The Digerati Life

I always enjoy going to Ginger’s site — the blog called “Girls Just Wanna Have Funds”. I find myself invigorated every time I pay her a visit, thanks to the vibrant colors of her site and the energy she puts forth in her posts. Well this time, Ginger brings us an awesome Carnival of Personal Finance, which I was happy to be part of. Our post on Best Places For Your Money When The Stock Market Tanks made it as an Editor’s Choice! Thank you to Ginger for presenting a great array of finance articles, some of which got my attention:

• Funny About Money: On The Trail Of The Elusive Job
• The Passive Dad: Free Creative Ideas to Help Friends Facing Foreclosure or Bankruptcy
• Ask Mr. Credit Card: How To Dispute An Item On Your Credit Report

In the meantime, Dollar Frugal hosts a hefty Festival of Frugality, Benjamin Franklin Edition, which contain these informative and timely frugal posts:

• The Personal Financier: Roller Coaster Ride In A Manic Depressive Stock Market
• Financial Wellness Project: Save, Don’t Borrow: Building Up For Our Japan Fund
• Almost Frugal: Stay Warmer in Cold Weather

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Photo by Digital Sextant

It’s been a while since I got tagged with a financial meme. This time, Aryn from Sound Money Matters tagged me to answer the question: What is some of the best financial advice you’ve received?

I grew up in a household that didn’t really talk about money that much — at least, to the extent that I would have liked to. To this day, my father doesn’t really like it when I talk about money; whenever I bring the subject up, he is quick to remind me that “money isn’t everything”. I guess it’s never really been an exciting topic for my parents, who are both hard-working people who have a pretty relaxed view about finance. All I can say is that while growing up, I noticed that my parents never fussed or worried about money (regardless of how much or how little they had of it), which took a backstage to everything else. Money came second to faith, family and community.

But I’ll have to say that one of the most meaningful pieces of financial advice I’ve ever gotten, actually came from my dear old Dad. He told me to study well and to get into the field of technology and computer science. He advised me to pursue a career that was in high demand; if I did so, then I shouldn’t have an issue about keeping a job or making enough bucks.

Well, I guess he was right. I have to say thanks to my Dad for the awesome advice!

Now if you’re reading this and you have a blog, consider yourself tagged. Won’t you share with us the best advice you’ve come across?

Now on to financial articles I enjoyed this week!

Recommended Personal Finance Reads

• Five Cent Nickel shares some lessons from the stock market game — a game his ten year old son is playing at school.
• Blueprint For Financial Prosperity shares with us how to sell our gold jewelry. Wait, don’t we need to hold on to our gold now that the economy and the stock market are on the rocks?
• Get Rich Slowly: J.D. tracks the time and money he spends on growing his own food and maintaining his lovely edible garden.
• Mighty Bargain Hunter barely avoided carrying a credit card balance, but worked out a way to pay off the debt on his card.
• No Credit Needed walks us through how he allocates the funds in his savings account for various financial goals.
• Lazy Man and Money: I was amused by these three ridiculous and stupid ideas that can save you money, care of Lazy Man. How about these wild ways to save? Or these equally outrageous ways?
• The Smarter Wallet shares the truth about bank fees — what else can your bank be hiding?
• Frugal Dad offers unique strategies to recession-proof your household.
• Money Smart Life: discusses how busy parents can handle a home-based business. This sure fits our household to a T!
• Gen X Finance: Should FDIC protection limits be raised from $100,000 to $250,000?
• The Sun’s Financial Diary ponders whether gold is a good choice to hedge against inflation.
• Million Dollar Journey brings up the “R” word for “global recession”.
• Brip Blap: could the economic crisis have a hand at devaluing MBAs?
• My Dollar Plan: if you live to eat (who doesn’t ?) then try out this yummy and frugal chicken soup.
• Rich Credit Debt Loan shares with us how to get motivated to organize our finances.
• Money Ning gives us 10 activities for the bear market. I’ve written an article along these lines discussing effective strategies to leverage a weak stock market.

Additional News Around The Financial Blogosphere

• Penny Jobs: Why We Should Put Our Hope Back In Capitalism
• So Cal Savvy: I Am Young And I’m Buying Stocks On Sale
• Lance Turner: Credit Crisis Further Weakens Big Newspapers
• Twenties Money: 5 Tips for Job Fair Success
• Green Panda Treehouse: Joint Accounts: How We Budget Deposits and Withdrawals
• Free From Broke: Happy 1st Birthday! Congratulations on hitting your first anniversary milestone, and may there be many years of fun-filled blogging ahead of you!

