If you're looking for ways to cut your expenses, take a look at Money's September cover story, "Cut Your Spending by $500 a Month." I admit to being a little biased here, as I was one of the contributors to the story.

As such, I can tell you that coming up with money-saving tips that actually work is tough. Not all of my ideas made it into the story. And frankly, not all of them really deserved to. Here are some of my ideas that I or or my editor decided were too silly, stupid or trivial to make the cut. Bear in mind that I actually do all these things.

• Water down your shampoo. From personal experience, I can tell you that Pert Plus not only lasts longer but works better when it's watered down a bit. I don't know the scientific principle underlying this discovery, but using this tip can save you literally hundreds of cents a year.
• Stop buying so many shoes. You know who you are. You can only wear one pair at a time, unless you wear them on your hands, too. How many shoes do you need, anyway?
• Buy pet toys in the human toys department. Pet toys can be ridiculously expensive. Instead of buying a couple of tiny balls for your cat to chase for $3.99, buy ping pong balls for a buck. Or just wad up pieces of paper. Cats don't care. They'll get bored with whatever you buy for them within a few minutes anyway. Ungrateful jerks.
• Listen to tapes. Once upon a time, in the age of boomboxes and Walkmen, tapes were the hottest selling music format around. Now that they've been kicked to the curb, first by CDs and then by digital downloads, no one seems to want them anymore — which means you can find perfectly fine tapes for fifty cents or a dollar at any decent thrift store. If you've still got a working tape deck, let your analog freak flag fly. Sure, you can't easily skip tracks, but who needs to skip tracks when you're listening to Slim Whitman's Greatest Hits, like I am right now? Slim Whitman rules!
• Don't get tattoos. They're expensive going on, and even more expensive coming off. If you want to impress that rocker chick at the bar, draw something on your arm with a Sharpie before introducing yourself to her. It doesn't matter if it looks convincing. She's not going to be interested in you anyway.
• Don't buy groceries until you've absolutely run out of everything, and are reduced to eating nothing but pickles for lunch. To be honest, I'm not actually sure this will save you money. It's just how it always seems to happen in my apartment.
• Stay behind the times. Wait until books come out in paperback and until movies come out on DVD. Don't buy the latest electronic gizmos; see if you can mooch gently used digital cameras and not-all-that-lightweight laptops from your friends and relatives when they upgrade to the latest models. Don't bother changing your hair or clothing styles until people giggle and point at you whenever you leave the house. Speaking of which …
• Never leave the house. Doing stuff outside the house tends to cost money, so avoid the outside world whenever possible.

Hey, at least none of my tips are quite as stupid as those in this list from Cracked.com. Got your own bad good good bad ideas? Leave a comment and let the rest of us learn about it.

This fall, your children can watch Warren Buffett, America's greatest investor, imparting his wisdom online from AOL. But the Oracle of Omaha might look a little different that you remember him — he'll be appearing as a cartoon.

The online animated series, called "Secret Millionaire's Club," will feature Buffett mentoring a group of children as they try to turn the Omaha Candy Company into a successful business. In an interview with CNNMoney.com's Poppy Harlow, Buffett talked about how everyone's financial habits are learned early, and how he wanted to teach kids good habits early. "It's just as easy to pick up good habits as bad habits, but you have to be exposed to them," said Buffett. "And what better way than to tell them through stories that entertain them at the same time?"

He has enough nuggets from his letters and speeches to fill at least ten episodes: "Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction." "Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful." "Our favorite holding period is forever." "When investing, pessimism is your friend, euphoria the enemy.

You can watch a sneak peek of the AOL program online. (AOL is majority-owned by Money's parent, Time Warner.)

While Buffett definitely is sending the right message, the title of the series, unfortunately, sends the wrong one. "Secret Millionaire's Club" sounds as greed-driven as a sequel to "Liar's Poker." Selling success as a exclusive club conjures up memories of bankers speaking in an arcane language of credit-default swaps and mortgage-backed securities that the rest of us didn't understand. Why does Buffett's approach to good money habits have to be presented as a secret? Although Buffett is a master at investing, he's the antithesis of the Wall Street Master of the Universe with a secret formula — you know, the kind that blows up the economy in the end.

Buffett's always been noted as a champion of philanthropy, and I'm curious to see how much that aspect of his life will be present in the show. (His $37 billion donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is still thought to be the largest charitable contribution ever.) For those who do make it to the top, he has this advice: "If you're in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent."

Wouldn't it be more fitting with Mr. Buffett's philosophy and the current needs of this country if the show were named "The Not-Secret Long-Term, Patient, Slow-But-Steady-Growing, Don't-Buy-It-Unless-You-Can-Afford-It, Common-Sense Club?"

Doesn't really have the same ring to it, does it?

