The plant nurseries that were jammed in the spring with shoppers this spring eager to turn over the newly-thawed soil, are now quiet, and few owners want to go into winter with a stock of landscaping plants vulnerable to freeze and disease. This makes September, October and even Novemer months to watch for some great deals on trees, shrubs and ground cover, often more than 50% off.

In mostly zones of the U.S., fall is a great time to plant new landscaping. The threat of parching heat is past and a deep, prolonged freeze still a couple of months away. Most plants will respond well if planted in the proper soil, with some compost or other nutrients and adequate water. The slow cool down of fall will allow them to slip into dormancy and return in the spring ready to add color and interest to your yard and garden.

Be sure to check the latest revision of the USDA Hardiness Zone Map for what plants will thrive in your area, and learn to recognize a promising tree or bush from one on life support. If you're not confident, stick to shopping at reputable nurseries rather than mass merchandisers.

While feeding the family must take precedence in any household, a home does not run on bread alone. Sometimes the phone cord gets crackly or you blow a fuse. Prices on some of these things can be absolutely shocking, so I headed to the dollar store, Home Depot and The Source to compare prices. Please compare prices in your area.

• Whether you want a night light with an auto sensor or an on/off switch, Dollarama has Sunbeam night lights for a buck each. At Home Depot, the exact same style of sensor night light by Philips cost $4.99.
  
• Fuses cost $2.49 for two at Home Depot and $1 each at the dollar store, so you save almost 50 cents on the cost of two fuses.

When I was a young adult I couldn't wait to leave home and get out on my own. It really wasn't that hard to do -- I made good money as a waitress and cheap places were plentiful. When I went to nursing school in Colorado Springs, tuition was $700 a semester including books and I could make enough in the summer to pay for school. I lived in a nice cabin for $60 a month that included heat and cable. Boy, are those days gone.

College graduates now face thousands of dollars of debt as they pick up their diplomas. Two-thirds (65.7%) of 4-year undergraduate students graduate with an average student loan debt of $19,237. Graduate and professional students borrow even more, with the additional debt for a graduate degree ranging from $27,000 to $114,000. Many graduates see little choice to get out of debt except move back with the folks.

These boomerangers are everywhere. In 2007, 14.5 million children age 18-24 lived at home, up from 6.4 million in 1960, according to U.S. Census figures. Moving back home has become the new normal. So many kids are doing so that there is no longer a stigma.

Hurricane Fay is just the latest in a long string of natural disasters that have wrecked havoc on people's lives over the last few months. Hurricanes, devastating California wildfires, terrible flooding in the mid-West--we've all gotten a good reminder that natural disasters can strike anywhere, anytime.

Having lived through two hurricanes ourselves, we know good preparation is critical. But beyond your standard stockpile of food, flashlights and other emergency items, we want to help you be prepared for the financial side of a disaster.

We hope you never need this information, but it will be invaluable if you ever get that knock on your door that it's time to evacuate or find yourself dealing with the aftermath of a disaster. Let's look at the critical documents you must have ready in case of an emergency.

# 1 Keep Your Financial Documents Safe

For all important documents, it's critical that you keep them in a safe, secure and easily reachable location. We recommend you keep one copy in your home in a watertight container in a secure spot. If you have a fire-proof or built-in safe, that's ideal. Keep these documents all together in a small enough container that you can grab and take with you in case of an evacuation.

It's also a good idea to keep a second set of these documents in a safe-deposit box. That way, you are covered if the copy in your home is destroyed. But can also get to them if for some reason you can't access your safe deposit box (for example, if your bank is damaged and is closed in the days following a disaster).

Foreclosures aren't necessarily a bad thing. If a bank is willing to sell a house to some one like you for less than what the previous owner paid, the bank got what it wanted and you just got a great deal. It's only in areas of the country where foreclosed homes are piling up like dirty socks, with no buyers in sight, that you have rising crime, revenue dropping for the local governments, and the value of the homes dropping like a stone.

You've heard over and over about where the foreclosures are, but BusinessWeek took a look at where the foreclosures are getting bought up. While California and Nevada top the list, states like Connecticut and Massachusetts show that smart buyers are snapping up the deals in good neighborhoods. And even in places like Southern Florida, things will likely turn around in a year or two when all the excess inventory gets sold off at a discount.

