Thanks to our users, our community has experienced an immense growth in the past months. Numerous new users joined, a lot of items were offered and many services were swapped. To thank everybody we are announcing a sweepstakes starting on September 1^st 2010 to give you the chance to win a $50 AMAZON Gift Certificate.

It only takes a few seconds to participate:

- retweet the following message on TWITTER:

“Win a free Apple iPod on #Barterquest. Find Information on http://tinyurl.com/29n44jp“

or

– Become a fan of BarterQuest on FACEBOOK and post on our wall what you like about BarterQuest or bartering in general.

or

– Register on BarterQuest and invite your friends.

By tweeting on Twitter AND posting on Facebook AND inviting friends you increase your chances to win. Do your best and have fun!

The winner will be announced on October 11^th, 2010.

In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has. –Proverbs 21:20

Saving money is not a matter of math. You will not save money when you get that next raise. You will not save money when that car is paid off. You will not save money when the kids are grown. You will only save money when it becomes an emotional priority.

We all know we need to save, but most people don’t save like they know they need to save. Why? Because they have competing goals. The goal to save isn’t a high enough priority to delay that purchase of the pizza, DVD player, new computer, or china cabinet. So we purchase, buy, consume all our dollars away or, worse yet, go into debt to buy these things. That debt means monthly payments that control our paychecks and make us say things like, “We just don’t make enough to save any money!” Wrong, wrong, wrong! We do make enough to save money; we just aren’t willing to quit spoiling ourselves with our little projects or pleasures to have enough left to save. I don’t care what you make—you can save money. It just has to become a big enough priority to you.

If a doctor told you that your child was dying and could only be saved with a $15,000 operation that your insurance would not cover and could only be performed nine months from today, could you save $15,000? Yes! Of course you could! You would sell things, you would stop any spending that wasn’t required to survive, and you would take two extra jobs. For that short nine months, you would become a saving madman (or madwoman). You would give up virtually anything to accomplish that $15,000 goal. Saving would become a priority.

The secret to saving? Focused emotion. The secret to saving money is to make it a priority, and that is done only when you get some healthy anger or fear and then focus that emotion on your personal decisions. Harnessing that emotion will make you move yourself to the top of your creditor list. Then ask yourself, “Which bill is the most important? After tithing, who should I pay first this month?” The answer is you! Until you pay God first, then yourself, then everyone and everything else, you will never save money.

The advertisers and marketing community are affecting our emotions every day and taking every dollar we have by making us see our wants as needs. It is time for this to stop! Emotions make great slaves, but they are lousy masters. No matter how educated or sophisticated we are, if we are not saving all we should be, we are being ruled by emotions, not harnessing them as financial planning slaves.

So whether you are saving for college tuition, a trip to the family reunion, new school clothes for little Bobby or Sally, or anything else, start saving now! It’s never too late!

(CNN) — Miriam Brown has always wanted to visit Cape Cod, but when she recently began to plan a trip and found out she would have to pay $200 or more a night for lodging, her dream vacation seemed out of reach.
Miriam Brown and her husband bartered their services for room and board on Cape Cod.

Brown, who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, is an accountant. Her husband is a home renovations contractor.

Like many people dealing with a soft real estate market and high food and gas prices, they just don’t have that kind of extra cash for a trip.

“I have traveled a lot in prior years, but after [Hurricane] Katrina, there’s just no money for traveling,” Brown said.

So she still plans to go, but she won’t spend any cash at all on lodging.

Brown has joined the growing ranks of Americans who are bartering — trading goods and services without exchanging money — as a way to cope with tough economic times.

Brown posted an ad in the barter community last month, offering to trade her accounting skills and her husband’s knack for home repairs in exchange for room and board on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

She has lots of company.

“When the economy turns unfriendly, users become far more creative to get their everyday tasks done,” Susan MacTavish Best said.

Swapping ‘to get by’

Other Web sites that put Americans in touch with like-minded people who are willing to trade everything under the sun have also seen a boost in traffic.

“I think a few years ago it was more for fun,” said Jessica Hardwick.

“But we’ve seen a real shift in the last year, and especially an increase in the last few months, where I think people are really doing it to get by.”

Some of the most popular items to trade for late this summer were school uniforms, which some parents found they could not afford to buy for their children, Hardwick said.

Experts aren’t surprised Americans are becoming more financially creative during an economic downturn.
Dealing with the economy

• 67 percent of consumers have haggled in recent months, compared with 33 percent in 2006

• 61 percent of consumers now regularly use a shopping list, compared with 35 percent last fall

• 70 percent of shoppers now look primarily for “the deal” in the Sunday inserts, compared with 51 percent last fall

“Historically, when times get tough, you see a 50 percent-plus increase in bartering as a way for people to be able to buy things or get things and do it economically,” said C. Britt Beemer, chairman of America’s Research Group.

