I hate it when I get to the store -- like the Carter's outlet near me -- and find that I had to have signed up for their email updates to get a discount. Of course, being a frugal consumer (read: cheap bee-yotch), I am happy to take 10 minutes to step away from the register, sign up for the emails using my smartphone, and present my coupon like I'd planned to do that all along. Never mind the irony of being a cheapo with a smartphone. I'd sooner give up my dishwasher.There's just one problem with the money-saving emails: Sometimes the time you spend unraveling the exact deal, and how much you can actually save, costs more than the savings. And sometimes, if you really look, you aren't saving anything. When did my money-saving email deals turn into spam-scams?

Wouldn't it be nice if every dream job had a dream salary to go along with it? Unfortunately, that's far from the case. So many glamorous-sounding careers pay a pittance. I guess people who have them should count their lucky stars that they're doing something they love. But that isn't exactly going to get them through the recession or pay the bills.

But some of the jobs with the lowest salaries are totally unexpected. Click through the slideshow below and see if you're as bowled over as we were to learn that these careers are so financially thankless.

What other cool jobs can you think of that pay terribly?

Image via ph-stop/Flickr

Ah, vanity plates. Almost invariably, by the time you're old enough to get one, you no longer have the desire to announce to everyone behind you that you're 1H0T1 or MISSTHANG. I myself had always intended to get one, till I realized that if I were to commit some kind of crime, it would be easy for eyewitnesses to identify my vehicle. Not that I'm planning any drive-by snowballings or bank robberies, but it did seem prudent to avoid being super obvious. Anyway, a guy in Washington, D.C., where weirdly huge and stupid fines are de rigeur, did not get the memo. In addition, he chose a vanity plate that ended up costing him much more than the $50 the DMV requires. Like tens of thousands of dollars more. How?

Hey, billing errors happen. We’ve all opened a utility bill and said, “This doesn’t seem right,” and 9 times out of 10, it’s all resolved with a quick phone call. Even when it’s an aquarium-sized water bill for a three-bedroom house. But what if that billing error happened, and you’ve authorized electronic billing? If you’re like one Chicago-area family, you could end up overpaying by more than a hundred grand for a month’s worth of electricity. Oops.

Is there anything that's more depressing than looking at your holiday gift list and wondering: how am I going to pay for all of these? The older we get, the more people it seems clog up that list. Is it any wonder that 40 percent of Americans say they flat out won't be holiday shopping this year because they're terrified of going into debt? What a bummer!

Folks, you don't have to go all or nothing to have a good holiday, I promise. Just doing a little trim of the holiday gift list should do it ... and before you say, "But I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings," that's possible too. Just check out this list of perfectly plausible ways to kick people off your present list:

Occupy Connecticut Light and Power! The electric company of the Constitution State was charging an old Italian guy $220 a month for power in his condo. He knew the bills were wrong because he hardly used any electricity or gas at home. Meanwhile, his barbershop was tricked out with electric everything and plenty of A/C, and its bill only topped out at $150 a month.

He kept trying to tell the company that something was wrong. They kept saying the only thing wrong was he wasn’t sending checks fast enough. This went on for 10 years, before the guy’s son went in and straightened things out. (Why did that take 10 years, anyway?) In the end, they finally had to cut him a check ... for guess how much?

Journalist Caitlin Kelly didn't intend to spend more than two years working behind the counter at The North Face. Yet that's exactly what happened when this veteran newspaper reporter faced an uncertain financial future and needed to make ends meet. What followed was Kelly's eye-opening account of life in customer service and sales in Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail.

For anyone who has worked in retail, these humiliations and occasional triumphs will ring true. And for anyone who has been a difficult customer -- especially around the holidays -- this story will give you some insight as to how the other half lives. But you don't yell at minimum wage employees, do you?

Kelly is also positioned properly to give you some great holiday shopping tips before you head out next weekend. Here, the author of Malled gives you 10 tips (and two bonus tech tips!) on navigating the mall this holiday season.

When your two-bedroom bungalow gets a water bill big enough for an aquarium, of course your antennae are going to go up. But keeping your eye on every household bill on a monthly basis can be more of a challenge. Still, it’s worth it, as one woman discovered. The error on Linda Sacash’s cable bill wasn’t huge, but it added up to a big difference in her bottom line. And even though the company told her she couldn’t do anything about it, she kicked up a fuss and got what was coming to her. Here’s what happened ...