If you are interested in foreclosure properties, but don't know where to start, check out the re-designed foreclosure page at AOL Real Estate. There's information on foreclosure laws, short sales and the foreclosure process.

Brett Widness is an editor with AOL's Real Estate channel and a licensed agent in Virginia.

When you cook on a stovetop, you are not just using electricity to heat your food, you're also heating up the room, which causes your air conditioner to kick in and fight harder against the rising temperature. You might start to notice a jump on your utility bill every time you steam vegetables for dinner.

Solar energy is free, widely available, and effective at cooking many of the foods you currently prepare on your stovetop. Cooking may take a little bit longer than with a traditional stovetop, but not so much that it will add significant time to your meal plans.

Ready-to-use solar ovens are available for $50-$300 online. These devices collapse down for easy storage and transportation, and are great for camping as well as use in the home. If that seems like a steep price tag, it's not really very difficult to build your own solar cooker using cheap materials you already have in your home. This might also be a nice way to try it out before committing to a big purchase. Find building instructions for a variety of solar ovens here.

Every day, WalletPop will be bringing you information about a fantastic freebie. Like what you see? Check back tomorrow for more!

Home improvement superstore Lowes is offering free subscriptions to its magazine Creative Ideas, along with memberships in Lowe's Woodworkers and Lowe's Garden Club.

Of course the magazines and newsletters have a catalog vibe to them, but it's worth checking out if you're the do it yourself type. Click here to sign up.

Hot, huh? So you probably aren't thinking about winterizing your home, but August is a great time. While the weather is good and before the crazy-busy fall season strikes, taking some time to button up your household can save you big this winter (note: gas and electric prices are going up, up, up).

Here are a few of our suggestions to prepare for the season of cold and ice:

Furnace tuneup - Money spent on furnace maintenance can be recouped quickly in fuel savings. Make sure the filters are changed, and the humidifier is working. If your furnace exhausts into the chimney, check that too. In fact, check it anyway, to make sure it's not serving as a condo for a family of homeless critters.

Drainage - Take advantage of the next downpour to check your gutters and downspouts for leaks that could lead to ice build-up in the winter. Also check the soil level around your foundation for any low spots that might cause water to pool against the house rather than drain away, and fill those in. Trim back hedges, ivy, etc. and rake dead plant material from around the foundation to allow it to dry between rains. Don't forget to clean gutters in the fall; you did clean them last fall, right? If not...

About a week ago, I wrote a post about the Styrofoam homes that are currently being manufactured by the International Dome House Company. Durable, whimsical, and wonderfully insulated, the bubble-shaped buildings have unbeatable energy efficiency, can be easily constructed in about a week, and can be adapted for multiple uses. On the other hand, they are basically huge foam hemispheres, which might make them less than attractive for anybody who isn't a Smurf or a hobbit.

With that in mind, anybody interested in building a reasonably-priced, energy-efficient home might want to check out KitHAUS. Starting at $29,500 for a 117-square foot module, KitHAUSes are designed to be attached to each other to form larger houses, offices, and getaways. Constructed of double-pane glass and aluminum frames, they can be assembled in a few days and come pre-wired for electricity. Although neither as energy-efficient nor as whimsical as their Japanese Styrofoam counterparts, the KitHAUS modules fit much more easily into the traditional Western concept of a home. Better yet, since they don't need heavy building equipment and can be easily carried, they fit very comfortably into places where a traditional home would fear to tread!

Bruce Watson is a freelance writer, blogger, and all-around cheapskate. Although he loves the KitHAUS design, the idea of living in a glass house just makes him want to throw stones.

New York City's new program to pay students for passing Advanced Placement tests just got its first report card, and the results were nothing to brag about. The privately funded program by Rewarding Achievement (REACH) is one of many around the country that try to incentivize students to do well on tests, show up or behave. The New York City students at 31 high schools got $960,000 this year, according to the New York Times. More kids took the test, fewer passed. (The test is graded on a scale of one to five, with three and above passing.)

• Number of students taking an AP test: UP 4,275 to 4,620


• Number of tests passed: DOWN 1,481 to 1,476


• Number of tests scored 5 (the highest): 184 to 207


• This year's pay for scores: 3:$500 4:$750 5:$1,000


• Next year's projected payouts: 3: $250 4: $500 5: 1,000

Obviously the program didn't get the improvement in scores it was hoping to inspire, but it points out that it started started after kids had already signed up for AP classes. That does seem like a huge handicap. Fellow Walletpopper Bruce Watson made some compelling arguments in favor of these programs last month.