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Within the next week or two, I’m having a fellow personal finance blogger and Miami Herald columnist, Sharon Harvey Rosenberg of The Frugal Duchess, share some of her thoughts here with you as she promotes her new book “The Frugal Duchess: How To Live Well and Save Money.” Sharon will be launching a book tour both online (and off?) to give us a chance to learn more about this project. For all you money saving mavens out there, do give this book a look see — I’m waiting for my own copy at this time with much anticipation, especially after reading a little about what went into it, in Sharon’s blog post about her book writing experience: “What I Learned About Money From Writing A Book”.

Here’s a little bit about what she says about her book:

Instead of writing a how-to book, Bob suggested that I combine my Miami Herald columns with a narrative. I took his advice on that matter and others. It was a good formula and allowed me to mix finance with stories about my family. My vault of family tales, includes portraits of my unusual grandmothers, hard-working women from the South, who left their husbands and children for assorted reasons.

I’m intrigued!

So please stay tuned for more on this book tour, which we’ll be presenting to you here over the next several weeks.

For now, let’s check out the action at a few carnivals.

Debt Kid presented a very special Meltdown Edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance, with the following great reads among 56 money articles:

• Money and Fitness Blog: Renting vs. Selling your house: a cost breakdown
• Financial Blogger: A Story About Banks: They Are NOT In The Real Estate Business
• The Dividend Guy: Bit The Bullet and Actually Bought A Stock — How Absurd!
• The Wisdom Journal: Where Do We Go From Here? How About Back To The Basics

Value For Your Life hosted the Festival of Frugality, Gratitude Edition, where I enjoyed these selections:

• Simply Forties: Frugality vs Environmental Responsibility
• Cheap Healthy Good: Veggie Might: Don’t Fear The Bean Curd
• Bible Money Matters: Using Coupons Can Cost You Money!

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Things are a little rough at home right now as a few more members of my household have picked up the flu I had earlier. So I’m now groggily manning the fort, attending to the infirm. I’ll probably have to keep this a bit short.

Here are some recent money articles I had a chance to look at:

Recommended Personal Finance Reads

• Free Money Finance: Curious about how our politicians are handling their charitable giving? FMF shares the details with us here.
• Blueprint For Financial Prosperity: Jim gives us an update on his latest vegetable garden haul. Though I have a garden too, I’m slightly envious that I won’t be able to eat my flowers .
• All Financial Matters shares one reader’s reasoning why younger people aren’t saving enough.
• Lazy Man and Money discusses the $700 billion bailouts that have been cruising through the financial industry in recent weeks.
• Frugal Dad suggests some great frugal activities for the weekend.
• Money Smart Life covers some career tips from co-workers and reveals the results of a career survey.
• Gen X Finance shares a yummy and cheap(!) steak chili recipe.
• The Sun’s Financial Diary has gone on vacation but gives us a peek at his first day on vacation in China.
• Million Dollar Journey looks at the pros and cons of a career in financial services.
• Brip Blap offers some thoughts on frugality and self-sufficiency.
• My Dollar Plan: Have you done all these moves for your 401k yet?
• Rich Credit Debt Loan gives us some basics on managing our checkbook.
• Money Smarts reflects on the financial events of the past week and some of the lessons learned.

That’s all I can muster for now…. I hope to be back on track in a few days.

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I’ve got a fantastic cheap date planned but I’ve been felled by the flu.

So You Think You Can Dance photo by starpulse

Ugh! Just as the carnivals are heralding the start of autumn, I’ve caught my first bug of the season. Whether it’s the cold or flu, I’m not feeling too hot, am feeling extremely lethargic and am functioning at a snail’s space, so I hope I’m still able to do a decent job with telling you about what’s out there at our weekly personal finance carnivals.

I *really* need to get better and recover from this bug as I’m all set to attend a planned date with my spouse — one I’ve been anticipating for some time. We received a couple of free tickets to the “So You Think You Can Dance” tour — courtesy of Wise Bread who conducted a fun giveaway for the tickets when they debuted the “Women of Personal Finance” spotlight event. Hopefully, I get over this bug in time to make it to the tour tomorrow evening!

We sure need something like a night out to take our minds away from the unsettling news that have been swirling around the markets over the last week.

So how is everybody else coping? Let’s check out the carnivals and find out:

Sound Money Matters puts together a fall edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance where I picked up these articles:

• Money and Such: Asking for a Raise? Consider Context
• Cash Money Life: How to File a FEMA Claim
• Broke Grad Student: Girl Selling Her Virginity To Pay For College (yikes!)

