13 things you can get for free

By Forbes.com

With Wall Street smarting, the dollar withering and food and fuel prices soaring, we could all stand a little something for nothing. If only there were indeed a free lunch.

Good news: After a bit of searching, we uncovered a bunch of 100% discounts hiding in plain sight. In many cases, the only effort that's needed to claim them involves the 15 seconds it takes to type in a name and an e-mail address.

We divided our findings into five categories: financial services, entertainment, travel, advice and health care. Look hard enough, and you'll no doubt find plenty more where these came from:

Financial services

Credit monitoring: Get up to nine months of free credit monitoring from TransUnion. Thanks to a recent legal settlement, the company is required to offer free access to credit scores, as well as free notifications of changing scores, to anyone who has obtained a credit card within the past 20 years.

Through Sept. 24, you can claim your free service without providing a credit card number or even your Social Security number. (Suspect your score needs a boost? Join MSN Money's Great Credit Score Race.)

Stock trading: Think it's time to go bargain hunting? Zecco, an online brokerage, wants to grease your re-entry by giving away 10 stock trades per month. There's no minimum-balance requirement in the first month. After that, continuing customers still get their first 10 trades per month for free, though they must maintain minimum account balances of $2,500.

Tax preparation: If you're age 60 or older, serve in the U.S. military or earn less than $40,000 a year, you can qualify for free tax-return preparation services, care of the Internal Revenue Service and throngs of trained volunteers at thousands of sites all over the U.S. Check out the details on the IRS Web site.

Entertainment

Free flicks and shows: Instead of spending $2 at the iTunes store for an episode of "Family Guy" or $10 for the movie "The Big Lebowski," go online to Hulu and get them free, for viewing on your computer. Hulu's inventory of 100 movies and 400 TV shows includes titles from Fox, NBC Universal, MGM, Sony Pictures Television and Warner Brothers. (See "Kill the cable box: Get free TV.")

Sports gambling: Online gambling has always been illegal, even though people got away with it for years. CentSports.com skirts this pesky problem by bankrolling its customers. Users start off with 10 cents in their accounts, provided by CentSports, and use it to bet on any event for which Las Vegas bookmakers set a line.

Accumulate $20 in winnings, and you can cash out a minimum of $10 (sent by check in the mail). Losers risk nothing and get immediately re-staked with fresh dimes. (For more on CentSports.com, check out "A legal alternative to online gambling.")

Free tunes: Napster is no longer free, but there are legal alternatives to downloading free music, including MyMojo.

For a better, more customized radio experience on the cheap, check out Pandora.com. Just enter an artist, and the site will generate playlists from that band and others within its genre. Better yet: There are no commercials.

Continued: Travel deals

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