There is a mouse in our house.

Or at least there was this morning, and for all I know, there's a ring of mice in the floorboards and behind the walls of our house, sleeping on beds made out of matchboxes and sitting on spools of thread for chairs. We discovered that we may have a problem over the weekend, when I was putting some of our daughters clothes away, and I opened up a sock drawer.

Suddenly, I'm staring at a mouse, staring at me. Then he darted deeper into the drawer, at which point I slammed it shut and, if we're going to be honest, I started shouting for my wife. No, it's not what you think. I didn't need my wife to protect me from a mouse. Well, maybe I do. But we also, thanks to my wife's propensity for finding stray animals, have four cats, along with two dogs, and I figured if a mouse was somewhere trapped in my four-year-old's dresser, we were going to make this a family affair.

PETA can drop its plans to write mean letters to me, however; we didn't kill the mouse.

You can spend a lot of money keeping the bathroom stocked with essentials. But if you don't need to have a name brand, you just may find that the personal care aisle at the dollar store has many quality products that will do the job just as well. Again, please check prices in your area.

1. Band-Aids. For years I tried different store brands in an effort to save money. The individual strips were hard to open and the plastic was of such a poor quality that it would tear. I had all but given up when I discovered Medi-Care at my local dollar store. They are sterile, open easily and stay put. My store has them in packages of 60 regular or clear, five large size and children's cartoon designs. Johnston and Johnston bandages cost $3.27 for a package of 40 or a package of 10 large. The larger, patch type band-aids are 20 cents each at the dollar store. The brand-name ones, at the price I saw, would be about 33 cents each. The off-brands won't "cling in soapy suds" but under normal circumstances, they do the job very nicely, thank-you.

2. Purell hand sanitizer cost $4.87 for 237 ml bottle with a pump. The dollar store brand comes in a 236 ml. pump bottle for $3.87 less.

The pool industry is a'hurtin. Not a lot of new home building going on these days, which means nobody is putting in swimming pools anymore. And now, the individual pool man is feeling the pain, too. At least that's what an article in the Los Angeles Times says.

Pool men, those guys who drive around with pick-up trucks full of Chlorine and sweeper poles, are having to raise their prices to keep up with the increased cost of gasoline. Southern California swimming pool owners are increasingly responding by firing them...and maintaining their pools themselves.

A smart move? Maybe. But how much is your time worth?

Today your house burned down, or was flattened by a hurricane or a flood. How will you replace the many elements that made up your household, from beds and linens to video games and bicycles? A good house inventory is a great tool to have in the event of such a disaster.

One of the most convenient, free helpers I've found to aid in organizing such information is the program Know Your Stuff, which you can download free from the Insurance Information Institute. The program, which runs on PCs and Macs, coordinates your home inventory information through a set of helpful screens. Adding photos of items and receipts is a snap, as well, and checklists will help you ferret out those overlooked items that can strain your budget if you have to replace them out of your own pocket.

A paid add-on option worth considering is Vault24, which for $15 a year allows you to upload and store your inventory on its server in Switzerland. All too often, homeowners who face such disasters realize they have stored their insurance info at home, now buried in the rubble.

As you can imagine, a good inventory not only will help you get fully compensated to the limits of your policy by your insurance company; it can also speed your claim.

When people suffer financially, their animals face hardship, too. At the beginning of the year the Humane Society warned about about shelters being overwhelmed. Dogs and cats were losing their families when those families lost their homes. Now we're hearing about all kind of animals suffering in the financial downturn. Basically any animal that depends on humans is a little bit less secure.

Dogs and Cats
Shelters around the country report a surge of animals surrendered. Some have surely been forced into the situation, but lots of animals seem to be cast out as if they were impractical luxury goods. In Los Angeles, an 11-year-old shepherd was left scared in the shelter; the Animal Shelter of Sterling, MA, tells the Worcester Telegram that they haven't seen this many surrendered animals in 15 years; dogs in Dallas are being dumped on the side of the road. And, as I wrote about earlier, some people cruelly abandoned their pets in the house as a way to inflict suffering on the bank -- never mind what it did to the animal.