My ears perked up the first time I heard Phil on my local K-Love station. Wonderful worship music, a high tenor voice that seems to lift into the clouds, and the lyrics - amazing. I went to I-Tunes and bought the song I heard but you can get it for free, plus 14 more. From your good friends at Jesus Freak Hideout and Phil himself. Cool. 
Cheapskate, skinflint, tightwad -- whatever you want to call us, we hate spending money and love finding a good deal. If we can save a few bucks, we're happy. And if we can get something for nothing, we're in heaven.Even in these days of $400 haircuts and million-dollar starter homes, you can find plenty of things for nothing. We've pulled together a list of 26 of our favorite freebies, and they're not junk. These are valuable goods and services you'd actually want, from free music and movies to legal advice and financial services.
A Georgia company looking to solve America's energy problem has finally teamed up with the federal government, hoping to make millions of barrels of oil every day from virtually anything that grows out of the Earth.
Bell Bio-Energy, Inc. says it has reached an agreement with the U.S. Defense Department to build seven test production plants, mostly on military bases, to quickly turn naturally grown material into fuel.
"What this means is that with the seven pilot plants – the military likes to refer to them as demonstrations – with those being built … it gives us the real-time engineering data that we need to finish the designs for a full-scale production facility," J.C. Bell, the man behind the project, told WND today.
"In 18 months or so, we will start manufacturing oil directly from waste and we will build up to about 500,000 barrels a day within two years. In another six months, we'll reach a million barrels a day."
You've heard of hybrids, electric cars and vehicles that can run on vegetable oil. But of all the contenders in the quest to produce the ultimate fuel-efficient car, this could be the first one to let you say, "fill it up with air." That's the idea behind the compressed air car, which backers say could achieve a fuel economy of 106 miles per gallon.Plenty of skepticism exists, but with many Americans trying to escape sticker shock at the gas pump, the concept is generating buzz.
The technology has been the focus of MDI, a European company founded in 1991 by a French inventor and former race car engineer.
New York-based Zero Pollution Motors is the first firm to obtain a license from MDI to produce the cars in the United States, pledging to deliver the first models in 2010 at a price tag of less than $18,000.
The concept is similar to how a locomotive works, except compressed air -- not steam -- moves the engine's pistons, said Shiva Vencat, vice president of MDI and CEO of Zero Pollution Motors.
Didn’t you know that toothpaste (despite its name) is for so much more than your teeth? It’s truly handy to have on hand (I pity the household - and their teeth - that has no toothpaste at all), because it is quite multi-functional. Here are a few ways you can get your toothpaste working extra hard for you: 
A great band from Canada with a unique sound, you will likely be hearing a lot more from Downhere over the next few months and years. Never turn down the chance to get a free legal download like this one.
What's better than cheap, pre-owned movies delivered to your door? Free ones. And for a very limited time, you can take your pick of hundreds of movies at Blockbuster for the cost of tax. Blockbuster online has a large selection of new and pre-owned DVDs for you to purchase. You don't have to be a member to buy, but you do get a nice discount (5-10%) if you are. With Christmas less than 6 months away, I had been meaning to buy a few pre-owned DVDs to put in the kids' stockings, and with the latest in promo codes, I got them at a very nice price (FREE!)
Here's what you do: They Will be glad to tell you how over at Wisebread
Creative.com offers the refurbished Dell Pocket DJ 5GB Digital Jukebox MP3 Player for $19.99. With $5 for shipping, that's nearly $175 less than what Dell charged for this MP3 player back in 2005. Features include a 4.4-oz. weight, 10-hour battery life, MP3 and WMA support, earbuds, 1.62" blue back-lit display, and USB 2.0 interface. A 90-day warranty is included, although it's unclear who supports it.
So what's the catch? They are E-Books that you download for free. Until Aug. 4th The World eBook Fair is offering the free downloads from some of the worlds top E-Book providers. Load up while they are free, you don't see a deal like this every day.
Imagine being able to convert water into a boundless source of cheap energy. That's what BlackLight Power, a 25-employee firm in Cranbury, N.J., says it can do. The only problem: Most scientists say that company's technology violates the basic laws of physics. Such skepticism doesn't daunt Dr. Randell Mills, a Harvard-trained physician and founder of BlackLight, who recently claimed that he has created a working fuel cell using the world's most pervasive element: the hydrogen found in water.
"This is no longer an academic argument," Mills, 50, insists. "It's proven technology, and we're going to commercialize it as quickly as possible."
For the first time in his company's 19 years of persistent trial and error, Mills says he has a market-ready product: a fuel cell that produces a chemical reaction to alter hydrogen atoms. The fuel cell releases heat that turns water into steam, which drives electric turbines.
The working models in his lab generate 50 kilowatts of electricity - enough to power six or seven houses. But these, Mills says, can be scaled to drive a large, electric power plant. The inventor claims this electricity will cost less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, which compares to a national average of 8.9 cents.
There's a woman who saves every $5 bill she gets, blogs Get Rich Slowly. She's been doing so for three years and has saved $12,000. JD at Get Rich Slowly also shares his wife's personal money saving trick:
For several years, Kris has been rounding every transaction up to the next dollar in her checkbook. If she spends $49.74 at the grocery store, she enters this in her checkbook as $50. If she spends $33.13 on gas, she enters it as $34. As a result, she saves an average of 50 cents every time she performs a transaction. In 2-1/2 years, Kris saved an extra $500 using this method. That's enough to treat herself to something nice.
