This coming Wednesday, November 11 is Veterans Day and since I’m far too much of a wuss to serve in the military, I thought the least I could do was put together a list of freebies available to active military members and veterans. Most (all?) of the offers below require nothing more than proof of military service in order to get the freebie.

Applebee’s – Applebee’s is offering free meals all day long! Well, the offer is all day long, I doubt they’ll let you actually eat meal after meal throughout the entire day. But heck, why not try?!

Golden Gorral – A ginormous video staring Gary Sinise pops up on this page, which makes perfect sense. When I think of Veterans Day and Golden Corral, I obviously complete the trifecta with thoughts of Gary Sinise. Anyway, GC is giving away a free military appreciation thank you dinner on Monday, Nov. 16 from 5-9pm.

Krispy Kreme – All veterans and active military personnel can get a free doughnut of any variety, including glazed, kreme filled, and chocolate cake. Whoa, whoa, whoa – chocolate cake doughnuts? Wouldn’t that simply be a slice of chocolate cake? Somebody at Krispy Kreme Laboratories needs to stop slacking off and come up with better ideas.

McCormick and Schmicks – They’re hosting a special dinner on Sunday, Nov. 8 and space is limited. There’s a reservation form at the bottom of their page, so RSVP today if you want to attend! Parties cannot be larger than 6 though.

*NEW* Outback Steakhouse – All veterans and active duty military get a free Bloomin’ Onion and beverage.

Sam’s Club – Over 25,000 Hugo canes will be given away free of charge to United States military veterans in need of mobility assistance. Sam’s Club membership is not required, but supplies are limited so you may want to call your local store before heading there.

Uno Chicago Grill – They’re offering a free entree or individual pizza with an entree or pizza purchase of equal or greater value. A BOGO isn’t the best offer on this list, but at least you can feed the entire family for half the price.

U.S. Department of Interior – All of the areas managed by the DOI is offering free admission to any and everyone on Veterans Day. This includes all national parks, forests, and monuments.

Those are all of the national freebies I could find for Veterans Day, however there are a ton of local offers available in a few dozen states. Military Avenue seems to have the best collection of them, so be sure to check them out! And by all means, if you know of a nationwide freebie I missed, please let us know about it in the comments!

We’re only a few days away from Halloween and so I thought I’d whip up a post of freebies that are available this coming Saturday. Apparently I’m now too old to steal my siblings candy, so I’ll have to take advantage of a few of the freebies below.

Free Black Jack Taco – Taco Bell is giving away tacos from 6pm until midnight.

Free Chipotle Burrito – After leaving Taco Bell, drive over to Chipotle between 6pm and close to get a free burrito. You have to dress up as a burrito in order to get a freebie, but last year my brother just wrapped a loop or two of tin foil on his head and he was good to go. Unfortunately he’s still wearing it as I convinced him I have telepathic powers.

Free Lamination at Mardel – I’ve never heard of Mardel, but apparently they’re a Christian and education store in Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. And the best part is that they’re offering free lamination of anything up to 50 feet. If I lived near a store, I’d take them up on this offer in a heartbeat and laminate the most mundane items. via Freebies 4 Mom – thanks!

Free Event & Prizes at Michaels – From 10am-noon, stop in at your local Michaels to get a free trick-or-treat pail. Plus, they’ll have a free coloring activity with free Crayola Model Magic Fusion and build a Make-It Take-It Halloween frame. Children will also receive a balloon and candy because that’s exactly what they need on Halloween – an early start on the sugar intake followed by a helium chaser!

Free Menchies Frozen Yogurt – Available on Friday and Saturday, you can get a free frozen yogurt at participating stores if you print out a silly hat and wear it in. There’s a slideshow of people wearing the hat on their site and I must say, those people look way too happy and shameless. via Rain – thanks!

