1. Try to avoid the crowd. If you are planning to drive from LA to Vegas for 2 days of short vacation, you might want to leave on Sunday morning and come back on Monday night. Traffic will be so much better and hotel rates will be cut in half. The hours saved on the road plus the money saved on hotel might well worth taking Monday off.

2. Research online before you go. For example I just went to Santa Cruz a few weeks ago. Before I went I searched on google for "Santa Cruz". I found on the official Santa Cruz page there are a lot of valuable coupons for food/entertainment.

3. Try to reserve the rental car as early as possible even if you are not sure you will need it later. There is no penalty charge if you cancel the reservation, yet the rental fee will be so much higher if you rent at last minute. I usually use orbitz.com to reserve my car rentals because they have good comparison among different companies.

4. Search the best online air ticket by using the major websites like travelocity.com, orbitz.com, after you find the best deal, go to the specific airline's web page directly. Sometimes you will find that the airline's direct fare is cheaper, because they need to pay commission for other websites.

5. If you are not picky about a specific hotel/airline, try hotwire.com. You will usually get a great deal on airfare/hotel rates, with the sacrifice of not knowing the specifics until you pay. Last time I paid $40 for a 4 star hotel in Vegas, and it was well worth it --- I ended up in Golden Nugget, which I liked a lot.

1. When you are expecting your baby, don't buy too much baby cloth. I know it's so tempting to buy the newborn cloth because they are so cute, but those will be only worn for a few times as babies grow so fast! Also I am sure you will get a lot of newborn cloths from your friends as gifts!

2. Sign up for all the baby related products' free reward program as early as possible. Example includes pampers.com, huggies.com, similac, enfamil, Babies R US (in store), you name it. You will receive tons of useful coupons and free samples.

3. Do not spend too much money on buying toys for your baby. Babies lose interest in old toys very rapidly. You can try making some toy using available things from your house. My daughter's favorite toy right now is the toothpick jar with a few pennies in it :-)

4. Try to save on the big items(Graco stroller, crib, swing, etc) by buying used ones. The ones with quality brand usually last forever. Ask your friends who have bigger kids, a lot of them would have stroller/crib that they would be happy to give to you. Or you can check craigslist, usually you can buy those items for 1/5 of the original price.

5. When you buy baby formula, use coupon (formula checks) whenever possible. As I mentioned, join the Similac or Enfamil club, they would send you formula checks every few weeks. If you don't have enough formula checks, do a simple search on ebay and you can buy them at discounted price. Usually $4 can get you $10 in formula checks.