If you drive a hybrid, some insurers offer discounts simply because the vehicle is eco-friendly.Bragging about your child’s accomplishments in school could save you up to 20% on your insurance policy: Ask for a good-student discount (most companies require at least a B average). This generally applies to young drivers up to age 23 or 25.Being a member of a professional organization — such as a state bar association or medical board — within your field can save you money, Ross says. Some insurers even offer discounts if you graduated from a specific college or university. You could also qualify for low-mileage savings. If you don’t drive long distances, some companies will award you a discount based on your annual mileage.

• Make your car last 250,000 miles

And if you happen to have a homeowners insurance policy with the same company, don’t forget to ask for a multiline discount.2. Do I have comprehensive and collision coverage, and is it worth it? Comprehensive and collision are separate coverages, and you can buy one or the other, or both. Collision coverage pays for repairs to your car in the event of an accident, no matter who caused it. Comprehensive coverage pays for damage suffered through other events, such as vandalism, flood, theft or tree damage. Both coverages generally require that you pay a deductible. Alex Soto, a former chairman of the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America and the current president and CEO of InSource in Miami, says that collision and comprehensive coverage can be a good idea if you own a newer car. But once your car declines in value, you may want to cancel it. For example, it may not be worthwhile to pay $400 a year for collision and comprehensive insurance to protect a car that is valued at only $3,000. If you make a total-loss claim, you’ll pay your deductible — say, $1,000 — and the insurance company then pays the remainder — in this case, $2,000. Would that $400 premium be worth it?On the other hand, if your car is valued at $40,000, buying comprehensive and collision coverage for $500 to $600 may be a good idea. “It is worth it, because while you can afford a $2,000 loss as in the previous example, you may not wish to self-insure $40,000,” Soto says. Check the NADA Guides’ value of your car each year and decide whether collision and comprehensive coverage is a good bet.3. Does my policy include uninsured- and underinsured-motorist coverage?Not all states require you to have uninsured-motorist coverage. (See your state’s minimum levels of required auto insurance.) If you must buy it, your agent will tell you. If not, Ross says, it’s an important coverage to consider. If you have collision coverage, damage to your vehicle will be covered if an uninsured driver crashes into you. But if you don’t, you may want to consider purchasing coverage for uninsured-motorist property damage, or UMPD.”A lot of people cannot afford comp and collision,” Ross says. “So if you don’t have it because you can’t afford it, you can get UMPD.”Because it’s less expensive than collision, UMPD usually pays only up to $3,500 for repairs, but it does not require you to cough up a deductible. If you do have collision coverage and want to avoid paying the deductible (usually at least $500) after an accident, you can add on a collision deductible waiver. Relatively inexpensive, this will waive your collision deductible if your vehicle is hit by an uninsured motorist.You should also ask your agent what type of coverage you have in the event an uninsured driver hits your vehicle and injures you. Although collision coverage pays for damage to your vehicle, it does not cover medical bills. You may want to inquire about uninsured-motorist coverage for bodily injury.Continued: Actual cash value vs. agreed-upon value

(But be forewarned: You do owe taxes on the money you earn this way, and the only records you’ll have are your own. Survey sites generally don’t issue any tax paperwork or report any income to the Internal Revenue Service unless you’ve earned more than $600 from them in a year.)

• Refinancing? Rates still near record lows

And if you’re unemployed or underemployed? Online survey earnings might help you pay a utility bill or keep you from having to charge the groceries.A reader named Ginger, a blogger at Frugal Students, lives in upstate New York and is currently unemployed. Her fianc makes $24,000 a year. Online surveys bring in about to $250 a year in cash and CVS gift cards. The money, plus skillful use of the CVS Extra Care program, helps the young couple set aside a little more for pension and Roth individual retirement account contributions. “We wouldn’t be able to put (as much) money into retirement if it weren’t for the surveys,” Ginger says.