The company talks with thousands of consumers every week to gauge their spending habits and attitudes.

A couple of years ago, many Americans had $500 to spend at the end of the month, but that money has evaporated because of rising prices, Beemer said.

“We’ve never had a time, at least in my lifetime, where you have food and fuel going up at the same time. So it isn’t a question of buying things, it’s a question of buying nothing,” Beemer said.

Breast implants and a horse

Businesses have long recognized the benefits of bartering, and there are hundreds of barter networks set up across the country to fill their needs.

They use barter credits as currency, so a plumber in need of a filling doesn’t need to search for a dentist’s office with plumbing problems to make a deal. He can fix a leaky pipe for one member of a network and use the credits he earned for that job at any other.

“Really, there are no limits to it. We trade for just about anything you can think of,” Michael Krane said.

Bartering on this scale is also robust in tough economic times. Krane said his exchange has seen a 20 percent rise in barter transaction volume in the first six months of this year.

A longtime client is Thomas Forrest, an orthodontist in suburban Pittsburgh who barters his services for everything from office improvements to stationery. His practice hasn’t been affected by the economic downturn, Forrest said, but some of his patients seem glad to be able to visit him under the barter arrangement.

“I think if you have a business owner who has children in need of braces, I sense a gratitude that that’s available,” Forrest said.

Barter exchanges must carefully document all trades, since the Internal Revenue Service considers income from bartering as taxable. However, a barter exchange “does not include arrangements that provide solely for the informal exchange of similar services on a noncommercial basis,” according to the IRS.

In New Orleans, Brown and her husband are getting ready to go to Cape Cod after finding a taker for her bartering offer. The couple will work five hours a day in exchange for staying in “a beautiful three-bedroom house right in the center of it all,” Brown said.

“We can do a lot more if we don’t have to pay for room and board,” she added.

History Of Bartering And Money

Money makes the world go round.

Money is the root of all evil.

A fool and his money are soon parted

Few things directly affect the quality of our lives more than money.

• Where we can live
• How we must spend our time each day.
• Who we can date
• What we eat
• Where we go to school
• How healthy we are.

Money may not buy happiness, but it does buy freedom and options.

By the time most of us can talk, we realize money is something that’s very, very important.

Yet as much as money influences our lives, most of us go through our entire lives without really understanding what money really is.

Here is a brief and simple article on the definition and the history of money for the average person.

The word money comes from the Latin word “moneta” which means, “warning.”

By itself, money is nothing except maybe a strip of paper or a bit of metal. Sometimes and in some places, money can be a sea shell, a bead, a rock or even a lump of salt.

Nowadays, much of the world’s money doesn’t even exist in real life….its just bits of data on an outdated computer, hidden away in a dingy basement somewhere.

If you can’t eat it or wear it, then what good is it?

The value of money has nothing to do with what you can physically do with it.

Money gets its value from being a “medium of exchange, a unit of measurement and a storehouse for wealth.”

Money lets you trade goods and services and allows you to “save” value for future purchases.

If you are a chicken farmer and have a bunch of eggs, you can only “save” your eggs for but so long. But you can trade your eggs for money (sell them) and save your money almost indefinitely (barring inflation)

The value of money comes when everybody will accept it as payment for goods or services provided.

So how and when did people start using money?

As far as historians know, people have been using money for no less then 3,000 years.

Before then, people mostly traded or “bartered” for what they wanted.

“I’ll give you 100 eggs, if you give me your goat.”

“I’ll give you 4 goats, for your lion skin coat”.

“I’ll give you 10 lion skin coats if you let me have your daughter”

Bartering is great system of exchange which is still used today!

But bartering has it’s problems.

People often tend to disagree on what’s a fair trade. Then theres that issue again that sometimes the things we trade have expiration dates on them.

Money helps solve both of those problems.

Over time, crude “prehistoric currencies” evolved where people went from trading things like food, animal hides, salt, weapons and tools to standard mediums of exchange.

Ancient Chinese Cutlery

Tools and weapons, like arrowheads, spades and hoes (both the garden tool and the other kind) became some of the earliest mediums of exchange for pre-historic man.

But who wants have to keep reaching in their pockets and get their hands cut handling sharp objects over and over again?

Around 1,100 B.C., the ancient Chinese started making miniature rounded replicas of their tools and weapons. These became some of the first coins.

Coins and Currency

At around 600 B.C, the King of Lydia (the area now known as Turkey) began “minting” coins out of a natural mix of silver and gold (called electrum) and then stamping pictures on them to let people know how much each coin was worth.

