This economy has been tough on everyone –with seniors on fixed incomes especially hard hit. I spent a few hours doing research for an article today and thought I would share some of what I found with my readers.

So here are some of the best sites I found with tips to budget, save money, reduce expensesmake extra money or  raise some fast cash.

Budgeting

Personal Budgeting is a great site that walks you through the right way to set up a budget. Another great site is Always Frugal. It has tips on on frugal living, suggestions on how to save money on groceries, a budget worksheet and more. Ten tips for staying on a budget from How Stuff Works is also very helpful.

Dave Ramsey has a very different view of budgeting that you may want to look at.

Saving Money  & reducing expenses

The Simple Dollar is a great site with 101 money-saving tips.

DoughRoller has 75 Painless ways to save money

ZenHabits offers up 106 Money-Saving Tips for a Frugal Lifestyle

Frugal Dad gives you over 100 money-saving, expense reducing tips from his readers.

Making Extra Money

The MSN Money Blog offers up 52 ways to make extra cash quickly.

Us News Personal  Finance Blog offers 7 ideas to make extra money in your spare time.

The Wisdom Journal covers 26 ways to make extra money while keeping your job.

I am pretty new to Twitter. I have known about it for a while but didn’t really understand how it could help me. In just a few short weeks though I have built my Twitter list on my main eBay site at www.skipmcgrath.com to over 1400. And I just started a Twitter link for the Official Geezer Guide yesterday. I already have over 150 followers in just one day. (Here is the link to follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/HeadGeezer)

Twitter is a great social networking took, but you can also use it to make money. You can tweet links to your eBay and Craigslist listings, you can tweet affiliate links, you can use it to build traffic to your blog or your website where you sell products, information or have Google Ads and affiliate banners.  The possibilities are really endless.

There are a lot of schemes and tools people are selling that will help you build a Twitter list quickly –but most of them are pure junk.  The key to building a Twitter list that can make money is to have it focused on a topic, or a product or a niche of some kind. For example, if you sell diet or weight loss supplements, then you don’t want a list with lots of young kids on it, or a list of video gamers –you want middle aged to older people who are health conscious.  If you have a website that sells quilting supplies, then you want to build a list of hundreds or thousands of quilters –you don’t want real estate investors and Puff Daddy fans.

Last week I found the perfect tool. It’s called The Twitter Traffic Machine.  This is a series of 6 short videos that walks you through an automated system to build your list of hundreds of  HIGHLY TARGETED followers a day with just a few minutes of work.  The program only costs $27 and comes with a money-back guarantee.  I have only been using it for a few days and it works great.  I did one post right after setting it up, and that post made $56 on an affiliate link within about 30 minutes. I checked again today and it made another $11 –all from that one post.

I also started using Twitter to drive traffic to my eBay listings.  The two listings I featured in a Twitter post got double the amount of hits they normally did each day and resulted in one Buy-it-now sale for $229. so my $27 investment paid off pretty quickly.

Earlier this week I also told you about a new selling tool called netSpray.  The neat thing is that you can set up a netSpray account and use Twitter to drive traffic to your netSpray listings.  When you look at netSpray, you will get a free 27 page eBook I wrote for the netSpray folks as part of their launch promotion.  And if you sign up for netSpray for one month, you will get another book I wrote that shows you how to use Twitter to generate profits from eBay and netSpray.