Free Toys R Us Treats and Giveaways – I have no idea what “treats and giveaways” mean, but that’s what will be given away from noon-3pm on Halloween. The press release I linked to is long, but here’s the good stuff:

Toys”R”Us stores nationwide will host Trick “R” Treat events on Halloween, complete with costume parades, complimentary treats and giveaways.

As always, you might want to call ahead and make sure your local store is participating.

Bass Pro Shop Freebies – On Friday from 4-7pm there will be a trick-or-treat event throughout the store with a kids’ costume parade at 6pm. Then on Halloween from noon-4pm, there will be mask decorating, marshmallow roasting, and sample dutch over apple cobbler. I one time dropped a mini-dutch oven in a river as a kid. Well, it wasn’t so much “dropped” as “used it as a submarine for my army men.” I got away with it too – sorry, Dad!

Free Mattel Toy at Sears – Bring your child in to any Toy Shop at Sears and get a free Mattel toy. In addition, they have a $5 off $20 toy purchase coupon available. It’s valid between now and 11/1, so you could use it for a Christmas present or something. Be sure to click the red “click for store locations” on their site to see if your store is participating. It looks like mainly stores in California and Illinois are in on the offer, though I suspect any store will take the coupon.

Free YoCrunch Yogurt Coupon – For up to two weeks after Halloween, you can send in any candy wrappers in exchange for a coupon good for any YoCrunch yogurt. Yea! Eat candy and then get free candy yogurt! You’ll probably want to include a note with your address on it as well. Wrappers can be sent to the following address:

Shaina Zalma
YoCrunch
9507 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 300
Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Discount Sonic Food – I couldn’t find anything official My local Sonic said they were participating in an offer to sell $0.50 corndogs from 5pm-midnight on Halloween. Nicole from Savvy Shopper was kind enough to forward me some official info that shows this is a nationwide event!

Free Brunswick Bowling Coupons – And finally, don’t forget about the free Brunswick Bowling coupons that we posted a few weeks ago. They don’t expire until Nov. 24 and while they’re intended to be given out as Halloween treats, there’s nothing stopping you from saving a few for yourself

*NEW* Macy’s Events – Looks like Macy’s has a ton of offers on Saturday. To start, the first 100 people in the store will receive a free $10 gift card. At 11am, there will be a coolest costume contest at 11am and free face painting at the makeup counters all day long. (hopefully with scary paintings, not makeup) And finally, everybody gets a free trick-or-treat bag while supplies last.

So there you have it – all of the confirmed freebies I could find. Know of any I missed?

Updated: 10/30/2009

Over the past months, a trickle has turned into a torrent of e-mails from people telling me that X store doesn’t take printed coupons and Y store does but only if you use less than five and Z store has no limit and… you get the point. The thing is, in this example, Walmart was X, Y, and Z store!

So, I set out to see if there was a universal corporate coupon policy for any of the big name stores. I compiled the list below and began emailing corporate offices asking if they accept Internet coupons. Long story short: yes, most have an official policy and in the majority of stores, printed Internet coupons are okay.

But as I’ve hinted to, everybody seems to have a horror story of a cashier who refuses to accept the coupons and suddenly the total bill balloons. Nine times out of ten, that cashier is in the wrong and this is where a little education, planning, and hopefully this post will come in handy. If you shop regularly at any of the stores below, you might want to print out the policy and carry it around in your purse when you go shopping next!

There’s no reason for anybody to be denied savings when they’re rightfully entitled to them, especially in this economy!

A&P – Holy Mother of…A&P simply did not want to respond to my e-mails at all. But after a mere trillion messages by me, I received an e-mail with the following statement:

The internet is a powerful vehicle for getting information out to people and at the same time it is also a vehicle for false information. Unfortunately, internet coupons are not accepted in our A&P stores due to an abundance of fraudulent coupons circulating over the internet.