This new form of currency helped Lydia to become a wealthy kingdom by increasing domestic and international trade.

(Though Lydia’s wealth could not protect it from being conquered by the Persian Empire.)

China Kicks Economic Ass…Even 2500 years ago

By the time European Marco Polo got to China in 1,200 A.D., the Chinese had a well developed paper monetary system.

And they meant business. Just like how American bills say “In God We Trust,” Ancient Chinese bills said “All counterfeiters will be decapitated.”

Europe stayed big on coins as currency for a minute, especially after they started bringing in more gold and silver from The New World.

Only thing was, lugging gold and silver currency everywhere started to become a real pain, so gradually banks started to issue “bank notes” that were easier to carry around and could be taken into the bank and exchanged for their face value of silver or gold coins.

Of course people started trading these bank notes for goods and services as though the notes were the gold/silver coins themselves.

Some historians say that the first paper currency issued by European governments, as opposed to banks, were actually issued by the colonial governments of North America!

This was because colonist would run out of money waiting for shipments between Europe and the colonies.

Instead of going back to bartering the colonial governments would just issue paper IOUs which were traded like money.

For instance part of the history of money in  Canada, involves how,around 1685, French soldiers would use playing cards signed by the Governor like cash.

History Of Paper Money

The more people started using paper money, the more international trade took place.

As Banks, Royals and Rich people started buying currencies from other countries, the first currency markets started to emerge.

If a King( or Queen) could keep a stable rule over their country then their countries currency would be stable and that country would had an advantage over other countries, trading goods internationally.

Currency wars were waged where countries would try to affect the value of the competitor’s currency by

• driving currency value up to make enemy’s exports too expensive
• driving currency down to reduce the enemy’s buying power (and ability to pay for war)
• eliminating the enemy’s currency all together.

(Hmmh wonder how much things have changed since then?)
“Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.” – Mayer Amschel Rothschild, 1790

So is money really “the root of all evil”?

Who knows (I don’t).

But what I do know is that, no matter what people tell you, money is the untold story behind  most of what we hear on the evening news.

And if you want money to be a solution in your life, rather then a problem, you need to know everything you can about it.

Edie Falco: I Buy “Unisex” Clothes for My Kids to Save Money

Edie Falco doesn’t go overboard shopping for her children, Anderson and Macy.

“It’s hard to justify spending a lot of money on kid’s clothes because they grow out of them in five minutes,” Falco, 47, tells UsMagazine.com. “And my kids don’t really care what they wear.”

“So I occasionally buy something for my son and he wears it until he grows out of it, and my daughter wears it,” the Nurse Jackie star goes on. “I just make sure that it’s unisex.”

Falco, who adopted her Anderson in March 2005 and Macy in April 2008, says she asks her 94-year-old grandmother for parenting advice.

“[She] raised five kids who back in the day was doing everything. Grandpa was out making the money, and grandma was feeding one kid with her hand and rocking another kid in the cradle with her foot,” says Falco.

“She would explain to me about patience. It’s about teaching yourself to be patient. We all move at a pace and get used to it. And then you’re with kids who have their own schedule and own time frame. Part of me wants to just say ‘C’mon let’s go.’ But they’re not having it.”

“You can come to loggerheads if you don’t learn how to breathe and learn how to let them take the time they need. You have to let them be sometimes — to let them look at a book to let them brush their teeth,” adds the Emmy winner.

Down economy leads to more bartering

Donna Arnold sees a brighter future through the revival of her past.

“When I got married, I had my reception, my cake, my flowers and my wedding gown all on trade,” she said as she recalled her 1980 wedding.

Donna, 56, who plays bass guitar and sings in a band with her husband, Bill, sought a new direction after Pocmont resort near Bushkill closed in November. The couple had played there for six nights a week for many years and now they only perform about three times weekly, she said.

“I’ve got a great painter,” she said. “I’ve got a mechanic. I’ve got restaurants. I have counselors. I have a jewelry store.”

Bartering gains appeal in times of economic stress, tight cash and high unemployment.

“It’s grown at about a 15 percent annual rate over the last two years because of the economy,” said David Wallach, president of the International Reciprocal Trade Association, a nonprofit in Portsmouth, Va., that sets standards for the industry. “It’s a parallel capital system.”

Participants in trade exchanges acquire scrip, or bartering credits, by providing a service or selling goods within the network. Traders use scrip to buy from other partners in the exchange, who often meet online.

Each side in a bartered transaction pays a 6 percent fee to the exchange, along with monthly membership dues.

Bartering in a difficult economy has merits. It preserves cash, allows companies to find new clients and dispose of excess capacity. Traders often refer cash-paying customers to other exchange members.