The carnival host temporarily bailed out of The Festival of Frugality. But My Two Dollars eventually got it together, presenting a list of great posts which included these gems:

• Saving To Invest: House Prices Decline Around the World
• Paid Twice: Just Because You Clip It Doesn’t Mean You Have To Buy It
• Gather Little By Little: Brand Spankin Used

The Real Estate Carnival found its way to Pasadena. Thanks so much to Doug Willis from up2date realestate.com for awarding us with The President’s Trophy for our entry about an unusual investment property turned green home.

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Before I launch into my rather massive linkfest this week, I’d like to cover an interesting discussion I’ve come across at the Wesabe forums lately, which I’ve been visiting in my spare time. This particular discussion is about dealing with spousal debt.

What do you do if your spouse has a spending addiction and is irresponsible about their finances? The consensus: don’t rely on a financial rescue package like the one the government has been using on our economy. Executing a bailout won’t resolve the problem behavior (and in fact may encourage it).

It gets pretty dicey when your partner racks up the credit card debt, and just doesn’t know how to stop spending. Here’s how the Wesabe community responds to this issue:

How To Handle Your Partner’s Credit Card Debt and Spending Addiction

#1 Don’t convert credit card debt into home equity debt. It’ll just free up your spouse’s cards so that he or she can do more damage. Unless you freeze or cut up those cards and commit to paying down debt, any loan modification efforts will only lead to increased spending temptations and additional debt.

#2 Encourage your spouse to seek debt and psychological counseling. This can be tricky. Have you ever seen the show on television called “Intervention”? You can only instigate change if you desire to. Unfortunately, many people don’t see their debt as a problem and continue to be in denial.

#3 Don’t bail your spouse out. Discuss the possibility of separating your finances with your partner who cannot manage their debt. See if you can work out an agreement wherein you keep separate financial accounts.

#4 Approach the issue with sensitivity. Be supportive and provide a positive attitude and loving approach to your spouse’s problems.

#5 Become your household’s main financial manager and give your spouse a spending allowance. Can you make your spouse agree to a financial plan? You’ll have to work as a team on this. You’re basically imposing strict limits on your household spending.

#6 Help your spouse gain more of a financial education. Provide your partner with financial resources such as books and articles on how to manage one’s money.

#7 Visit a financial professional: a debt counselor or a financial planner can help straighten out your financial issues and provide valuable input, third party observations and expertise to address your concerns.

As I mentioned, I picked up these situational pointers from the Wesabe community groups, where you can find more helpful discussions of the financial sort. It’s definitely a great place to visit!

Now on to some more discussions around the blogosphere….

Recommended Personal Finance Reads

• Five Cent Nickel discusses the government’s “Rescue Package” for the economy.
• Blueprint For Financial Prosperity talks about how long time Lehman employees have been wiped out by their company’s bankruptcy. Lesson? Diversify! But while the market was tumbling last week, Jim decided to do a little day trading.
• The Simple Dollar: Trent shares 5 great ways he spends his weekends to live frugally. What DIY projects do you do?
• Mighty Bargain Hunter covers the difference between an accumulation and a collection. Case in point: a coin collection.
• No Credit Needed shows us how to calculate the average daily balance of our charges using a free spreadsheet.
• Lazy Man and Money has a guest post from Master Your Card about how to get the best deal when buying a car.
• The Smarter Wallet also has some car buying tips for the used car shopper.
• Frugal Dad has a guest post from The Writer’s Coin on how the market crisis can help your retirement.
• Money Smart Life: discusses the financial turbulence of the last week, as have I in my recent articles referencing the best places to put your money right now and your savings accounts in problem banks.
• Gen X Finance asks if you got suckered into a fake gas price hike from hurricane Ike. I’ve noticed that a few bloggers (such as JLP from All Financial Matters) were affected by hurricane Ike, as they’ve reported from the trenches.
• The Sun’s Financial Diary reports how the Chinese stock market has lost 70% of its value in less than a year. Yowza! Some bailouts went into place for the Chinese market as well, resulting in a 9.46% one day surge.
• Million Dollar Journey has a guest post from QCash on his first foray into real estate investing.
• Brip Blap talks about building wealth in an age of thieves.
• My Dollar Plan shares 29 steps she took to leave the workforce at age 29.
• Rich Credit Debt Loan suggests ways to undo the results of financial trauma.
• Money Ning reflects on the steps we take to fix our finances and offers us a great truism: disaster prevention trumps disaster recovery.

Additional Financial Articles I Enjoyed

• The Personal Financier: How Can They Possibly Afford That? Or Is Money In The Eye Of The Beholder?
• Nursing School Search: 100 Essential Resources to Achieve Personal Well-Being
• Sentient Money: Why Is The Financial Meltdown Happening?
• My Super-Charged Life: You Can Literally Think Your Way To Success And A Good Life
• My Family’s Money: How To Make Your Child A Millionaire!

