1. Make your own greeting cards for free. The Hewlett Packard site has hundreds of free downloads. Invest in a pack of greeting card paper, select the card you want, print it and you are good to go. I just made a store quality valentine card for my husband in under 5 minutes. Four of those minutes were spent finding where I put the card paper stock. You can buy a pack of greeting card paper with envelopes for about $9, so each card can be printed for around 30 cents, plus a few minutes of your time.
2. The actual, official free credit report site is at www.annualcreditreport.com. This site allows you to order a credit report once every twelves months from each of the nationwide consumer credit reporting companies: TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian.
Many of the free credit report offers online are in fact scams. If you sign up with them, you (maybe) get one month for free and the get your charge card billed for access to credit reports monthly until the end of time. In a way you have to give admire the diabolical cleverness of the credit reporting agencies for finding a way to make money for a problem they helped to create (easy credit fraud).
3. You can get many free books online at books.google.com and www.gutenberg.org.
4. Get free books, audio books, DVDs and subscriptions from your local library. Most people know that libraries offer free book rentals, but these days the freebies don't just stop at books. My favorite freebie from libraries is subscriptions to online journal and magazine sites. Most libraries subscribe to a number of these subscription services. If you write for a living like I do, or do other kinds of research, access to these online services is a fantastic resource. In California you can get a library card from many different cities, and correspondingly many different journal services, as long as you are a resident of the state. If you live in California, or a state with similar library rules, stop in to various libraries whenever you travel and get a card. This will give you access to a wide range of online, free full text articles you won't find in the search engine listings.
Hint: The libraries in cities with the highest home prices tend to have the best online research tools.
5. If you have a Kindle book reader, there are some books you can download for free at Amazon.com.
6. iTunes has many free podcasts. I like to download the self improvement topics, like the ones from the nutrition departments at colleges on how to eat healthy.
