SavingsBonds.gov - Buy Series I savings bonds online
HSH.com - FREE mortgage calculator
Pingo.com- Cheap international calling
Tel3Advantage.com - Cheap international calling
FDIC.gov - Confirma that your bank deposits are insured
Ed.gov - The U.S. Department of Education
FinAid.org - More education financial aid info
FastWeb.com- Search for scholarships online

A lot of savers with idle cash are griping about the low rates on savings accounts and CDs from banks. Well, Clark wants to offer a possible solution. It's been a while since he's talked about Series I savings bonds, which were a fantastic deal in the 1990s up to about 2001. They're a great deal once again if you buy them before the end of April. Over the next 6 months, you'll get a return of 4.28% APY. Beginning in October, the rate will bump up to 6.06% for the following 6 months. That's a very competitive rate.

Series I bonds are an unnecessarily complicated product. The "I" stands for inflation, and they're like the cousins of the original savings bonds. I bonds offers a fixed rate of interest for as long as you own them, plus a floating rate based on the rate of inflation. You can own I bonds for a minimum of 1 year and a maximum of 30 years.

I bonds give you the opportunity to benefit from what's harming you. As high inflation erodes the value of your savings, I bonds give you the rate of inflation and a guaranteed return. That guaranteed return is puny, but earning anything about the rate of inflation on something that's 100% safe is great.

You can buy I bonds online from the U.S. Treasury at SavingsBonds.gov for as little as $25 or in-person from some banks and credit unions for a minimum of $50. The maximum amount you can buy is $5K per Social Security number. Be sure to pick them up now before the rates reset on May 1. You should plan on holding I bonds a minimum of 18 months until October 2009. If you surrender them before 5 years, you'll forfeit the last 90 days interest. So you don't want to cash them in a year from now and forfeit the 6.06%. The trick is to bail out when rates are bottoming out.

Criminals after trying to reach your wallet through your phone bill again. 3rd party aggregators have been posting bogus collect call charges to phone bills issued by the monopolies AT&T, Verizon and Qwest. First, a little background: Let's say Clark's Collect Calling Phone Company decides to charge $5/min for a collect call made from a pay phone. His goal is to bill that charge to the recipient of the call. But first he has to find a billing company that -- for a cut of the action -- will take that charge and then go to a monopoly phone company and get it on the customer's phone bill. The monopoly, of course, also gets a cut for its role in the transaction. As bad as that sounds, at least it's a legitimate business model.

But the rotten thing is that some 3rd party aggregators have been issuing charges for calls that never took place. The FCC rightfully should have put a stop to this, but they've been sitting on their hands doing nothing about these fraudulent activities. So the FTC had to step in and fine the 3rd party aggregators. One company managed to steal $35 million from people with phony charges!

The real message here is that you've got to vet your phone bill page by page every month looking for bogus charges. Businesses are a major target because their phone bills can be pages and pages long. Shame on AT&T, Verizon and Qwest for aiding and abetting the criminals. The cop on the beat is asleep, so it's up to you. Call up your phone company and get a credit if you're stuck with a phony charge.

There's a lot of tumult in the student loan market right now. Because of fallout from mortgages, many educational lenders are not able to borrow money to service their customers. One lender recently went bust and left students stranded high and dry with their tuition checks bouncing. Other lenders are not even making loans for kids going to college this fall. While this is a problem, it's not the severe crisis you might imagine. The U.S. Department of Education is required to step in and pick up the slack with loans.

Meanwhile, 8 of the top 10 lenders are no longer doing consolidation loans. Yet there's a great opportunity here for those who haven't yet consolidated their loans. Wait until after July 1 and you can fix your rate at 3.25%. That's tremendous.

Just know that trying to secure a loan for next fall will be like going through a funnel. Clark's advice is to start early. Take care not to borrow too much. Doing so can create a back-breaking financial burden in your 20s. Clark advises students to do college on a 3-year or 6-year plan. With the former, you take summer classes and eliminate 1 year of living expenses. With the latter, you work nearly full time and go to college part time. You also pick up great work experience and defray the cost of your loans along the way.

If you've traveled on a full-fare airline recently, you know that you have about a one-third chance of flying what Clark calls a wind-up toy propeller plane. For many years, these smaller planes were routinely overbooked because the airlines weren't required to compensate passengers who got bumped. Now that's changing. The compensation for being bumped will apply to any flight that has more than 29 passengers. You can get a maximum of $800 in compensation, however the exact dollar amount with be based on the actual fare you paid.