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The last couple of days have been nuts for us harried investors. I long for the day when we can look back at all this, shrug our shoulders and talk about how our portfolio survived this period not too much the worse for wear. With ongoing foreclosures and failures in the banking and insurance industries posting a constant drumbeat in the news, it doesn’t feel like the mood will change anytime soon.

I have a few things to do in the financial front and it’s looking more like this is a good time to leverage a weak stock market and make some financial moves — at lower stock market prices. I’m evaluating a possible Roth IRA conversion for me and my spouse, maybe doing some portfolio adjustments like adding some new asset classes to our portfolio, and even (gasp!) checking out some annuity products. I’ll wait for the markets to calm down a bit before doing anything.

Anything just as exciting in the carnivals?

The Personal Financier did a great job putting together the Carnival of Personal Finance this week. Here are some finds I’d like to bring to your attention:

• Warren Buffet’s “10 Ways To Get Rich”? @ Can I Get Rich on a Salary?
• How Having A Company Can Make More Money Through Tax Management @ The Financial Blogger
• Credit Cards Are Excellent Financial Tools @ Ask Mr. Credit Card
• How Bad Is The Housing Market? Home For Sale: $1 @ My Investing Blog

The Festival of Frugality can be found over at Living Almost Large where I spotted these cool articles:

• Make your own hot-flash spray, and other frugal hacks @ MSN Smart Spending
• How to Cut a Little Boy’s Hair @ Almost Frugal
• Extravagantly Frugal: Friends In High Places @ Not The Jet Set

Also, My Daily Dollars featured a great Carnival of Money Stories where my post: Basic Business Advice from an Accidental Entrepreneur, was selected as an Editor’s Pick. Many thanks for this honor!

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The Consumerist just reported that apparently, Toys R Us discriminates against young grandparents. The toy store is offering a 20% discount coupon for grandparents, except that you need to be 50 or older to be eligible for the discount. Tut tut.

So if you’re thinking of using this coupon to buy goodies for your grandkids, it will only be effective if you’re way over the hill. Maybe the coupon should say “We Love OLD grandparents?”

Shockingly, I have friends my age who are already grandparents (but I’m certainly not going to be one for a good long while) and some of them are even attending that alumni reunion I’ve been trying to avoid.

The coupon thing doesn’t really bother me though — I’m a little bit more perturbed by the fact that I’ve got peers my age who have grandchildren. That’s just too weird a thought for me to absorb right now as I think it’s still quite a stretch to think of myself in such a role, given that I feel stuck in a time warp sometimes and forget that I’m no longer in my 20’s. I’m still busy trying to fund some 529 plans here….

Let’s move on right along then — how about joining me in absorbing these financial articles instead?

Recommended Personal Finance Reads

• Free Money Finance talks about the tipping point for buying a new car.
• Get Rich Slowly brings to our attention some budget killers in the form of some of our favorite foods!
• Lazy Man and Money has a guest post on reverse mortgages. Here are some pros and cons.
• Frugal Dad points out that half of us are living paycheck to paycheck and urges us to start saving!
• Money Smart Life: Changing jobs? Find out what expenses are associated with your job change.
• Gen X Finance compares some big-named financial web sites. For another review, you can check my own comparisons between Mint and Wesabe.
• The Sun’s Financial Diary ponders whether small-cap stocks are making a comeback. Is it time to buy small caps? Sun thinks it may still be too early.
• Million Dollar Journey wonders what should be considered as savings. For instance, should you consider only your liquid assets as savings?
• Brip Blap reflects on the events of 9-11. Though I somehow missed ruminating over its anniversary this year, I consider this event as one of the most traumatic that I’ve ever had in my life, and one that has changed how I live and think in many ways.
• My Dollar Plan, one of our resident retirement experts, shares a great strategy to avoid taxes when you do a Roth IRA conversion. Since we don’t have any deductible IRAs around, then I’m guessing we won’t have much in the way of taxes when we do a conversion!
• Rich Credit Debt Loan offers some recommendations for saving without even trying. Great suggestions!

Additional Financial Articles I Enjoyed

• The Top Five Pre-Baby Money Matters to Discuss with Your Partner Now @ The Prosper Blog
• My Timer @ Remodeling This Life
• Carpool Your Way To Happiness @ My Daily Dollars
• Woops, Bought a Lenovo IdeaPad S10 Netbook @ Stop Buying Crap
• The Next Great Company @ Dividends4Life
• Why Do I Need A Will? @ Quest To Be Debt Free

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