Has a big company done you wrong? Trying to get it to address your problem isn't always easy. Sure, you can email a complaint to the customer service department, or you can beg for mercy over the phone. But that doesn't mean you'll get the results you want.

Well, one disgruntled United Airlines customer found a creative way to get the company's attention.

When Canadian musician Dave Carroll was flying from Halifax to Nebraska on March 31, 2008, he changed planes at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. There, another passenger noticed some rough handling of luggage out on the tarmac, exclaiming, "My God, they're throwing guitars out there." Carroll says he looked out the window to witness baggage handlers throwing a bass guitar. And when he got to Omaha, he discovered that, sure enough, his $3,500 Taylor guitar was "severely damaged." It would cost him $1,200 to get it repaired.

Carroll filed a complaint with United and spent the next nine months haggling with United reps for compensation, to no avail. Exasperated, Carroll "promised the last person to finally say no to compensation … that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world," he wrote on his web page.

Carroll unveiled the first of those videos this week. "United Breaks Guitars" is a catchy, twangy ditty about the musician's experience, and with more than 520,000 views in just a few days, it's become a viral video success.

So much, in fact, that United Airlines itself is taking note. A United spokeswoman told the Chicago Tribune: "This struck a chord with us. We are in conversation with one another to make what happened right." The company has gone so far as to praise Carroll and wants to use the video "to help change its culture." Meanwhile, Carroll is working on the next two songs and videos.

Sometimes drastic situations call for drastic measures. How have you gotten your complaint noticed by a company that won't recognize its wrongs?

On Thursday morning, Warren Buffett said that a second stimulus package to help the economy might be called for. I'm not going to go into all the pros and cons of a second stimulus (you can read all about that here). But the metaphor that he used to break down the idea on Good Morning America was a little…how should we say it…odd. Buffett said, "Our first stimulus bill, it seemed to me, was sort of like taking half a tablet of Viagra and having also a bunch of candy mixed in as everybody was putting it into their own constituencies. It doesn’t have quite the wallop." (Credit to The Wall Street Journal's MarketBeat blog for picking this up.)

Viva Buffett!

In addition to Buffett's Viagra analogy, President Obama has fumbled over the definition of price/earnings ratios (fast-forward to about 1:50 into this clip):

And Treasury Secretary Geithner dumbed down his response to questions about the safety of the U.S. dollar and Treasury investments so much, that his audience of Chinese students broke out laughing:

I don't envy these guys. Trying to boil down an extremely complicated situation into a TV news bite is impossible. But I wonder what the Cialis folks think about Viagra getting all the attention?

Three signs of our hard times, in order of ascending weirdness:

1) Dollar stores are doing top dollar business. In Newsweek, Daniel Gross looks at buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts' one big success (amidst a bevy of big failures) over the past year: its $7.3 billion investment in Dollar General, up a smart 30.8 percent since KKR purchased the bargain-bin company in July 2007. (Other dollar store chains are also doing well, but not quite as well as this.) Why? Gross explains: "Rather than simply pile up cheap bottles of detergents and ultra-cheap clothes — truth be told, only about 30 percent of the items it stocks retail for less than a buck — Dollar General … tried to remodel the bargain basement into a condensed version of Wal-Mart—tightly run, more convenient, less overwhelming." It doesn't hurt that Dollar Stores are still meccas for ironic hipsters who love displaying their latest finds — or even reworking dollar store junk into marginally less-junky crafts. (See here and here.)

2) Coffee, tea, or free? Struggling British Airways is asking its employees to work up to a month for nothing. As CNN reports, "In an e-mail to all its staff, the airline offered workers between one and four weeks of unpaid leave — but with the option to work during this period." A month!? I'm not sure even Office Space's evil boss Bill Lumbergh would have had the chutzpah to ask for that.

3) Rental home hostages. CNN's Ed Lavandera reports on a strange and disturbing result of the housing bust: In Phoenix, Arizona, smugglers of illegal immigrants frequently hold these immigrants hostage until they agree to pay far more than they had originally agreed to to be ferried across the border. Making the kidnappers' jobs much easier: the glut of rental houses on the market because their owners can't sell them. There were an estimated 370 kidnappings in Phoenix last year, Lavandera reports, which means hundreds of hostages in some 80 "drop houses," many in middle-class neighborhoods. This one's worth watching.

Are you drooling over the new iPhone 3G S, anxious to get your hands on Apple's latest creation this Friday? If you plunk your money down for the shiny new toy, maybe you need to take another look at your finances.

At least that's what suggested by the blogger who runs Free From Broke, which he bills as "A Personal Finance Blog for Regular Folks." In a recent post, FFB collected his observations on 25 traits of the "not-so-well-to-do." I had a laugh going through his list. He argues that, individually, the traits aren't bad per se, but if you spot too many in some people, there's a good chance they're blowing through cash they might not even have. And number 7 on his list is always buying the latest cell phone.