I know this is not the answer you and your readers want to hear at this time, but we are listening to you and other customers who are seeking alternate means of stretching their food dollars. Currently, we are working on a solution that would allow our customer’s to download coupons from the internet directly to our loyalty cards electronically. We are exploring this idea and hope to put it into fruition in the near future. I apologize for the delay in my response, as I wanted to wait until we had more information of the new clipless electronic coupon service we will be offering. We are working with an external vendor and hope to have this service available starting August 7, 2009. [ed: so...it's released now?]

So that’s kind of promising as it sounds like they’ll be rolling out their own Cellfire version within a month in the past.

Care to see the rest of the list?

Please raise your hand if you’ve never heard of Swagbucks. Holy moly, why are so many of you holding your hands up?

For anybody who is new to HIF, Swagbucks is basically Google + prizes. You search with them just as you would with Google, but the key difference occurs when you win swagbucks, which can be redeemed for gift cards, books, sports memorabilia, video games, school supplies – you name it, they’ve got it. Unless you just named pet turtles. I don’t think they have those.

Well the bigwigs at Swagbucks are releasing some new features and as a result, have offered new users from HIF a free swag code that gives them 2 free points. Couple that with the automatic 3 free points you’ll get for signing up and that’s…uh…hold on, let me find my calculator.

The code is freeswagcode (in all lower caps) and expires on 9/10/09.

Like I said, Swagbucks has some new features, for new and old users alike. One is a toolbar that is compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. The cool thing about the bar is that, for the entire month of September, Swagbucks will release an exclusive free swagcode each day on it! That’s 30 free swagbucks by the end of the month! An Amazon giftcard costs only 45 points, so toss in whatever points you’ve already earned and you’ll most likely have enough to get it!

They’ve also got a version of Bingo coming out called SWAGO where you can play and win points. It hasn’t been released yet, but you can check out their blog this week and get all the details there. And as always, their Twitter and Facebook accounts are pretty good sources for unique codes as well.

So there ya go! Put all those hands down now and enjoy the free swagcodes.

I’ve updated the heck out of our free birthday food list this morning. In addition to adding a half dozen or so offers, I removed any offer that I had yet to be able to confirm, so the list is a bit leaner and more accurate now.

If you happen to know of an offer that I missed though, please feel free to comment on that post and fill me in! It’s been a few months since I’ve gone through those comments, so I’ll be doing that later this afternoon.

EDIT: This code is no longer valid.

The exclusive Swagbucks code for Hiffers that I wrote about last week expires tonight at 11:59 PT. If you haven’t signed up yet, what the heck are you waiting for? Go sign up for a free account, then use the code FREECODE (case sensitive), before basking in the glow of your free six Swag Bucks you now have.

If you’re new to the site, here’s the initial review I wrote about Swagbucks back in January.

EDIT: This code is no longer valid.

How many times have we written about Swagbucks here? A gazillion? It probably has something to do with how awesome the site is – in fact, I just cashed out my fourth $5 Amazon giftcard this weekend thanks to them.

For anybody who is new to HIF, Swagbucks is basically Google + prizes. You search with them just as you would with Google, but the key difference occurs randomly when you win swagbucks, which can ultimately be redeemed for gift cards, books, posters, and starting today – video games!

In fact, to promote some of the new changes they’ll be rolling out this week, they’ve given HIF an exclusive code. Signing up for a free account will net you 3 points automatically. Then you can use the code FREECODE to gain an additional 3 points, giving you 6. For reference, a free $5 Amazon giftcard costs 45 points, so you’ll already be 13% of the way towards your first prize. Like I said in my previous Swagbucks post, I average about 2-3 swagbucks a day though my normal search habits, which takes me about 15-20 days to earn my prize of choice. (the code above will expire on June 16 at 11:59pm PST)

Some of their new features this week include a widget that you can place on your blog / website, a newly designed frontpage, and a favorites section in their store. If you were ever wondering why Swagbucks destroyed Blingo and Winzy, I think you now have your answer!

