College sports are awesome. I think college sports trump the pros any day of the week. College kids have a passion that can’t be bought, and if you think football and basketball have some passion you should check out the kids in the lesser sports. Me, I have become enamored with college tennis. It is exciting, fast paced, and for the most part the kids have heart and take college seriously even though they hope to go pro.
If you live near a university and have never been to a tennis match you should check it out sometime. It is almost always free so it is a good frugal outing for the family. My three year old loves it and really enjoys watching the matches. The best part of college tennis is you get to yell and scream like you are at basketball.
Enough about my fascination with tennis, here are some finance articles to rock your Friday.
@FiscalGeek gives us the single most important financial step… STARTING! I love the title and love the article. You aren’t going to change anything if you don’t start working on it today. Get started, take a step in the right direction, it is the most important thing you can do to better your financial situation.
@Matt_SF hits the nail on the head with his post about buying during the doom and gloom. I am not an investor but when the proverbial doody hit the fan I was drooling to buy stock, I didn’t, but man I wanted to. Everyone was getting out of dodge but I wanted in. When there is a huge drop in the markets it is like a sale on companies I don’t get the fear. Hey bob let’s wait until it gets expensive again, then we can buy. WTF!
@Josh_Smith wants everyone to know what a lottery check scam looks like. This reminds me of the days of AOL and instant messages asking for your login name and password. For the most part the intent is obvious but people still fall for it. I have never been to Nigeria but I am pretty sure royalty there isn’t looking for me, and I know I never entered their lotto but hey lets cash this check, it’s all good.
@RevancheGS joined Gymboree but not for why you think. This article wasn’t what I expected and is a prime example of how thinking outside of the box can save you money. If you are looking at lots of purchases of a similar type it makes sense to get with a rewards program if you can.. right? I know I never thought about this, great idea.
@Clarifinancial brings up a good point about how permanent or whole life insurance may not be quite so permanent. What he fails to explain is in what instances they aren’t permanent. My understanding of some of these policies is that they eventually pay for themselves, if you haven’t paid enough in to cover your premiums until you die then you policy could lapse. Lets say you are quoted based on you dieing at 110 but you live to 120. It is possible that your policy could not be able to sustain your premiums until you die. I am sure that is only part of the problem, and hopefully accurate.
CONTESTS
Well-Heeled Blog is running a giveaway sponsored by Prosper.com. They are giving away $300 in cold hard cash. Check out the rules to enter over at the Well-Heeled Blog
Flexo has a pretty sweet contest up where he is giving away Turbo Tax, Quicken and Quickbooks. Check it out over at Consumerism Commentary. If you do go an enter make sure you mention you saw it here and help me out.
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:
- Install an Alexa Tracking Toolbar: Firefox/IE or Chrome So your site visits count towards our rankings
- 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.
So I guess sleep is optional right? Lately I have been running on caffeine and will power. I am trying to get a little bit of a side business running doing some web development and thesis customization. If you are a Facebook friend you have seen my fan page invite. I haven’t really made a formal announcement on my blog as I want to try to focus on local business. If you are looking for some help with Thesis or Wordpress or want a custom site design check out my new venture Suburban Media. I would love feedback on the site too, just drop me a line if there is something you think is off.
Here are the links for the week:
@EnemyofDebt Introduced his March 2010 Manage Your Money Challenge. This challenge features the budgeting application PocketSmith and includes some pretty gravy prizes. Stop by and enter the challenge and checkout PocketSmith.
@MJTM asks why everyone hates on financial planners. I don’t think everyone hates on financial planners. I don’t know very many of them but there is certainly a time and place for everything. If I had a moderate to decent amount of money manage I would certainly be looking for professional advice.
@Matt_SF lists out the fastest ways to go broke. I agree with most of these but my children aren’t making me go broke, I have less money but more joy. It is one of those trade-offs you have to be willing to make. Same thing with divorce, is it really worth the drama just to save money?
@FinancialSamura talks about how the government is sexist and no one seems to care. While he certainly makes his point I find it interesting how his examples are not for the average couple. My wife and I don’t make anywhere near $200k combined so I find it hard to relate to the examples. It is a good point though and one I have seen made elsewhere.
@FiscalGeek tells us how to budget like an Olympian. I love how he talks about visualization of a goal. Anytime you want to achieve a specific objective you should visualize what that will look like. When you have that picture you can attack it and hopefully succeed.