They want your opinion

It’s easy to see why some people think it’s a scam. Why would anyone pay for your opinion about automobiles or supermarkets? Why would a company pay thousands of people to watch a commercial or try a new laundry soap?”Companies are trying as much as possible to gear their advertising and their products to what people want,” says Jonathan Tice, a spokesman for My View. No matter where you roam on the Internet, you’ll see “join our survey group” ads and pop-ups. You’ll also be solicited through rewards sites such as MyPoints or SendEarnings, or through aggregator sites like QuickRewards, Sunshine Rewards or e-Rewards. Among the favorite sites of Smart Spending message board readers are PineCone Research, Toluna, e-Rewards, Synovate, Lightspeed Online Research, i-Say, SurveySpot, Valued Opinions and Surveyhead. When you sign up, be sure to fill out your profile completely. The more a company knows about you, the more surveys might be sent your way.Of course, not every survey is designed for a specific group. “Sometimes we’re looking for feedback from a wide variety of the population,” says Janice Caston, a spokeswoman for Toluna.

How much can you get?

Some companies pay in cash and others in points that can be traded in for gift cards (or, sometimes, for cash). Generally, you can expect to earn 50 cents to $4 for an ordinary survey that takes between five and 30 minutes to complete.Bigger-ticket opportunities do exist, however. Baltimore reader Celia W. earned $25 with a questionnaire about restless legs syndrome. (Again: Fill out your profile!) She also got $15 to try a new brand of body wash.It adds up. “By saving two years (worth) of these little piddly amounts, I was able to have an emergency fund,” she says. These days, Celia banks her earnings — at least $400 a year — to help pay for an annual trip to Manhattan.You may also be offered freebies such as detergent, paper towels, diapers, cold medicine, disinfecting wipes, cleaning products, paper towels, infant formula, sports drinks or snack foods. You might even be asked to watch the pilot episode of an upcoming television show.Survey takers often relish this inside track. “Getting to see these products before everybody else can be fairly entertaining,” says Tricia Meyer of Sunshine Rewards.Continued: ‘Don’t spend a lot of time’

In January, Goldman Sachs (GS, news, msgs) CEO Lloyd Blankfein asserted while testifying at an inquiry commission hearing that he and other top managers at the bank “did not know at any minute what would happen next.”Former Citigroup (C, news, msgs) CEO Charles Prince and former senior board member Robert Rubin told the commission earlier this month that they’re really sorry but didn’t know what was coming. “There isn’t a way in an institution that has hundreds of thousands of transactions a day that you’re going to know what’s in those position books,” testified Rubin, a former Treasury secretary.Dick Fuld, who was head of the failed Lehman Brothers, has said he had no idea his company was using accounting gimmicks to cover up exposure to risky debt instruments. Now, I can’t tell you which executive knew what or when, or what they believed they were seeing. But their institutions spotted trouble early on:

• At Citigroup, a former executive, Richard Bowen, says he warned top managers as early as 2006 about problems with bad mortgages. “I witnessed business risk practices which made a mockery of Citigroup credit policy,” Bowen told the commission this month.

• E-mails disclosed last weekend reveal Blankfein gloating, “We lost money, then made more than we lost because of shorts,” in November 2007 — when the banks’ problem had just started to surface. With the crisis looming, the bank had placed big bets against, or shorted, the mortgage-backed securities it was selling to customers, a maneuver Angelides says is akin to “selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars.”

• Another e-mail has a Goldman bond trader telling his girlfriend in March 2007 that the subprime business “is totally dead, and the poor little subprime borrowers will not last so long!!!” (Goldman Sachs responded that the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which released the e-mails, had “cherry-picked” them from millions of pages of documents and that the bank lost money on residential-mortgage-related products during 2007 and 2008.)

• At Lehman Brothers, former executive Matthew Lee says he was fired in May 2008 after raising concerns about accounting practices.

