Instead, you can use the The Understory site to find banks, credit unions, and other businesses which will sort and redeem your change for much less money.

If you do plan on rolling your own coins, be aware that some banks will not accept rolled coins. If you plan on rolling your own, you might want to contact your bank beforehand to make sure they accept them and don’t charge a fee for taking them.

Preparation is the best defense against the demons of nature and other unforeseen disasters. While a beekeeper’s suit or a personal bomb shelter might help you rest easily at night, there are more practical ways to protect your personal treasures.

Some of the tips I like include ways to preserve objects of sentimental value which you would not have time to grab should the worst occur.

Don’t throw away those exercise videos and ubiquitous AOL CDs. Jim Williams wants you to mail old videotapes and CDs to him, so that more than 40 disabled staffers at his ACT Recycling in Columbia, Missouri can recycle them. And, oh, don’t toss out those used Fed-Ex envelopes or broken smoke detectors; their manufacturers take them back for recycling.

Indeed, these days, it seems that more cast-offs than ever can be recycled. No matter where you live, you can recycle a wide range of discards—aseptic juice packages, printer cartridges, ordinary batteries, iPods, PDAs, and even cell phones.

Surprised? Recycling has leap-frogged ahead, meaning if you haven’t checked the recycling scene since the mid-1990s, it’s possible that much of what you thought you knew is wrong. Not only can you recycle more things, but your discards are very much in demand, perhaps more than you realize.

Get this: Recycling and reuse businesses now employ about as many people as the auto industry, if not more, according to a 2001 “U.S. Recycling Economic Information Study� commissioned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and several states through an agreement with the National Recycling Coalition. At least 1.1 million people now work in the industry, more than triple the jobs in mining. BusinessWeek in February pegged the number of auto factory workers at about 950,000. Demand from industrializing China and India is helping spur the U.S. recycling industry, which now provides a “major source of raw materials,� according to Jerry Powell, editor of Resource Recycling magazine.

You can read more about recycling discarded items here.

billQ is a new web-based application that gives you an easy way to keep track of your bills. With billQ, you can make sure you always know exactly what you have to pay, and when you have to pay it.

You can also set up groups. This is useful if you have related bills or if you have multiple people paying a bill. A good example would be setting up a group so all of your roommates can split rent.

I would imagine most people using the internet to track bills and what not would just do it through online banking, though it seems to be a good way for groups of people to track bills (ie, maybe a planned trip, shared housing, some sort of club, etc).