Learn More tricks at Get Rich Slowly
When it comes to cutting costs, consumers always look at the big stuff. Postponing that vacation. Keeping your car a few more years. Nixing the addition on the house.But it's often the little things that can make an even bigger difference. For instance, Joseph Montanaro, a certified financial planner for USAA Financial Planning Services, says he saved $130 a month just by kicking his daily Dr Pepper habit. That's a savings of $1,560 over a year.
We calculated the savings you might see from making various adjustments over a period of one year, from carpooling to work, to drinking a cheaper cup of coffee, to taking a quicker shower. If you do all the things we suggest here, you could save at least $5,000 over a year's time. That's real money.
So, what lifestyle change can save you the most cash? Read on.
How much can you save over one year if you...
Forget hydrogen. The car of the future has an extension cord and a great big laptop battery. The next evolution of the automobile will be plug-in hybrids that get their juice from a household electrical outlet. They'll start rolling into showrooms within in 18 months. Experts say plug-in hybrids could account for about 20 percent of vehicle sales within a decade -- and half of all sales by 2050.
"It all boils down to the three ways electricity is better than gasoline," says Felix Kramer of Cal Cars, a plug-in advocacy group. "It's cleaner, it's cheaper and it's domestic."
Advocates say plug-in hybrids are the best chance to address global warming and wean the nation from oil. Consumers remain unsure about electric vehicles. Ethanol's a shaky proposition because of the food-for-fuel debate. And it'll be decades before hydrogen is a viable option. That, advocates say, leaves plug-ins as the best option. They'll go up to 40 miles on a charge; but they'll also have a gas engine to keep you going beyond that at 80 to 100 mpg or more.
A shopping list is a useful way to remind yourself what you do and do not need to purchase. But most frugality experts emphasize shopping with a list because it prevents impulse purchases. Impulse purchases wreck grocery budgets. In Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, Paco Underhill writes: Supermarkets are places of high impulse buying for both sexes — fully 60 to 70 percent of purchases there were unplanned, grocery industry studies have shown us.
More than half of all grocery purchases are unplanned! No wonder creating and sticking to a list can bring down grocery costs.
But that’s not the only way to save money at the supermarket. Over the past two years, I’ve published a lot of tips for saving money on your grocery bill. Some of these have been obvious — others less so. All of them can help you save at the supermarket. Here are some of the best:
Sonshine Festival, which takes place July 17-19 in Willmar, MN, kicks off Wednesday night, July 16, with a free concert by Jars of Clay. No tickets are required and everyone is invited. The folks at Sonshine Festival just want to show their appreciation to the community that has hosted their annual Christian music festival for the past 27 years.
The festival then kicks into high gear on Thursday, with a line up that includes artists like Jeremy Camp, Third Day, Newsboys, TobyMac, Pillar, BarlowGirl, Superchick, Thousand Foot Krutch, Kutless, David Crowder Band and Skillet.
For more information about the event, camping, or tickets to the festival visit the Sonshine Festival wesite.
If there's one thing most people know about solar cells, it's that they are too expensive. Now, MIT researchers think they may have found a way to double the performance of solar arrays with cheap dyed glass and some tricks borrowed from fiber optics.
Their so-called solar concentrator could be placed on top of existing solar arrays. It could capture some wavelengths of visible light and guide them to high-voltage solar cells on the edges of the array, while still allowing the infrared light that largely powers current solar systems to pass through.
"If you stick one of these on top of existing solar panels, we think we could nearly double the performance of these systems with minimal added cost," said Marc Baldo, the lead researcher on the work.
The new research, published tomorrow in the journal Science, is another major advance in solar energy, a field that's received renewed interest due to concerns about climate change and rising fossil fuel prices. The new MIT technology marries the science behind two of the most promising ways of harnessing solar energy: light concentrators and thin-film solar cells.
The fairytale weddings that many couples have yearned for are starting to come back down to earth -- leveled by everyday problems like house payments and rising gas and food bills.
He averaged just 88.3 miles per gallon.
Most drivers would take a victory lap if they managed to squeeze that kind of mileage out of increasingly precious gasoline. Even on this, a bad day, Hudgin coaxed 28 mpg more out of his 2000 Honda Insight hybrid than its federal highway mpg rating.
Hudgin's disappointment — he usually averages about 100 mpg this time of year — stems from his pride in being no ordinary driver.
He's a hypermiler, part of a loose-knit legion of commuters who've made racking up seemingly unattainable mpg an art. And a sport.
Hypermilers practice such unorthodox techniques as coasting for blocks with their car's engine turned off, driving far below speed limits on the freeway, pumping up tire pressure far beyond car and tire makers' recommendations and carefully manipulating the gas pedal to avoid fuel-burning excess.
In the 18th century the British parliament offered a £20,000 prize to anyone who figured how to solve the problem of calculating longitude. More recently, Netflix offered a million-dollar prize for improving its movie recommendation software. And now Senator John McCain is suggesting a new, national prize: $300 million for anyone who can develop a better, more efficient car battery. “I further propose we inspire the ingenuity and resolve of the American people by offering a $300 million prize for the development of a battery package that has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars,’’ Mr. McCain said here at California State University, Fresno.
“That’s one dollar, one dollar, for every man, woman and child in the U.S.,’’ he said. “A small price to pay for helping too break the back of our oil dependency, and should deliver a power source at 30 percent of the current costs.’’
He made the proposal as he spoke about improving enforcement of fuel efficiency standards, hastening the conversion of cars to flex-fuel vehicles, and offering tax credits to people who buy zero-emissions cars – stressing issues that are popular in California. (Last week, in Houston, he proposed lifting the moratorium on off-shore drilling for oil, which is considerably less popular here.)