A lot of people outside the banks saw something coming, too. In September 2004, the FBI publicly warned that a potential epidemic of rampant mortgage fraud could cause “the next S&L crisis,” referring to the huge savings-and-loan meltdown of the 1980s. In early 2005, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times began running articles warning that relaxed lending standards and a speculative housing market bubble were dangerous. Directors have little excuse for missing such signs because they have a legal obligation to understand the risks inside companies, says Michael Garland of CtW Investment Group, which lobbies companies on shareholder issues for union pension funds. “They didn’t have to know that the mortgage market was going to collapse to know that the risk equation in the mortgage market had changed dramatically,” he says.And the CEOs? Well, it’s possible some of them really didn’t recognize the risk early on, but there were enough warnings to say they could have and, given the size of their paychecks, to think they should have.Continued: It’s someone else’s fault

Crossman said she “never could have envisioned this scenario” before it came together, but the three women said they enjoy living together.”It’s working out better than I could have ever expected,” Crossman said. “Mom buys the groceries, my sister cooks, and I clean up. What’s better than that?”The Crossman-Lloyd household is part of resurgent U.S. trend: the return of the multigenerational household.

Multigenerational households by the numbers

A record 49 million Americans, or 16.1% of the population, lived in a household that contained at least two adult generations in 2008, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data. Of that group, Pew reported that:

• 47% lived in a household with two adult generations of the same family (with the youngest adult being at least 25).

• 47% lived in a household with three or more generations of family members.

• 6% were made up of a grandparent and grandchild, but no parent.

The Great Recession, with its high unemployment and foreclosure rates, is accelerating the trend. U.S. multigenerational households rose by 2.6 million, or more than 5%, just from 2007 to 2008.But the popularity of multigenerational households has actually been on the rise since 1980, driven in part by an influx of Asian and Latino immigrants for whom living with parents and grandparents is often the norm.It used to be more the norm for U.S. households, too. Around 1900, more than half of people 65 years or older lived in a multigenerational household, the Pew report said. At the end of the Great Depression — the period in which the multigenerational TV show “The Waltons” was set — one in four U.S. households had multiple adult generations.(In researching my own family history, I was struck by how often grandparents lived with their adult children and grandkids — and often a boarder or two, as well.)

Better health, bigger safety net, growing suburbs

The trend declined as older adults got healthier and more prosperous, thanks in part to the creation of Social Security and growth of work-related pensions. The Pew report also cites rapid growth in the “nuclear-family-centered suburbs” after World War II and a decline in immigrants for the retreat of multigenerational homes, which bottomed out at 12.1% of all households in 1980.This time around, seniors are once again moving in with their adult kids — perhaps because the “outsized” baby-boom generation provides more households from which the elders can choose, the Pew report speculates. In 2008, 20% of people 65 and over lived in a multigenerational household, up from 17% in 1980.

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But there’s been a far sharper rise in the percentage of people age 25 to 34 living with their folks. In 1980s, just 11% of adults in this age range lived in a multigenerational household. In 2008, 20% did, and the figure moved up a full percentage point just from 2007.Later marriages, a rising number of college students and a big jump in unemployment have contributed to the trend. In 2009, fully 37% of people 18 to 29 were not in the work force, Pew research showed. Moving in with Mom and Dad — or never leaving — has been a financial survival strategy.Continued: Problems solved, problems created

As it turned out, his father responded with “only this unconditional love . . . an unconditional belief in me,” Buffett says. Exploring other options, he realized that two investing experts he admired, Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, were teaching at Columbia’s graduate business school. He dashed off a late application, where by a stroke of luck it was fielded and accepted by Dodd. From these mentors, Buffett says, he learned core principles that guided his investing. The Harvard rejection also benefited his alma mater: His family gave more than $12 million to Columbia in 2008 through the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, based on tax filings.The lesson of negatives becoming positives has proved true repeatedly, Buffett says. He was terrified of public speaking — so much so that when he was young he sometimes threw up before giving an address. So he enrolled in a Dale Carnegie public-speaking course and says the skills he learned there enabled him to woo his future wife, Susan Thompson, a “champion debater,” he says. “I even proposed to my wife during the course,” he says. “If I had been only a mediocre speaker I might not have taken it.”Continued: ‘I need to work extra hard’

So, buy in moderation, and make sure to store it in a refrigerator if you plan to keep it a long time.

