Poorer Than You

Money: It's Not Just For Rich People

What Are You Saving For? Win up to $850 With the #ImSavingForSweepstakes!

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Win up to $750 plus a bonus $100 gift card with the America Saves #ImSavingForSweepstakes

Whether you’re saving for a new car, to buy a house, to start a business, to become debt free, for retirement, or for anything else, you could almost certainly use a little more cash toward your savings goal.

America Saves Week is a national effort to set a savings goal, make a savings plan, and save automatically. Join me and the millions of others who are taking time this week to start or grow our savings.

It all starts when you make a commitment to yourself to save. I’m a big fan of making a public commitment to save, because it’s one of the little steps that made a big difference early on in my savings journey. I pledged to pay off my credit card debt, and when I was done with that, I pledged to work on some savings goals. I could only commit to saving a mere $5/month toward retirement. But in less than 10 years since I first made that pledge, my retirement savings have swelled to over $90,000! It all grew from that little $5 seed and the savings habit that I made.

Let America Saves help! Take the first step today and take the America Saves pledge to save money, reduce debt, and build wealth over time. America Saves will keep you motivated with information, tips, and reminders to help you reach your savings goal. Think of them as your own personal support system.

Share Your Savings Goal for a Chance to Win up to $750 in the #ImSavingForSweepstakes

To celebrate the 2018 America Saves Week (Feb. 26-March 3, 2018), America Saves is launching the #ImSavingForSweepstakes. It’s easy to enter. Just tell America Saves your savings goal and make a plan to reach it for your chance to win $500 toward your goal, then boost your potential prize by an additional $250 by sharing your savings goal, story, or tip on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. (Plus, be entered to win an additional First Prize $100 gift card, just by entering here through Poorer Than You!)

How to enter:

  • Take a photo, draw a picture, or make a collage illustrating your savings goal
    • OR Make a short video featuring your savings goal by answering at least one of these questions: What are you saving for? What is your savings story and how can it help other people? What is your favorite savings tip or trick?
  • Share your video or illustration on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter with the hashtag #ImSavingForSweepstakes
  • Take the America Saves Pledge and tell America Saves what you’re saving for and make a simple savings plan to reach your goal
    • When you make the pledge through one of the links on this page, you’ll be entered to win the grand prize of up to $750 toward your savings goal, and you’ll also be entered to win a bonus first prize $100 gift card! (And yes, you could win both!)

Get creative!

  • Keep it simple by taking a video or picture in front of the item you’re saving for – like a new car or house
  • Use a video or photo editing tool to put yourself in the frame with your goal – like a trip to the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore
  • Use an app to add a caption or some character to your submission

Take the Pledge!
No Purchase Necessary. Sweepstakes ends 4/6/18. See Official Rules.

More Cash Prizes for Saving and Sharing

I’m so excited to see what you are saving for! Feel free to tag me in your social media post (@Stephonee on Twitter, @PoorerThanYou on Facebook, or @Stephoneek on Instagram) or just tell me about your goal in the comments below!

Announcing the Back-to-School Shuffle for a Shuffle Giveaway!

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For many of you, it’s time to head back to college and hit the party circuit (and maybe a few books, too). In honor of our studious readers, the members of the College Money Network have put together a week-long series and giveaway to help you start this year off right.

For the first “Shuffle” in our Shuffle for a Shuffle, we’ll be offering up six great articles on a variety of back-to-school topics. What makes it a “shuffle” is that each blog will be hosting someone else’s article. For example, tomorrow Broke Grad Student will be hosting an article from Laura of Green Panda Treehouse.

The best way to make sure you see all six articles plus more great content from the College Money Network members is to subscribe to the CMN. You can also just watch the CMN main page, but you’ll have to check back every day for fresh content — subscribing is much easier! Or you can check back here on Poorer Than You next week, as I’ll surely do a roundup post that highlights all six articles in the Shuffle.

