If you've never heard of Freecycle, you need to check it out!  I have been a member for about 6 months now and it has done wonders in cutting my household budget.   Freecycle is a international network of "gifting groups" (administered through Yahoo groups) whose mission is to divert useable items from landfills by having members give them away to other members.  According to Freecycle, there are over 5 million members worldwide.  Here's how my local group describes what Freecycle is: 

Freecycle is...
- About keeping things out of the landfill.
- About sharing an item that retains usefulness.
- About clearing out our unused clutter.
- About COMMUNITY.

Freecycle is not...
- A lending closet.
- A free-for-all.
- A means to get as much free stuff as you can.
- A way to get more stuff to sell, EBAY, or auction.
- A way to keep from taking your broken items to the dump if that's where they really belong.
Since joining Freecycle, my wife and I have received clothing not only for ourselves, but our son as well.  We have also received toys for him, a TV set and other items.  We have also given away the clothes he has outgrown and cleared most of the stuff from our attic that we no longer use, which is much less aggravation (and much quicker) than trying to sell them on ebay or doing a yard sale.  There is often computers (albeit older ones), furniture, various household items posted in our local group, which is over 2000 members county-wide, many of which are close to us as there is a county sub-group in a nearby city that also has a lot of members.  

Basically how it works is that members post an offer to the Yahoo group for an item and then receive responses from interested takers.  It's up to the giver who they give the item to.  The parties then make arrangements for pickup. Once an item is taken, the member posts it as taken in the group message board.

Members may also post items that they are looking for (up to 5 per month) in our local group.  Members that only post wanteds and never post offers are generally not well received.  We rarely post wanteds but we recently got Dora The Explorer videos on a wanted post.  

It is recommended that you set your email settings to "individual emails" under the edit membership settings in your Freecycle group.  The only downside to this is that you get A LOT of emails.   It is not uncommon to get upwards of 100 emails a day from the Freecycle group.  However, by switching to "daily digest", it is unlikely that you will get items.

Overall, Freecycle has been a good experience for me as it has allowed me to allocate money elsewhere that would have been spent on things that I received from Freecycle.  I can't even recall the last time I have spent money at the mall (not that I spent a lot to begin with).  In addition, getting emails from grateful people receiving items makes me feel good as well.  I'd love to hear from fellow Freecyclers out there!