Buy a $10 gift card at Subway and get a free cookie. By offering this deal, Subway joins the ranks of retailers offering special perks and bonuses to encourage folks to plunk down cash and buy gift cards.

WalletPop readers shared the bonuses they spotted at Barnes & Noble, Outback Steakhouse, Red Robin, Sports Authority and the Cheesecake Factory. Earlier I blogged about gift card bonuses at CVS, the Container Store and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.

Caveats: it's unclear when the Subway promotion ends, but I'm guessing it'll be over after Christmas.

Thanks, Tina!

I don't think I know anyone who isn't on a budget this holiday (and those of you who aren't, feel free to keep that happy news to yourself). For the rest of us playing Santa on a shoestring, I bring tidings of great joy.

Yes, Virginia you can find great toys priced under $20 -- and I'm talking award-winning, hours of fun, thank-you note kind of toys for all ages.

After combing through 2009's lists of award winning toys from toy-testing aficionados including Family Fun Magazine, Parenting Magazine, Dr. Toy, The Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Toy of the Year Awards, iParenting Media Awards, as well as the list of top ten "Toy of the Year Awards" from the American Toy Industry Association, I found far more than 20 toys priced under $20.

So, in the interest of time (which is another thing parents don't have enough of), I used my status as a veteran mother of two to highlight a cool list of toys representing a variety of age ranges, interests and prices (not the old, $19.99 trick every time).

Feast your eyes:

It's no laughing matter for Sinbad: the IRS is seeking to take his home.

The IRS has filed an action in court against the actor/comedian (whose real name is David Adkins) in partial satisfaction of taxes it says he owes.

The IRS has filed tax liens in the amount of $8.15 million in tax liens against Sinbad. The tax obligations range from $157,934 in 2003 to $2,358,563 in 1998. Penalty and interest continue to accrue for all years while the matter remains outstanding.

The Project on Student Debt recently released its Student Debt and the Class of 2008 study and the results are sobering, to say the least.

The average graduate of a four-year college with loans is now leaving with $23,200 in debt, up from $18,650 in 2004.

The state by state numbers are also interesting: the District of Columbia clocked in with the highest average debt load: $29,793. Iowa, Connecticut, New York, and New Hampshire followed.

As a Dad with a daughter in public school, I was more than a little alarmed to read that the meat/bacteria regulations for fast food restaurants are 10 times more strict than the standards set by the USDA for school lunches, according to a report by USA Today.

Underscoring how truly alarming this is requires some history. Back in 1993, Jack in the Box fast food restaurants were responsible for the deaths of several children due to E. coli O157:H7 food poisoning. Four kids died of hemolytic uremic syndrome and 600 residents of Washington state were sickened or hospitalized with bloody diarrhea stemming from bacteria-tainted hamburgers, derived from meat produced by Von Companies of California.

Gift cards are one of the most popular gifts -- especially for those hard-to-shop-for names left on our gift lists. Now charities are getting in on the gift card action. Companies like TisBest, who earlier this month was ranked #1 charity gift card, lets gift card recipients donate their gifts to the charity of their choice.

As a bookend to WalletPop's hard-hitting expose on candy smuggling into movie theaters, we bring you the other end of the picture-show universe: a chain so upscale that $49 bottles of champagne, $19 steak sandwiches and a club-like pampering come on top of a $29 ticket.

The recession has faded to black for a niche of upscale movie goers, according to an article in Monday's Los Angeles Times. Australia-based Gold Class Cinemas opened its fourth luxury movie mini-palace in the United States -- this one in Pasadena, Calif., -- and it's doing brisk business.

When I was a kid, the first Blockbuster video opened near my school in Fort Lauderdale. And I don't mean the first Blockbuster in my neighborhood. I really mean the very first Blockbuster, ever.

The place was a revelation. Just a few years before, only the richest Americans could afford machines that played videotapes, so the appearance of a tidy supermarket of titles, many of which we'd only dreamed about seeing on UHF channels once in the distant past, was practically the definition of luxury. I'll never forget rushing there after school on new release day, or the soothing smell of all those gleaming aisles of new plastic clamshell cases. It was heaven.

There's no place like home for the holidays. Which if you're Stephen King means celebrating the season by the rocky shores of coastal Maine. Makes one wonder what characters he's planning on having over for figgy pudding.

But while many celebrities are busy worrying about taxes and platinum flooring, King's embracing the spirit of giving and opening up his presumably large pocketbook to spending a bit of his fortune on others. A move experts say should make him very happy.

Housing sales up. Housing sales down. Home prices up. Home prices down. Mortgage rates higher. Mortgage rates lower. It's a wonder the entire country isn't suffering from motion sickness by now!

Since the fiscal mess began, we have been "treated" to seemingly non-stop reporting giving us monthly and often daily temperature readings of the nation's economic state. Sometimes we feel reassured. Sometimes we feel like we've been hit over the head with a sledgehammer.

The truth is, no one set of figures does a trend make, and we shouldn't get too up or too down by any one particular set of reports.