Now, for the other “Shuffle” involved…

Shuffle for an iPod Shuffle (and more!)

shuffle_black

Prizes:

These prizes are being given away across the six College Money Network sites that are participating in the Shuffle for a Shuffle. Each site will provide you with six chances to win, meaning you have a total of 36 entries into the contest that you can earn! To enter on Poorer Than You, you can do one (or all!) of the following:

Follow me on Twitter, @stephonee. Leave a comment on this entry or email me with your Twitter user name so I can count your entry. No need to spam your Twitter with a specific tweet or anything. Although tweets about the contest are appreciated, they won’t earn you any extra entries on Poorer Than You. (1 entry)

Become a fan of Poorer Than You on Facebook. Leave a comment anywhere on the fan page, or contribute something to the “Discussion” tab. (Please be cooler than just begging to win in your comment.) Once you’ve done that, send me an email letting me know what your name is as it appears on Facebook, so I can match it up and count your entries. (2 entries)

Write a blog post about college finances. Your post must include a link to Poorer Than You, either the main page (https://poorerthanyou.com) or any article on the site other than a giveaway. Write about anything you want that relates to college and money, but it must be a new blog post — previous articles do not count. Again, leave a comment on this entry with a link to your blog post, or email the link to me. (3 entries)

How To Win

All valid entries will be assigned a unique number. We will use a random number generator to select the winning numbers. Odds of winning depend on the number of entries received.

All entries must be received by September 6, 2009 at 11:59 PM PST.

Winners will be notified the following week. After all the prizes have been claimed, we will release an official announcement listing the winners.

Rules and Restrictions

  • All winners must be 18 years of age or older and live in the United States.
  • No purchase is necessary to participate in this giveaway.
  • We will choose the winners from the qualified participants. We are the sole judges of adding entries to the list. Plagiarized content, trackback from splogs, spams, and comments containing abusive or inappropriate languages will not be considered.
  • To award the prizes, we must be able to contact you. Please leave a valid email address with your comment, or make sure we can contact you through your web site. Your contact information will not be shared with anyone else.
  • For certain prizes, winners will be required to submit a physical address to ship the prize. Again, your contact information will never be shared with anyone.
  • Prizes are provided as-is, and substitutions may be made at our discretion.
  • Winners must reply within 1 week from the time we notify them to claim their prize. Otherwise, they forfeit their prize, and it will be awarded to an alternate.

HP Better Together: Top Entries and Winner!

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Many thanks to everyone who entered the PoorerThanYou and HP Better Together Giveaway! The requirement to enter was to submit a piece of multimedia that relates to personal finance. Here are the top entries, in the order they were submitted. Remember, top entries were judged on the following:

  • Demonstration of a sound personal finance concept. Entries that were off topic or hard to understand were not considered.
  • Free of copyrighted material. This is difficult for me to verify, even though I’m a big copyright geek and now a lot of the rules. But I have vetted these to best of my ability. If I find out in the future that a top entry is in violation of US copyright law, it will be removed from this page.
  • Fun! This can be hard to do with personal finance, so I was a bit lax about this rule. But there were a few “downers” submitted, which was the opposite of what I wanted. Entries that looked on the sunny side of things were much more likely to make the cut.

Submissions after the “jump:”

[Read more…]

Better Together: HP Laptop Bundle Giveaway!

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The contest is now CLOSED! A big “thank you!” to all who entered! The best entries, and the winner of the laptop bundle, will be posted here on PoorerThanYou.com by 6pm today. The winner will also be contacted by email, so watch your inbox!

HP and Microsoft have graciously provided me with a sweet laptop bundle to give away to one of you guys, in any way that I see fit. Here’s what the prize pack contains:HP Better Together Giveaway

Sweet! So what flaming hoops am I going to have you jump through to win this bundle?

Contest Rules

Create a piece of multimedia that embodies a sound personal finance concept. “Multimedia” can be a photo, a drawing, a video, a collage made with software, or even a song if you so choose. I will pick my favorite submissions and feature them here on the blog on Saturday. I will assign each of the best submissions a number and use Randomizer.org to pick the winner!

I am not looking for the most artistic person in the world. I wasn’t a photo major or an art major… I was a film major, but that’s beside the point. I don’t expect you to be any of those things. It should look (or sound) like you put some work into it, but aesthetics will not be the #1 thing I use to pick out my favorites. Pretty is nice, but it’s not the point here.

