Last Saturday a woman standing in line with my wife and I told us not to buy gas on May 15.

She beamed at her Ford Super Duty pickup. She said she's tired of paying so much to fill it, and she's looking forward to sticking it to the gas companies.

The gas companies love people like her.

I found myself involved in discussion about cars today. Two people are looking to buy something. One's leaning toward a used car, while the other is bound and determined to buy a new car.

I know which will be retiring first.

So, tomorrow's the biggest shopping day of the year, with deals like 2-gig SD cards for digital cameras for $25; Sony Playstation 3s for, well, regular price while they last; 1-gig USB disks for $13, select CDs and DVDs for $9.99 and under, laptops for under $300, and so on.

Did you know you can get some of that stuff without leaving home?

I've had the same lawnmower for the last 4 years or so. Maybe three. I lose count. It's a piece of junk--worth slightly more, perhaps, than what I paid for it (nothing) but it didn't work right when I got it, and this mowing season it just fell apart. And besides falling apart--the wheels really were coming off, and I couldn't find anyplace that sold new ones that fit--it was getting to be impossible to start.

My wife found another one at a yard sale for $25. It didn't start either, but at least it was in good physical condition and it was only a year old.

I heard on the radio this morning about an 82-year-old who up until two months ago was still paying AT&T $29.10 a month to lease a rotary phone.

I'm just barely old enough to remember those arrangements--when the government broke up the AT&T monopoly (the first time, before it rebuilt itself) consumers were given the option to opt-out. They could even buy the phones they had been leasing, if they desired--or they could return them.

Chrysler criticized oil companies a couple of weeks back for padding their profits and not trying to do anything to help gas prices. There were some fallacies in their arguments; I'm not even going to try to touch it. I'd rather try to solve the problem: Figure out how to burn less gas.

I've got two cheap tricks that seem to work.

Compact fluorescent (CF) bulbs are on sale at Kmart this week. I bought a bunch.

I've been gradually replacing the light bulbs in my house with CFs as they burn out. CFs cost enough that I wasn't comfortable throwing out 30 perfectly good bulbs and buying all CFs in one hit, especially not at 2002 prices.

I'm glad I took that strategy, because today's CFs are better and they're cheaper.

There's a tiny produce market in a former Amoco gas station about a mile from where I live. I've driven past it for years without ever so much as stopping in to see what they had.

I wasted a lot of money that way.

Do you know what the least expensive way to buy legitimate copies of Windows is? Do you know what the Microsoft Volume Licensing agreement covers?

Of course you don't. Nobody can figure out Microsoft licensing. But Microsoft wants to send you a FREE! USB flash drive filled with this ultra-valuable information!

And oh, yeah, nothing stops you from erasing this information when you're done and replacing it with your own, even more priceless data.

Most GenXers don't spend their money wisely.

That's not an insult on my peers; there's plenty of blame to go around. Yes, we want what our parents had at 50 and we want it at 25, but part of the problem is the images all around us tell us we have to have all that. And if my education is any indication, the only financial education I received in school was an aside in a U.S. History class.

Let's talk about how to earn more to dig out of financial ruin, and how to stay out.