Carnival of Personal Finance

Don't Be Superfrugal On Your Wife's Birthday

And don't just buy flowers on her birthday and anniversary, either.

How to Climb Out of Debt

Step Four of the No Debt Plan continues, here.

Make Every Dollar Count

Yea, pinning them on the wall is a dumb idea.

Not Every Vacation Has To Be Fancy

Although it's nice when they are.

Have Your Cake, Eat It, Too

Using the protection of credit cards and making money while doing it? Genius.

Sep 10, 200750

Carnival of Personal Finance #117

Categories: Carnival of Personal Finance, Personal Finance

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Update #2: Ack! There were a few code errors that meant some posts were skipped (gotta love HTML). I’ve fixed the code and the articles are correctly appearing below. Please accept my apologies… and check out the new articles!

Welcome to the 117th Edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance. I’m Kevin, the interim managing editor of this fine institution for this week.

As always there were a multitude of submittals for this edition. The final count came in to 76 entries. Please note that not every entry was included. Some were not on topic, others were obvious product pitches. I hope you’ll find this edition to include the best of the best. Content for this week has been broken down into various topics. Investing and general money discussions are the thickest section of the carnival this week. I haven’t used fancy graphics or anything like that. I am going for a streamlined, easy to read Carnival this week. (That and my hard drive on my desktop went caput and my graphics generating abilities are severely limited.)

Please feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed. Additionally, you may enjoy some of my more popular posts (full list on the right sidebar), including Selling Your Cell Phone: A Look at Your Options and Setting Goals.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoy!

Edit/Update: I critiqued a couple of articles I disagreed with. I did this not to be mean, but I wanted to include the posts in the Carnival. Discussion is what the web is about, right?

To start, here are the major headlines from this week:

My pick for best article of the Carnival goes to:
Silicon Valley Real Estate Blog - How to Not Overpay When Buying a Home. This is a very detailed post from a real estate professional. Highly recommend you take a look.

Other solid articles:

The Digerati Life - Surefire Ways to Shrug off Market Slides

KCLau - Dissecting Leona Hemsley’s Will

Gather Little by Little - Personal Finance is like Driving a Car

Honorable Mentions:

Saving Advice - 25 More Money Confessions

The Tao of Making Money gives a thorough analysis of 0% credit card offers drying up.

Moolanomy - Does Dollar Cost Averaging work?

Consumerism Commentary - 5 Romantic Outdoor Day Dates Under $30. The old saying, “A happy wife leads to a happy husband” (or something along those lines) applies here. Props to Consumerism Commentary for being the only romantically related post in this Carnival.

…and now for the rest of the festivities!

Home Ownership/Mortgages/Moving:

Make Your Nut ponders, Am I subprime? Obviously not, and neither are we! (Although we are getting an 80/15 loan).

Don’t let your home remodeling project financials run amok, says Finance is Personal.

A Penny Closer reminds us that A New Home Costs More than a Mortgage. We’ve more than doubled our budgeted utility expenses for when we move into our new home.

Fiscal Musings wants us to Consider the Cost of Living when searching for a job.

Investing:

Four Pillars warns us to Ignore the Last Ten Years.

At the same time, Home Finance Freedom wants us to Ignore Average Annual Return Rates. I found this article very interesting. It really shows off how mutual funds market to us. Returns are not always up, up, up even though the ads are all so positive.

DaxDesai tells us how to Set up a self directed IRA so we can invest in different types of assets.

Growing Money wants us to be Emotionless When Investing.

Should your investments dance like Elaine from Seinfeld? Dough Roller thinks so.

The Dividend Guy argues for International Diversification when Dividend Investing.

Teaspoon Finance reminds us Why you should have a stop loss on your trades.

I’m sort of shocked by this one. My Retirement Blog shares that Ben Stein Advocates Variable Annuities. Of course he means only in certain situations. I’m still shocked!

The Amatureist Financial gives us the skinny on Options, Options, Options.

Should you invest in Index or Actively Managed Funds? Just Ask Mr. Credit Card.

Everyday Finance offers an Unusual Way to Get in on IPOs.

Trader’s Narrative points out why Insider Buying/Selling is important.

The Div Guy shares How to get started with dividend investing with DRIPs.

One post I disagreed with is from StockTradingToGo - Extreme Trading. The author argues that if you put in enough effort, you can “play the game and become rich.” I disagree solely on the basis that investing is not a game to play. It is not betting.

General Money Thoughts:

Money Consciousness - Attribution Theory

MoneyNing - Procrastination

Agonist - The Last Wave of This Expansion - a very detailed, in depth look at the economy

Fund Mastery Blog discusses Mutual funds sharing more of their secrets than expected.

Blogging Away Debt gives us some pointers on How to verify it is your credit card company calling.

My Wealth Builder wants to Get the Monkies off His Back.

Debt Free 4 Ever takes it to the big man with Gas prices and disparity.

Ask Dong if you want to know What’s Next?

Another post I wasn’t convinced by was from Advanced Personal Finance - Sports Betting and Investing. Sports betting and investing are so different I can’t find words for it. Sports betting — any gambling — is designed to take money out of your pocket and keep it for the house. In sports betting, you are betting on a group of individual performances with little information on what to expect from performance. (That is unless you work for a team.) Investing in public companies you have a wealth of both company and industry information. You will never have a complete picture, but you are much better equipped to make a good decision. Take Return on Invested Capital. Generally, companies with high ROIC are solid investments. Occasionally they will lose value in stock price due to circumstances, but are overall good values. Is there something equivalent in sports betting?

Budgeting/Money Management/Emergency Fund:

Paid Twice tells us to Give Yourself a Payday Advance.

Queer Cents - Three Tips for Tracking Expenses Online

There were 3 articles on making time to manage your finances:

No Credit Needed - Make time to manage your finances

The Happy Rock - Marriage and Money - The Budget Meeting

We’re in Debt - Scheduling Financial Sit-Downs

Passive Income:

Edith Yeung - The Money Series - Steps to Creating Passive Income

Disputes:

My Money Thinks - 10 Tips for Resolving Financial Disputes

Save Money: