Number 44 The Economy - eeep!

I really like whatbills.com. It has a tab for upcoming bills, adding a new bill and payment history. I like this in it's simplicity. I think sending reminders via email when a bill is coming due is helpful as I have a habit of forgetting certain bills that don't get paid each month, like the water bill.
ClearCheckbook.com would be a great place to keep and view your financial status at any time, but what I don't have time for is the record keeping. I want something that will interface with my banks and when I use my check card, if some place like ClearCheckbook.com would get that information and insert it into the proper fields, like where I spent my money, how much I spent there..I would be more interested in using it. I don't know if I would be able to import my information from my bank. I guess I should sign up for this and see what it lets me do. I am not real afraid of security issues, but having all my banking information at this site kind of scares me. Should it? Plus I think this site is just more than I really need.
I have a loan at a bank where I also have checking and saving. I can not pay this loan payment online, I have to write a check every month. I can do the automatic withdrawal, but I usually pay more than the amount due, so that wouldn't help me any. This is not a small bank either, why are they not 2.0?
I do pay a lot of my bills online with MyCheckFree which is a great service and they are free. You sign up with your account numbers of your bills and they have the electronic bill sent to them. It will show you when a bill comes in and you can view the bill, pay the bill, set up payments.. but they only service some places, not everywhere. They do not send out reminders either. I pay quite a few of my bills through this service. And they have good records of what you have paid and when.
I looked around at Wise Bread and didn't see much there to make me want to RSS it. To me a lot of this stuff is just common sense, Victory Gardens, Ride Sharing.. don't we all know how to save money in these times? Maybe not, I guess with my mom a product of the depression I grew up hearing about things like this. Maybe she was just trying to prepare me for these times as she always said they could happen again.
Craigslist is a good place to sell things you don't need anymore. I have some bikes I am going to put on the list in a few weeks. And if you have something you just want to give away free, that is the place to post it. My daughter did that with some things she didn't need anymore and put them in her driveway. A few hours later it was all gone. People must really watch that list for things that are give aways. I was amazed at how fast it went.
I don't think my neighbors would like me raising chickens, but if I lived out of the city I would probably give it a try. And I would love to have a garden again but my yard is mostly shade in the summer and I don't want to cut down any of my trees that we have planted. I do think having a garden is a great way to save money on vegetables and they always taste so much better. I will plant a few things in the sunny areas of my yard along with my flowers.
There are many options for us to save money. It is time for us to get out of the throw away mentality and start thinking about reuse, repair and recycle. I heard on the news a while ago that these new LCD and Plasma TV's, when they break it is cheaper to go get a new one than to fix the old one. Now, what is that telling you about our society and how, and where things are made?