending decision.

Vacations like these remind us what it feels like not to worry -- and remind us that really, that's how we should always feel. In fact, freedom -- not worry -- is the point of good financial practices. (Keeping a budget, for example, frees you to spend the budgeted amount.) Sometimes it just takes a vacation and a time of Thanksgiving to remember that.

Tip: If you'd like to take a financial vacation without regretting it later, determine before the vacation how much you can afford to spend, take out that much cash, and then feel free to spend it. And when it's gone, stop. You can rest assured you haven't spent too much, while feeling free with what you set aside!

Last spring (2007), when the Dow was surging, I resolved to start learning about the stock market and to get into investing in hopes of earning more than the 5% interest my bank was offering at the time. Well, I certainly couldn't have picked a worse time to get started -- like the rest of the stock market, our portfolio's value has been decimated. But don't let that scare you! I still feel confident that we followed sound investing principles, so I am not terribly worried. And since stock prices are now at record lows, it may be a good time for you to start learning about investing. So, with the disclaimer that I AM NOT AN INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL, I'd like to share what I learned.

Stocks 101

A few years ago, the idea of investing in stocks felt completely over my head. I had only a vague idea of how the stock market worked and NO idea how to get started. It took a ridiculously long time to finally realize how simple the principle of buying stock is:

Buying a share of stock is simply like buying an object -- say, a rare painting -- that goes up and down in value. Say you paid $100 for that painting. A year later, it's worth $150! Now you can choose to either hold onto it and hope its value continues to grow, or you could sell it for a profit.

Say you hold onto it, then suddenly the economy downturns and people don't want paintings anymore. Now it's only worth $50! The natural reaction at this point is to panic and despair that you've "lost" so much money. A lot of people, even seasoned investors, are feeling this way right now when they look at their retirement funds or portfolios. But what you must remember at this point is that you STILL HAVE THE PAINTING, and you don't really lose anything until you sell it.

If you bought the painting at a reasonable price to begin with, and you have reason to believe that this painting's value generally goes up, you can rest assured that if you wait it out, its value will eventually go up again.

Investing Made Easy

Now it's hard to predict whether a single painting or a single company will always increase in value. To do that, you need to be an art expert or an expert in the company you're investing in -- you need to understand its business model, growth plans, financial reports, etc. Just buying Apple stock isn't a simple way to go about investing.

But if you could buy a piece of every major company out there, you could feel pretty confident that in the long run, your portfolio's value would go up. If you believe that the economy will generally grow in the long run, if you buy a fund that represents the entire economy, you can rest assured that it will eventually grow in value.

Total market index funds are easy-to-buy bundles of stocks that are designed to do just that: Match the performance of the entire stock market by investing in a representative set of companies, such as the S&P 500. Considering that the S&P 500 outperformed 80% of professionally-managed funds in the past 10 years, investing in a single fund that matches the S&P 500 is a simple way to get started in investing!

How to Get Started

Thanks to these index funds, getting started in investing isn't nearly as hard as you might think! Although I'll say again, I am NOT an investment professional and so you're responsible to do your own research, I'm happy to share exactly what we did.

After learning all I could about Index Funds and broad-market investing (see the links below), we...

1. Decided how much savings we wanted to keep in no-risk accounts like FNBO Direct for emergency and short-term (3-5 year) needs, then figured out how much money we could afford to invest for 3-5 or more years.
2. Opened a free brokerage account with the friendly and easy-to-understand Sharebuilder, which allows us to buy any index fund that's traded on the stock market (which are called Exchange Traded Funds or ETFs).
3. Used our free trades to invest in two funds -- one that represents the S&P 500 and entire US market (Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF - VTI) and one that represents the entire international market (Vanguard All-World Except US ETF - VEU). Vanguard is one of the most well-known providers of these funds, because the amount they take off the top -- called the Expense Ratio -- is so low (0.07%), but there are others.

Once we got started, we kept learning more and more and have since created a slightly more precise portfolio (a lot like this one) that includes bonds (there's a Total Bond Market ETF - BND). But investing in broad index funds was a great way to get started. It got us paying attention to the stock market (more than we should have been!) and itching to learn more.

If you're looking to get started in investing -- and now *may* be a good time, since stock prices are at record lows (think of it as a bargain!) -- I highly recommend learning more about index investing, signing up for an account, investing a little money, and watching it eventually grow!

Learn More

The resources I learned the most from were My Money Blog, The Motley Fool and Seeking Alpha. Vanguard's website is also helpful. There are MANY great resources on all of these sites, but here are some good starting points from each:

http://www.mymoneyblog.com/my-money-blogs-rough-guide-to-money
http://www.fool.com/60second/indexfund.htm
http://seekingalpha.com/article/15134-the-seeking-alpha-etf-investing-gu...
https://personal.vanguard.com/us/planningeducation

Also, our friend Liz's book also recommends Index Fund investing and gives plenty of helpful advice! Check it out:

http://asklizweston.com/?page_id=1169

Great summary on investing