investing your money ;)

If you get an income tax refund, and own a house, put your return in an interest bearing bank account (create a new sub-account, and don't do anything else with it), and leave it there until property tax time. Ours is usually pretty close to the same ammount. You'll usually never have to worry about coming up with the property tax, and you'll get a bonus in interest as well. About the time others are complaining about how high their prop taxes are, my wife and I are choosing a nice resaurant to spend our interest at.

Don't use the $30 "rapid refund", wait the three weeks and keep the $30.

If your bank charges a monthy fee for anything- try a credit union.

I will NEVER pay for a company to "hold my money".

RE: investing- keep aware of day to day info such as news stories and even what products your friends are buying. try to analyze how it relates to the market. Just being aware of what compaies own what brands is helpful. Know what the financial health of any potential company is, and what their future plans are.
Create a free "watch list" of stocks on a site like yahoo, and track their progress. It helps to actually use a dollar figure for the purchase, and to be realistic. Watch a couple episodes of "Nightly Busines report" on PBS, or CNBC. it's pretty dry, but you get terms and such filtered into your mind- passive learning.

Diversify.

I'm pretty oil and energy heavy right now, but I just don't see the demand/price of those commodities going down any time soon. ...and if I'm going to contribute to those record profits at the $4 pump, at least they can give me some back every quarter. How many times do you have to hear 'record profits" on the news, before you think about buying oil stocks?

Sometimes you loose- I bought an LCD manufacturer that pays 10%, but have lost almost 1/3 of the value- go figure- with all the devices using LCD screens:(

Look for opportunities, IMO the best one lately has been BP- they got hammered with the spill, but did a great PR job afterwards. Up 12% since I bought and could go back to where they were before, another 20% or so, plus a 4% div.