I know it kinda stinks that the Swagbucks code doesn’t work for members who have already registered, but they are holding point giveaways for all users on their Twitter, Facebook, and blog this week. Plus, I’ll be starting another survey tomorrow afternoon with some prizes. So there’s that to look forward to

Unless otherwise noted, all of the freebies below are available on Sunday, May 10 (Mother’s Day!). As always, be sure to call ahead to your local store to make sure they’re participating in the freebies.

And of course, if you know of any that I missed, please leave a comment!

Bob Evans – Print out this coupon and get a free slice of pie after 4pm.

Champps – Moms get a free entree with the purchase of an equally valued entree.

El Pollo Loco – In a fabulous PR move, they are offering to honor the KFC coupon that many of us printed but were unable to use thanks to KFC not being prepared to meet the demand. Here’s to El Pollo Loco stepping in to fill the free chicken void in our lives.

Ikea – Moms can get a free small breakfast and coffee. No word on whether or not you can eat it while lounging on some of the furniture.

Kodak – First off, shipping is not included in this offer, but if you use the code FREECARD, you can get a free custom photo card worth up to $2.49.

Michael’s Kids’ Workshop On Saturday, there’s a Make it for Mom Bead Event (pretty self-explanatory) while on Sunday, they have a Decorate a Cookie with Mom event. Both are from 1-4pm. (thanks Scoring Deals!)

Outback Steakhouse – Bring “mum” in and she can get a free $10 gift certificate good for her next visit.

Smokey Bones – Moms get a free meal (up to $20) with the purchase of an equally valued meal.

TCBY – They’re offering a free cup or cone of yogurt to all moms!

T.G.I. Friday’s – With the purchase of an entree, mom’s get a free mom-sized (what the heck is that?) Brownie Obsession or Spiced Up Cupcake.

Texas de Brazil (warning: their website auto-plays some amazing eurodance techno music. Do not go there if you are prone to outbursts of dancing and/or raving) – Here’s a coupon good for up to two free entrees with the purchase of two regular sized dinners.

Texas Land & Cattle – Mom’s can get a coupon good for one free entree (up to $15), which can be redeemed during their next visit.

Ugh. Income Tax Day is only 48 hours away and I’ve still yet to finish mine. I’ve only entered in my name and address on my Turbo Tax account, but the status bar still reads as 0% complete. That’s not too encouraging if you ask me. I have an inkling I’ll be pulling a Homer come Wednesday. Why couldn’t I be more like Flanders?

In the mean time, enjoy this list of free Income Tax Day freebies and deals! As always with these day-long freebies, you might want to call ahead and make sure your local branch is participating.

Tax Day Freebies

Free Taco Del Mar Taco – This freebie actually arrives as a coupon via e-mail, so be sure to sign up for it now just in case it takes them a day to send it to you.

Free Cinnabun Bites – This one’s only going on from 5-8pm, so be sure to plan your trip accordingly. I almost made a horrendous pun about planning my trip, as in falling down, and how I felt weird about it. You’re welcome that I abandoned aforementioned pun.

Free MaggieMoo’s Ice Cream – As part of their “e-cone-omic” ice cream stimulus package ( ), they’re giving away a free scoop of ice cream to anybody who stops by throughout the day. As a thank you for the freebie, I officially forgive them for using the term “e-cone-omic.”

Free HydroMassage – If you have a location near you, call them up today and make an appointment for Wednesday! My back has been killing me lately, so I would die for a free massage right about now.

Tax Day Deals

P.F. Chang’s China Bistro Discount – Stop in for a meal and get 15% off your bill.

McCormick and Schmick’s Gift Certificate – Basically, if you eat here on tax day, they’ll give you a $10.40 gift certificate for any future visit. That’s kind of a key point, because I can see a lot of people mistakenly thinking they’ll be able to use the GC as soon as they eat on Wednesday.

Chick-fil-a Rebate – I can’t find an official press release from them, but a few different news outlets are reporting on this so I feel it’s fairly legit. Go to your local Chick-fil-a on Wednesday, make a purchase, and save the receipt. Then take the receipt back any day between April 16-30 and get a free meal of whatever you purchased!

