Taking aim at Amazon, Target has announced it will price match the online giant, as well as other online competitors, throughout the year.

The new online price-match guarantee, which Target temporarily offered during the holiday season, went into effect Tuesday, immediately after it was announced by Target corporate officials.

Shoppers will have seven days to find a lower price at Amazon, BestBuy.com, ToysRUs.com, BabiesRUs.com and Walmart.com. The guarantee also extends to Target.com.

If you still have gifts to buy for the holiday season, you're in luck.

Monday, Dec. 17, is "Free Shipping Day," making it one of the few times in life when it actually pays off to procrastinate.

More than 1,400 online retailers have signed up to participate, according to FreeShippingDay.com. Yep, there is an entire website dedicated to the day.

Along with the free shipping, retailers are guaranteeing your packages will arrive by Christmas Eve.

The holiday season is the busiest time of the year for a lot of small businesses. Here are tips from the Small Business Administration on how to get the most from holiday shoppers.

If you're shopping Cyber Monday sales today, don't forget about Ebates.

Ebates is doubling its cash-back rebate offers at more than 500 stores today for Cyber Monday.

If you spend $100 at Gap today, for example, you'll get 10 percent back from Ebates. A normal rebate at Gap is just 2 percent.

And remember, that's on top of any deals you get directly from the retailer.

Not familiar with Ebates? It's a shopping portal that pays you to shop.

Here's how it works:

Target is taking aim at online competitors with a new price-match policy for this year's holiday season.

For the first time, Target will match the prices of Amazon.com, Walmart.com, Bestbuy.com, Toysrus.com -- and even its own site, Target.com.

This is a great perk for holiday bargain shoppers, especially those armed with smartphones who can readily check online prices.

In the months leading up to our move from a 3,000 square-foot house with a walk-up attic to a home nearly half that size, I was on a mission:

Purge the clutter we had managed to collect in the course of 30 years of marriage and see how much cash we could raise for an anniversary trip.

If we didn't need it, love it or use it on a regular basis, we put it up for sale.

There's nothing like an impending move to speed the emptying of the closets, the far recesses of the attic and the frozen-in-time bedrooms of children who have left the nest.

But even now, a full year after our down-sizing, the purge continues. Beyond the cash toward our trip, we've found that less clutter has fringe benefits. There's less to dust, less to organize, less to haul to and from the attic.

Among the unwanted, unloved and no-longer necessary items we have sold:

a bookcase, an antique jelly cupboard, an antique wardrobe, a dining room table, two pieces of Ben Owen III pottery, a graphing calculator, dozens of books, Christmas decorations, old appliances, out-dated iPods, toys, clothes, broken jewelry and even a used rain barrel.

The kitty for our trip is hovering at $2,500, and counting.

Mostly, we've sold things online, but we've also toted items to consignment shops, sold unwanted gold and silver at a local jewelry store and rolled our "stuff" onto the driveway in the wee hours of a Saturday morning for a yard sale. We  even made a trip to the junk yard.

One of the biggest lessons we learned along the way is that it's a lot easier to purchase things than to purge them -- a huge deterrent to buying more clutter, by the way.

For all those reasons, cashing in on your clutter is a smart financial move. Like coins you find in your sofa cushions, it's found money.

Why not put it to work financing a vacation, shoring up the family emergency fund, adding to a child's college fund, boosting a Roth IRA or bankrolling a cash-only Christmas.

Here are a dozen places that will give you cold hard cash for your clutter:

My story about The Mint Market ran in today's Connect, our business and technology section. Go HERE to read the story.

Q&A with the Centsible Saver is an occasional feature on the blog. If you have a question for a future Q&A, leave it at the bottom of this post or email it to adunn@newsobserver.com. Ask me anything about coupons, rebates, saving money and living the frugal life.

This time around I've got questions about online coupon-printing sites, the liklihood of Super Double or Triple coupon promotions at Kroger and the best way to get multiple copies of coupons for items you regularly purchase.

Read on for the answers.....

The city of Raleigh has a new distinction as home to some of the most frugal-minded folks in America.

According to a study released this week by the website Coupons.com, the capital city ranks among the top five most frugal cities in the United States for 2011.

Atlanta was named the No. 1 most frugal city, followed by Tampa, St. Louis, Cincinnati and then Raleigh.

This year's No. 5 spot was a big move up in the frugal standings for Raleigh, which ranked as the 10th most frugal city in the 2010 survey,  said Patrick Crisp, a spokesman for Coupons.com, which is based in Mountain View, Calif.

Kroger's website has launched an online game promotion that gives you the chance to win free grocery products.

Click here to register or sign in to "race" in the Daytona 500. If your car wins, you get one of more than 80,000 prizes, which include bottles of Gatorade, jars of Ragu and tubs of Country Crock margarine.

You can instantly load the prize onto your Kroger loyalty card so it will be free the next time you shop.

Play once a day over the next two weeks. You're eligible to win up to two prizes.

I would say your odds of winning are pretty high. I won a bag of Cracker Jack the very first time I tried.