$55 prize for your best under $50 Valentine's Day gift ideas

Four days until Valentine's Day, so help me help out the people with bigger hearts than wallets. Today and tomorrow send me your best  suggestions for Valentine's Day gifts under $50. Get creative. No flowers, candy or blanket-on-the-floor matinee here. Get your imaginations working; you've only got a week to make him or her feel like a million bucks on a shoestring budget.

As a bonus, I'm giving away a promo code worth $55, courtesy of my partner CSN Stores. Best answer gets the prize, which you can use toward anything at CSN, which has more than 200 online shops where you can find everything from stylish handbags, a L shaped desk, or great cookware!

Best idea gets the prize, so be creative. I'm taking as many ideas as you want to send me either here or on Twitter, so send a bunch. It is Valentine's Day, and grown folk do like to get all happy time with theirs. If your idea's all hot & steamy, that's fine by me, but let's not get too explicit. Suggestive's cool, x-rated ain't.

Extended shoe giveaway; more on black women's wealth

Today's super busy at the 9-5 so no full post, just a round-up.

First, I've decided to extend the deadline to get your questions in for the women's shoe giveaway until March 30 instead of March 15 because I've gotten so many great questions that I haven't had time to answer them all. So ladies, you've got the rest of the month to ask me a question here, tweet me or ask me on formspring.

I'm giving away a pair of the shoes pictured below from ShoesGotSole for the best personal finance question from a woman this month (March is Women's History Month). The shoes are being provided by CSN Stores, which also sells kids bedding, modern furniture and other things, so be sure to check them out in thanks for hooking up the giveaway.

Next week, I'm going to go hard some more on this data about black women and wealth. Earlier this week I posted the results of research that found single black women's median wealth was lower than that of married couples and that of single black, white and Hispanic men or women.

This morning I saw a report of new Federal Reserve data showing that net worth nationally rose slightly for the third straight quarter. That's good news during a deep recession but it begs the question of whether black women's abysmal net worth is following the trend. I'll get into that next week.

As well, the inevitable, which I hoped wouldn't happen did: people are using the black men-black women's net worth data to fuel more played-out "gender wars" conversations. Someone texted me last night about a conversation in which the data came up and some men were calling black women "greedy" and "too ambitious". So I'm going to do some thinking and a few interviews and dig into why the data is definitely NOT fuel for an "us vs. them" conversation.

Have a great weekend and check back in next week.

Women's History Month giveaway: free shoes for the best women & money question

Yesterday began Women's History Month, so for the rest of the month of March I'm emphasizing things that will help my women readers better manage their money.

This is important for any number of reasons that I'm sure I don't have to explain: despite shifts in attitudes about women in the workplace over the past two generations and huge gains in the number of women climbing corporate ladders, pay inequities for men and women in the US are still persistent. And that's made worse by the fact that increasingly single women are the sole breadwinners in many households -- my own mother was one of them as I grew up.

So this month, I'll be taking a look at statistics regarding pay equity, discussing the dynamic money plays in relationships (though this affects both genders, it's a topic many more women have asked me about than men), and especially encouraging women to write in with their questions about managing their cash.

With that last thing in mind, I've got a surprise -- a giveaway. This month, I'm partnering with CSN Stores, a company that has more than 200 web sites offering kids bedding, modern furniture, cookware and thousands of other things. I'm giving away a pair of shoes from their site ShoesGotSole. Yep, a free pair of strappy pumps with a 2-3/4-inch heel that you can rock as soon as the warm weather comes:

So here's the deal: the shoes are going to the person who between today and March 15 asks me the best question about women and money (and who follows a couple other rules):

1) Leave your questions in the comments page of this post (use that link -- there's no limit on the number of questions you can ask);

AND

2) Tweet about the giveaway with a link back to this post and include my handle (@k_dot_re) in the tweet so I know you did it;

OR

3) Include a link to this post on your blog or elsewhere, and let me know that you did it (it doesn't count if I don't see it!).

Also, be sure to visit one of CSN's sites, especially AllChildrensFurniture. By way of disclaimer, CSN is generous enough to sponsor this giveaway; I'm not being paid to review or promote them but the hope is to help them build traffic for their sites.

So go forth and ask good, intriguing questions. I'm looking forward to answering them all.