T.G.I. Friday’s Gift Card – Spend $15-$25 on April 15th and receive a $5 gift card. Spend over $25 and receive a $10 gift card. In addition, remember the latest Budget Busters post where I mentioned TGIF had a reward program? Well, it turns out that for the entire month of April, you earn double points. So if you spend $50 between now and April 30th, you’ll receive an $8 gift card to boot.

Know of any that I missed? Then please feel free to comment and let us know. Heck, leave a comment even if you don’t know of any more!

Baseball is ten times the sport football is. There, I said it. I’m sick and tired of pretending that football is the greatest American innovation and that baseball has long since been relevant, let alone exciting. Call me crazy, (on second though, hold off) but baseball freaking rocks. And it starts during the spring! That’s like taking a giant birthday cake and dumping a pan of brownies on it. Tell me that wouldn’t be the best cake ever. You could probably slather some icing on top of them and then bust out the ice cream before…

Wait, where was? Oh yeah, baseball. It’s here! And you know what? Some of the Major League teams offer free kids programs. I’ve included as many as I could find in the post below and will update this as/if more become available. Some of the offers are clearly better than others, so here’s to hope your kids favorite team is listed below with some cool freebies.

Arizona Diamondbacks No Chew Club

This one won’t be available until April and they don’t say what you’ll get, but it’s going to be free, so it’s worth bookmarking and coming back to next month. They also have a free Kid’s Club where you can earn points for going to games and such.

Baltimore Orioles Birdland Package

1. Register below and Orioles.com will e-mail you a voucher good for one (1) FREE Upper Reserve Ticket to see one (1) Orioles 2009 regular season non-prime home game during your birth month.
2. After you register for yourself, you can then register on behalf of your child by filling out the “Birthday Celebrant Information” below to help them celebrate their special day! It’s our way of helping you create your own Orioles Magic.

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To go along with Jen’s recent post of free eCoupon sites, I decided to put together a list of what I consider to be the best printable coupon sites. In short, you can go to any of the sites below, select the coupons you want, and print them out right at home! Many of these coupons can be printed once per computer, so if you have access to a computer & printer at home, work, and/or school…well, you get the idea

One small tip: if you’re having trouble installing any of the printing software for the couple of sites that require it, you might want to make sure you’re using Internet Explorer and that you have any ad-blocking software turned off. I use Firefox for my normal web-surfing, but sometimes it has trouble printing the coupons.

Coupons.com – Hands down the #1 leader in printable coupons. Their selection is gigantic and they update coupons at least once a month. I routinely print a dozen or two coupons from them every month and regularly save $20 or more.

Box Tops 4 Education – Their selection is sparse, but they make up for this slight drawback by having some that no other site has.

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You know what’s going to be here before we even know it? Travel time! I was reminded by this fact when I saw a California state tourism commercial last night and that got me to wondering what each state offers in the way of free state maps and travel guides. Coupled with our free museum admissions list (which is actually fully completed now!), your summer trips might now be a bit more fun and free!

I linked to the official travel guide for each state below. As a fail-safe, I then provided a link to each state’s DOT page if their travel guide didn’t explicitly say it came with a highway map. Here’s to never getting lost again!

Free Alabama State Map – This is the first .travel website I’ve ever seen. Cool.

Free Alaska State Map – Here’s the first case of “so, does this come with a map?” (dot map)

Free Arizona State Map – What exactly is Old West activities? Like riding around on a horse and shooting pistols in the air? Arizona, here I come!

Free Arkansas State Map – They have a plethora of travel guides and kits, including golfing, hiking, and fishing guides, calendar of events, and even a Living in Arkansas guide for those considering moving there. Wait, where are you going?

Free California State Map – I would have been ticked had they not offered some free maps, considering the fact that I see their freaking tourism commercial every 10 minutes.