“This is an efficiency that has been unrecognized,” Wallach said.

Bartering has detractors, though, who view it as value lost from the traditional cash system. Bartering thrives in unstable economies with weak currencies, said Satyajit Ghosh, Ph.D., a professor of economics and finance at the University of Scranton.

“People are getting spooked because of the long recession,” Ghosh said. “To be honest, I don’t see any value to it.

“Even if people are getting something at a deep discount, they will find that the goods and services they are providing to each other, they will not get at market value.”

Dan Dutka, though, sees value in his barter transactions.

“I’m using the barter system to go to Florida,” said Dutka, who operates a Mount Cobb vacuum cleaner sales and service business. “I got two four-bedroom condos. I’m going for a weekend and they are all paid for on trade.”

Dutka joined ITEX about a year ago and sells vacuum cleaners through the network, mostly in New England. He said his products trade at the manufacturer’s suggested price.

“It’s business I would never have had,” Dutka said. “It’s one of the best things I ever got involved in.”

“It’s all about promotion. I’ve never been involved in business, I’m a musician,” she said. “This is a nice way to get extras in an economy that you might not be getting otherwise.”

Summer’s well upon us, and after last year’s “staycation” trend there’s some pent-up demand to go out, get away and have fun. At the same time, we still want to save money. From dining out to buying airline and concert tickets, here are some great saving strategies, … and in some cases free deals!

Restaurants

Americans spent more than $200 billion eating out last summer, according to the U.S. Census.

Day Trips

• Look for Target free arts and culture events. The retailer offers free or discounted entry to museums, concerts and galleries across the country. This year there are more than 2,000 free events.

• Free summer movie days at Regal Theatres. The chain runs a “Free Family Film Festival,” with a nine-week schedule of free movies with select days and times.

• If you’re a member of a discount club you may get discounts when they buy movie tickets in bulk.

• The U.S. National Park Service is offering free admission on August 14-15 at more than 100 parks that normally charge a fee.

Travel

The average family of four will spend $4,000 on a vacation this summer, according to American Express. Eighty percent of those surveyed said they plan to lower their travel costs. Here’s some help.

• Swap homes. Join a home exchange club like www.barterquest.com. There’s also a housing swap section.

• Book plane tickets on either Tuesday or Wednesday when prices are cheapest, according to travel experts.

• Reserve hotel rooms on Sundays, when the weekend rush is over and hotel managers have time to talk on the phone and discuss available discounts.

Beach

Stock up on food, drinks, beach towels and chairs before you get to the beach. Otherwise, you’re likely to pay a premium for things you can easily get for much, much less back home.

Bartering to save money — share your experiences

I would love to live a life where, for reasons much more about Ain’t Got Extra Cash than fuzzy-wuzzy-community-building (though hell, why not), a nice chunk of what I need is exchanged through bartering.

So far my efforts have been not so hot. When I threw out my back and then lived in flabby-ass-confirming misery for two weeks, I posted a possible trade on Craigslist: Work in my garden, and in exchange, I’ll do some sort of writing/editing/tutoring work. I got two bites. One from a guy who wanted me to tutor his daughter, but when I emailed him back for specifics, he never responded; one woman said she didn’t do gardening work but if I needed my house cleaned and could pay her to do it, she was interested.

In the coming weeks, I’m doing to try some dog care swapping with another stay at home mom in my neighborhood. Basically, she’ll watch my pups when I go away for a few days and vice versa. I feel good about it, and if it works, this relationship could save us hundreds in kennel fees.

But what keeps me from pursuing a full-on Life O’ Trading is …

1) For some of these jobs, like dog care or anything where I allow someone in my house, even when I’m there, I need to feel like I can really trust them. And to really trust them, I need to really know them. And if I really know them … I feel guilty about asking them to do any work, even if they’re getting work from me back, because everyone I know is already stressed out and busy enough, you know? In some ways it’s easier to hire a stranger who you can imagine has nothing to do all day except for help you. The unfortunate downside, of course, being hiring costs money. Is bartering best with some magical level of acquaintance?

2) Worries about inequity. I already suspect I’m going to be calling on my dog friend for help more than she will need to call on me. How do you keep things fair, and from one side from feeling overused?

3) That Person. The people who make you feel like you just should have done the project yourself or hired someone. You know, the usually-cool friend who sincerely volunteers to help, but doesn’t follow though because they’re “really busy right now,” and then you’re stuck with more work because you counted on them and shouldn’t have and need to figure out Plan B. We all know people like this, right? Let’s name names in the comments section! Just kidding.

I’d love to hear others’ experiences in bartering (or just, you know, a deal where you help out a friend and vice versa), and any tips you have to share!