2. Candy

One key rule of buying in bulk is that you should beware of purchasing guilty pleasures like candy and other junk food. Otherwise, bulk buying can turn into bulk eating.One consumer put it well on SavingAdvice.com: “If I go to my local store and (buy) 2 candy bars for $1 a piece, I spend $2 and they will last a week. I buy a box at Costco of 24 candy bars for $12, they still will be gone in a week. Even though the unit price is less, I end up spending more.”

3. Paper towels

It may sound like a good idea at first. Paper towels are not perishable, and they do tend to cost less when you buy them in bulk. But according to Joshua Thomas, a spokesman for Target, there is a downside to buying rolls and rolls of paper towels. “Paper towels may be more evergreen, but before you buy them in bulk you need to think about how much space you have in your home,” he says. And the last thing you want is to have paper towels taking up space you could use for other necessities. Bulk items that are light on your wallet can weigh down your life in other ways.

4. Toilet paper

As with paper towels, you don’t want to go overboard purchasing toilet paper. Though no one wants to discover there’s no toilet paper left in the bathroom, you also don’t want to have your cabinets and shelves overflowing with rolls of Charmin.

5. Nuts

In general, you should try to avoid buying nuts in bulk unless you’re the kind of person who munches on them throughout the day. They may be more affordable in bulk, but nuts usually expire within two months. “The high fat content in nuts (particularly in peanuts, pecans and walnuts) causes them to go rancid rather quickly,” says Alejandra Ramos, a home-cooking expert and the creator of the website Always Order Dessert. “If you must buy them in large quantities, remember that roasted nuts last longer than raw ones, and shelled ones last the longest. Light, heat and moisture also affect the quality, and they have the tendency to absorb smells, so always store nuts in the fridge or freezer. This also goes for seeds and nuts like sesame seeds, flaxseeds and pine nuts.”Continued: Too much mayo?

And this is what’s happening in the bank’s home market and what was once its core business of consumer and commercial banking. If Citigroup has trouble on this turf, you know it’s in trouble everywhere.The truth is that Citigroup has indeed survived. As hard and desperate as that struggle was, it may have been the easy part.

What’s left and what’s leaving

It’s hard to see a future in which Citigroup is anything more than an also-ran. Just name me one line of business where, within five years, it’s plausible that Citigroup will be one of the best 10 banks in the world.While the global financial system is better off today because Citigroup didn’t fail in 2008, the world of 2010 and 2011 doesn’t need Citigroup for much of anything. With apologies to Irving Berlin, anything Citigroup can do, some other bank can do better.On April 19, Citigroup reported its first operating profit — 14 cents a share — since the third quarter of 2007. The bank charged off only $8.4 billion in loans in the quarter — a huge number but still 16% lower than in the fourth quarter of 2009. Its Tier 1 capital common ratio, a measure of the strength of a bank’s most conservative kind of capital, stood at a huge 9.1%. It was just 3% at the depths of the financial crisis.I don’t think there’s any doubt that the bank will survive. And that’s a huge achievement. This is a bank that required $25 billion in capital from U.S. taxpayers in October 2008 and an additional $20 billion in December of that same year. But look at the bank still left standing.Citigroup’s strategy has been to split itself in two.All the really bad businesses — and some simply outside Citigroup’s core business — have been sold already or lumped into a group called Citigroup Holdings for eventual disposal. The list of businesses that Citigroup has sold includes the Smith Barney brokerage unit, rolled into a joint venture with Morgan Stanley (MS, news, msgs) but headed for eventual sale; Nikko Securities, the third-largest brokerage company in Japan; and insurance company Primerica, partly spun off in an initial public offering in March. But Citigroup Holdings still contains about $500 billion in assets. That’s about 25% of Citigroup’s total assets, and it includes subsidiaries the company wants to unload, including CitiMortgage, consumer-lending business CitiFinancial, and various toxic mortgage, credit card and loan assets.Continued: The Citi of tomorrow