Free Colorado State Map – Colorado’s official state slogan: Let’s Talk. Aw crap, they’re breaking up with us!

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Please raise your hand if you’re shocked when I reveal that I started a massive project and never found the time to finish it. Ok people, not cool, put your hands down! A while back, I decided I wanted to put together a list of every museum in the U.S. that offered free admission. Turns out there are a lot of museums in our country.

Here’s what we’ve got so far on the free museum admission list. As you can see, we’ve only completed 42 states and D.C. (Holy crap, that’s way more than I’d originally thought.) I understand that glancing at it for the first time might lead to some sensory overdosing, but it’s really not all that confusing when broken down. If a museum’s name is blue, it’s been verified. If it’s red, somebody (perhaps you?!) needs to check it out.

Some of the lingo can be confusing to a newbie as well, but again, it’s designed to save space while conveying as much info as possible. Here are a few examples and how to interpret them:

Patterson Homestead – Dayton – This museum is located in Dayton and since there’s no additional markings, it’s free to everybody on every day.

Southeast Museum of Photography – Daytona Beach – FTA? – This museum is located in Daytona Beach and we’re not quite sure if it’s free or not because their site was unclear. Anything with FTA? is a perfect opportunity for somebody to pitch in and help us figure out what their admission policy is!

Sometimes we group museums together in cities that have a ton of them, thus allowing us to save space by not repeatedly putting the city after the museum name. Like these, which are under New York:

New York Botanical Garden Museum – FTA Wednesdays – This museum is free to everybody all day on Wednesdays.

American Folk Art Museum – 11AU & FTA Friday after 5:30pm – This museum is free every day to anybody 11 and under. It’s also free to all (FTA) on Friday’s after 5:30.

You have to login to edit the wiki, but since I’m cool, I’ve integrated the wiki with the forums! So if you already have an account on the forums, simply use that info to sign in. Otherwise, why not create a free account today and join in on the fun?

Here’s to hoping you find some free fun the next time you’re stuck visiting distant relatives in an unknown city! We have a thread on the forums where we talk, ask questions about, etc. the wiki as well. Come chime in!

Well hello my freebie friends! I know it’s late but Merry Christmas! And if you didn’t celebrate Christmas, Happy Kwanza. Feliz Navidad. Froehliche Weihnachten. Buone Feste Natalizie. You get the picture!  I hope your Christmas or whatever it is you celebrated was amazing. You know what else is amazing? Freebies. This past year has been good to us, offering some of the best freebies ever available!

This is my year end freebie review for you, where I am going to go through some of the best things we have gotten this year…with a little help from some of the hiffers. Since most, if not all, of these freebies have long since died, I will let you know where you can get them and at what price. (Goob: I’ve linked to each freebie’s website. If I make a notation that’s it’s still available, then obviously head on over and snag a freebie you might have missed!) Also I will list the website for you too! Make sure you always check on HIF for the freebies, I have a feeling 2009 is going to be big!

Let’s get started! (more…)

About a year ago I put together a list of websites that let you send SMS or text messages for free. It was a pretty popular post, but the only thing is that a few of those sites have since died while many other (and potentially better) sites have sprung up. So, here’s a new list!

Call Wave – Call Wave easily wins the award for “fastest delivery time.” I sent myself a text message using their free downloadable widget and before I’d even had time to click back over to HIF, my phone was buzzing with the new message. They have versions that you can add directly to your Google or Yahoo Homepage as well as your Apple or Windows Vista computer. I especially like the fact that you can not only save phone numbers that you frequently text, but it even imported all the listed cell numbers I have saved in my address book on my computer! Nifty!

Chikka – You have to download a small program, which is basically just an IM platform, but built on sending text messages to your buddies instead of IMs. Your friends can then respond to you from their phone and it’ll show up on your computer in a message box. Not only have they since expanded the countries you can text since last year (US, UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong), but they also now offer free texts to everybody in the US.

Full list after the jump. (more…)