Things I will be looking for in choosing my favorites:

  • Money topics! It’s open to anything (poke around this blog for ideas), but try to keep it relevant to college students or 20-somethings. It can be something simple, like a cool photo of money. Or it can be something big that demonstrates a complex money topic in an easy-to-understand way.
  • NO COPYRIGHTED OR TRADEMARKED MATERIAL. Even if it’s unintentional, you cannot use anything that you don’t have the rights to (including pictures used in a collage, or music). Anything that violates copyright law will be automatically disqualified.
  • Fun! Personal finance can seem really dull and boring sometimes. It’s your job to make it fun and get people excited about money with your creation.

If you want to do something other than one of the multimedia forms I’ve already mentioned (photo, drawing, video, collage, music), contact me before you start your project. Let me know what you’re thinking of doing, and I’ll let you know if it will qualify for the contest.

Entries must be submitted by Noon Eastern Daylight Time, August 22nd. No entries submitted after that time will be considered, no matter how good they are. The number of “favorite submissions” will depend on the total number and quality of submissions.

Entries must be submitted in the comments section of this post. This means you will have to host your creation elsewhere (your own website, blog, Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, etc.) and just paste the link into a comment. DO NOT JUST POST THE LINK IN THE “WEBSITE” FIELD OF YOUR COMMENT! Put the link in the body of the comment. Otherwise it will not be clear whether you are entering the contest or just leaving a regular comment.

Be sure to use a valid email address when leaving your comment — one that you check often! I’ll be using the email address left in the comment to contact the winner.

One entry per person. You can work in a team, if you like, but then it’s one entry per team. And you’ll have to figure out which one of your team members is responsible for winning the laptop bundle.

I reserve the right to delete or disqualify an entry for any reason, including but not limited to copyright violations, multiple submissions, or obscene content. By submitting media into this contest, you give me the right to use your content in upcoming posts on Poorer Than You and other related projects.

Relatives of the site owner (Stephanie) are not allowed to enter. Sorry Mom… I know you really want this bundle, but you can enter the other 24 contests of the Better Together giveaway!

This contest is open to residents around the world and is not restricted to any one location. For areas where customs or taxes would prevent shipment of the bundle, an equivalent credit to the HP online store will be issued. If you have won a bundle in one of the other Better Together giveaways, you are not eligible to enter this one — sorry, no two-fers!

Go go go go! I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with!

Coming Up: “Better Together” Back to School Laptop Giveaway

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It happened last year on my birthday. I alluded to it in last month’s net worth update. Yes, it’s happening: together with HP and Microsoft, I’m giving away a laptop bundle on Poorer Than You this month!

Better Together!As a part of a massive 25-blog giveaway called “Better Together” I’ll be giving away a delicious prize pack that’s designed specifically for college students:

You can learn much more about the two computers in the bundle on Thursday, because in addition to providing a bundle to give away, HP also loaned me a second bundle to review. So check back on Thursday for some in-depth descriptions! (Or subscribe to the RSS feed or you can subscribe by email!)

So when can you enter to win? And how? Well, just like last year, the details of “how” won’t be revealed until my specially assigned giveaway-day. But I can tell you when that will be! Here are all of the sites that will be holding one of these giveaways, and their giveaway dates:

Student Bloggers 12th August
Geek Zone 13th August
Kill Jill Goes to College 14th August
Study Successful 15th August
Gear Live 16th August
CampusGrotto 17th August
Poorer Than You 18th August
Notebooks 19th August
ThePrereq. 20th August
Hack College 21st August
College Times 22nd August
OSNN 23rd August
Green Panda Treehouse 24th August
Building Camelot 25th August
Mocha Dad 26th August
College Candy 27th August
Studenomics 28th August
The 2.0 Life 29th August
Geeks room 30th August
Debt Free Scholar 31st August
One Day One Job 1st September
Daddy Forever 2nd September
Clinton Fitch 3rd September
Zen College Life 4th September
Gear Diary 5th September

So get yourself back here on the 18th and enter to win!

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