Some others:

• Subscribing to too many premium cable channels ("When you mention that it’s expensive they insist that it’s cheaper because of a package.")
• Always buying the latest gadgets and newest computers ("[They] go through computers like my two year old goes through diapers!")
• Not having an online savings account ("…they don’t trust online banking, or so they claim. Yet they seem to be able to use their computers to shop online without trust issues, hmm.")
• Eating out often and expensively ("It’s great going out with these people because they are quick to pick up the tab and/or leave a ridiculous tip.")

He makes some sense to me. The temptation to buy every latest technology is strong, but giving into it ofen produces a short-lived high — and only leaves you wanting more. And unless you've got a healthy disposable income, keeping up is not easy on the wallet. Some of his other assessments seem like common sense (buying holiday gifs you can't afford is never going to be a financially sound idea), while others discourage indulgences (hey, I like my HBO).

What do you think? Is FFB's list right on, or does it just boil down to the most basic rule: Don't spend what you don't have? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

There’s no doubt that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is a busy man these days. But he’s not too busy to get his own coffee.

Tim buys joe.

At 8:30 a.m. Monday — a half hour before he was scheduled to speak at the Time Warner Economic Summit — Geithner pulled up in a dark blue SUV around the corner from the Time Warner Center in midtown Manhattan. From inside a Starbucks across the way, I watched Geithner pop out of the back seat and walk briskly across 60th Street into the Starbucks, followed by two men (presumably his security detail). The line was at least ten people deep. But Geithner stood by himself in the queue with everyone else and focused on his BlackBerry until it was his turn to order and pay. If anyone recognized the Treasury Secretary, they didn’t make a fuss.

I wasn’t nosy enough to find out what Geithner likes for his morning caffeine fix, but when he showed up to be interviewed by Time magazine’s managing editor, Richard Stengel, Geithner was still clutching his cup o’ joe. The caffeine must have helped Geithner stay sharp as Stengel tried to get him to reveal details of the financial market reorganization plan that President Obama is unveiling on Wednesday. Saying he didn’t want to pre-empt the President’s speech on Wednesday or his own testimony before Congress on Thursday, Geithner wouldn’t discuss any details of the proposed changes, even though reports are already leaking out about reforms the administration would like to make.

But Geithner did say that the reorganization will focus on the core issues that lead to the financial markets meltdown, namely lack of oversight and basic gaps in consumer protections. When Stengel asked how the changes might better protect consumers, Geithner likened the financial market changes to the kind of reforms we saw a few weeks ago when Congress passed a major credit card bill eliminating some of the most egregious practices of card issuers. “Consumer credit was the focus of lots of bad practices — not just poor underwriting and poor disclosure but a fair amount of predatory behavior," said Geithner, "and we want to change that.”  Whether or not you believe that Geithner and the Obama administration's plans will really help consumers, it's heartening to hear it from a Treasury chief down-to-earth enough to get his own coffee.

- Donna Rosato

If the economic meltdown has forced you into a budget-friendly staycation this summer, you can treat yourself to some cheap and potentially cathartic entertainment. For a mere $5.95, just buy a deck of Financial Crisis Most Wanted Playing Cards.

Not to be outdone by the Iraqi most-wanted deck of cards from a few years ago, budding entrepreneur Jason Witt of San Ramon, Calif. came up with 52 faces of the financial crisis. The deck features Wall Street hot shots, financial felons (convicted or at least alleged), ineffectual regulators and other poster boys of the times. (And we do mean boys, since 51 of 52 cards picture men.) In the Iraqi version, the Ace of Spades was reserved for Saddam Hussein; in the crisis deck, that dishonor goes to Bernard Madoff, the Ponzi-schemer extraordinaire.

There is no shortage of intriguing “winning” hands. Here's a memorable full house:

–King of Spades: Alan Greenspan (former Federal Reserve chairman)
–King of Hearts: Angelo Mozilo (former CEO, Countrywide Financial, current defendant in civil fraud case for insider trading)
–King of Clubs: Richard Fuld (former CEO, Lehman Brothers)
–Ace of Diamonds: Ben Bernanke (current Federal Reserve Chairman)
–Ace of Clubs: Jim Cramer (CNBC stock jock)

The lone woman in the mix is FDIC chairwoman Sheila Bair. Witt says he wanted to include banking analyst Meredith Whitney, who has been credited as one of the few voices to sound the alarm bell early, but he was unable to snag permission.

Jokers are reserved for educational purposes. One features a 10-year timeline of key events, the other lists acronyms of the time, such as CDO and TARP.

What’s missing are stand-ins for some other key players, including the appraisers happy to pump hot air into the already dangerous bubble, and yes, the homeowners who fell for it all and took on mortgages they never really could afford. Who would you nominate for your own deck of shame?

–Carla Fried