Friday Finance Followers – Yakezie Style

For those of you who haven’t heard about it, the Yakezie challenge was started by Sam the Financial Samurai as a way to challenge his peers to improve their Alexa search rankings. I am part of this group of “Yakezie” as he calls them and I am using this challenge as a way to hopefully promote my blog further and increase readership. The challenge has really resulted in a smaller subset of the personal finance blogging community rallying around each other to help promote their hard work. When I started the challenge my Alexa rank was 185,584 today it is 151,739 which is almost back to where I was in September 2009. I owe a lot of that increase to the Yakezie challenge and making me aware.

As a reader there are two ways you can help us out:

1. Install an Alexa Tracking Toolbar: Firefox/IE or Chrome So your site visits count towards our rankings
2. Review our sites on Alexa: It is easy to leave a review, here is a link to my Alexa Review page

Now that you have installed the toolbar and reviewed Suburban Dollar check out these great posts by some of my fellow Yakezie:

@DeliverAwayDebt asks if you can be content while in debt. I think people can certainly be content while in debt but that doesn’t paint the right picture of the article. Jeff discusses how you can be content while working to pay down you debt. Making sacrifices doesn’t have to mean you can’t enjoy yourself.

@EnemyofDebt wrote EOD Short Story: Episode 1. This was a clever little back and forth between a downtrodden gent and life himself. Life is doing his best to make the debtor wise up and get motivated to crush debt. I agree just as much as the next guy that debt is evil, but I also think we should live in the now and not hope for something better down the road. The key is balance and restraint and you can be both debt free and have a good time.

@ExtremeJacob likens a family budgets to a sinking ship, constantly “leaking” money. I thought the comparison was clever and not necessarily off target but not everyone wants to wear the same two pairs of jeans and one pair of shorts. I personally only own two pairs of jeans but several pairs of shorts. Spending money and enjoying life doesn’t necessarily mean you are “leaking” money out of your budget. What good does it do me to keep my ship tight if I can’t enjoy the cruise.

@WellHeeledBlog says we should spend time not money to improve our performance. I agree with this post 100%, you can not purchase performance. A $400 driver isn’t going to improve your golf game if you hook it every time. That isn’t the club’s fault it is your crappy swing. You can’t buy performance but by taking the time to invest in improving yourself your performance will increase.

@FiscalGeek has a pocket sized solution to your budgeting woes. By taking paper and magically folding it you can carry your budget around in your “manpurse” or wallet. Personally I have way to much stuff in my wallet already but this is a pretty neat solution to carrying around just about any document you need in a small form.

Tagged as: Friday Finance Followers