Free one day weekend rental at Hertz, just pay taxes

Heres an interesting deal from Hertz rental cars. They are offering a FREE weekend one day car rental and all you have to do is pay the taxes. Theres no minimum days and its unlimited miles. The offer isn't available in all locations and there are terms and conditions. Weekend is pickup Noon Thursday through Noon Sunday. I checked it out for a Hertz location near me and it seemed to work. It showed the rate as $0 for a 1 day rental. It doesn't seem to apply to large vehicles like trucks or SUVs. I think you also have to pickup the rental on a Weekend day. So if you pickup on Monday through Wednesday then it doesn't accept the discount code.

Use the link or go to Hertz and enter Promotional coupon # 127595.

This is a great deal if you want a car for 1 weekend day. Or its a good way to get 1 day off of a multi-day weekend rental.

I tried it at Vegas and heres the result:

(I didn't actually make a reservation, but was just testing it out to see if it would work. I assume that theres no other catches involved.

I heard about this one at Fatwallet.

Best of Blog posts for the week January 2nd

My Money Blog found an offer for Free Retirement For Dummies Book
but you have to be 50+ and sign up for Humana's 'REAL community' whatever that is.

Jim at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity has a guide on How to Value Your Clothing Donation
Also at Blueprint is his list of Best Personal Finance Books for Your Library

Financial goals for 2009

Here are my primary financial goals for 2009:

Control our spending.
Maximize contributions to Roth IRAs : $5,000 x 2
Maximize Health Savings Account : $5,900
Pay down the home mortgage. : $20,000

All together this amounts to over $30,000 in savings and retirement investments. Keep in mind that this is a goal and I may fall short or if all goes well I might exceed it.

Looking at each item a little more specifically:

Control our spending - Without controlling our expenses we won't have money left to spend. So savings starts with keeping our spending down. I like to continuously look for ways to save money and reduce costs. Controlling our spending will be an ongoing effort throughout 2009 and after.

Maximize Roth IRA's - My wife and I will both put the maximum amount into our Roth IRA accounts. This is one of our basic retirement investments along with our investment real estate. With both accounts maximized at $5,000 that would be a total of $10,000.

Maximize HSA - I've decided to maximize our HSA contribution in order to save this money for future medical expenses and cut our current tax liability. For a married couple the maximum you can put in is $5,900 for 2009. We've decided to cap that contribution.

Pay Down the Home Mortgage - Our final major financial goal for the year is to pay down our home mortgage. We'll do this in two ways. First I have an additional payment made towards our principal with each monthly mortgage payment. This is about half of the extra amount that we plan to pay towards our mortgage. Above the extra principal payments we will also have a one time bulk payment which I'll likely make in the Spring. I hope to have about $20,000 extra payments towards our home mortgage in 2009.

Interest reduction as an alternative to refinancing

With mortgage interest rates dropping to very low levels, now is a great time to look into refinancing. As a general rule of thumb, if you can get a 1% drop in your interest rate and you expect to be in the home for at least a few years then refinancing may be a good idea. But what if you can't get 1% drop or you're not sure if you'll be in the home that long? An alternative to refinancing that you might want to consider is to simply ask your current lender for a lower rate.

Its usually in the lenders best interest to keep your business rather than lose you to a refinancing with their competition. And if they simply agree to drop your rate then it can save on closing costs and appraisals.

I myself got a lower rate from Wells Fargo years ago when mortgage rates were dropping significantly. In fact Wells Fargo offered the drop in interest free of charge without me having to do anything really besides resign.

My Money Blog recounts how they got their lender to drop their rate by 0.5% for $500 fee without a refinance.