Carnival of Thoughtful Consideration #1 is up. I would like to thank Andy for including my article on Some Tips for Holiday Shopping. Andy has done a great job on his first carnival and I love the mixture of personal finance and other assorted articles. Keep up the good work. I will be posting a couple of my favorite articles from the carnival and Congrats again to Andy for a great carnival.
Here are some of my favorite articles for this week. Impact of the Dollar Decline by Mike D. of The Time and Money Group has a very interesting article on why the dollar is declining and what some of the fall out could be. Another good article this week is from Personal Finance Advice "Investment Risk Tolerance: What's Yours". Check it out and take the quizzes to find out what your risk tolerance is. Another great article is by Life Training - Online, "Automate Your Way to Wealth". This is a great article on automating your emergency fund. These are only a couple of the articles I liked from the Carnival of Personal Finance and from the Carnival of Investing. Check them out to see a lot more.
So I've been slacking in my carnival duties lately. I'll blame it on finals and work, not that I have just been lazy. The funny thing is that I have been getting invitations to join other carnivals, which I thought was pretty funny since I thought that I was the only one reading my blog. J/K, I know there are one or two of you out there. Anyway some of them seemed a little fishy, but one seems like it is on the up and up. The Carnival of Thoughtful Consideration, just sounds nice. I have also looked over the site some and it seems pretty cool. It will host both personal finance and non personal finance topics. So anyone interested check out his site.
Thanks to Everybody Loves Your Money for hosting Carnival of Personal Finance #75. Also Thanks for including my article on Rules to Get Rich By. Definitely check out the carnival the set up is very interesting. Don't you love used car dealers? I will pick out some of my favorites from the front and back lots and post their links here later. So don't miss out on the Carnival, you may get some good deals. Okay here is one of my favorites from the Front Lot - Rule #15 all or nothing by My Open Wallet. A lot of times we forget to look around and smell the roses. Here is another good one by Geniustypes.com called See Money Differently to Attract More. Only a couple for now will add more later.
The Road 2 Riches is in two carnivals this week. Thanks to City Girl's Financial Blog for posting my article on "Do you want to be rich" for The Carnival of Personal Finance. Also thanks to AllFinancialMatters for posting my article on "Real Estate Riches Part 2" for the Carnival of Investing. I haven't had a chance to read any of the articles yet, but I will post some of my favorites later. Great job to both hosts for great carnival set ups. I will also be giving away a David Bach CD to a random post on the Do you want to be rich article.
Who doesn't, David Bach the author of The Automatic Millionaire says that he can tell if you are going to be rich by asking five questions. I am only going to talk about the first one because it caught my interest. It was do you want to be rich and what are your reasons. If you say to have a humongous house or to buy an expensive sports car, chances are you may not make it. He goes on to say that your values are what will make you rich. If your motivation to get rich is for retirement, a child's college fund, financial freedom, and such, chances are that you will meet your goal. So why do I want to be rich? Well for starters, we will need a bigger house eventually once the baby gets here, then we need to start thinking about college funds, and retirement. My main reason is financial freedom, I want to be out of debt and not have to worry about it any more. I don't want to miss out on family, friends, and life. These are the real things that make you rich.
Why do you want to be rich? I will give the Dave Bach CD to someone randomly who leaves a comment on this post and answers this question. So this will be my first contest give away.
Here are some of my favorite articles this week from the carnivals of personal finance and investing. The first one was a little mushy, but makes a lot of sense and made me feel all warm and happy inside. It's by Christine Kane on "Don't Get Rich Quick, Be Rich Quick." Sometimes we get so involved in personal finance that we may miss out what's going on around us. The next blog I liked was one by Stock Market Beat on "One Reason Starbucks Continues To Do So Well." I found it interesting not only because I invest in Starbucks, but because I learned that Starbucks pretty much owns all of it's locations. Here's another one I like To Become Wealthy: Starting in Real Estate. I found this one interesting because I too am interested in getting into REI, probably more on the rental side. These are just a couple, but I am sure I will find plenty more.
This week The Road 2 Riches is in two carnivals, the carnival of personal finance and the carnival of investing. I want to thank It's Just Money for including my article on Credit Score Hell. I also want to thank My 1st Million at 33 for including my article on Investing in Stocks and Personal Morals. Both blogs are great and have a lot of useful information. Check them out and check out the carnivals. I will post some of my favorites later.
The Carnival of Personal Finance #71 is up at Fat Pitch Financials. Just wanted to thank him for the great job and for including my article on Planning on the Cost of Our Baby. There are a lot of good articles this week. Some of my favorites are a Review of The Money Coach's Guide to Your First Million by Mighty Bargain Hunter. Thanks to his review I plan on reading this book. Even if I only get one new piece of information out of it, it will definitely be worth the read. Another one is Paying off Old Past Due Bills Without Hurting your credit by Searchlight Crusade. I just actually did this and it works, but I took a different route. I first disputed the claim and had it removed from all of the credit companies, then I disputed the claim with the collections office, they didn't drop the claim, but they did remove it, and I only had to pay less than 1/3 of the original debt. Anyway I get away from myself, check out the Carnival of Personal Finance, as you can tell I am.
Okay here are some of my favorite articles for The Carnival of Personal Finance #70. The first is Investing 101 - Getting Started by My Wealth Builder. It's always good to pick up new ideas since I am an Amateur Investor. The next article I liked was from Be Reasonable called Kiyosaki and Trump Perfect Together. I had been tempted to buy the book because I liked Rich Dad, Poor Dad, but I had read another negative review from FMF check out his view here. Another good one is from Taking Control Over Money, Do Sweat the Small Stuff. I still have a lot more to go over, but these are the ones that caught my eye.
Well things have been a little crazy this week and I wasn't able to get anything going for the Carnival of Personal finance, but I am looking forward to checking out what everyone else has to say. There are always a lot of great articles and I will post some of my favorites. I will try to get back into the groove next week.
The Carnival of Personal Finance #69 by Flexo is up. Thanks to Flexo for including my article on Property Taxes Are on the Rise. There are a lot of great articles this week. Some of my favorites are Mighty Bargain Hunter's post on Are money saving tips unhelpful to people who really need them? Sometimes we forget that saving and getting out of debt can be really difficult when you are struggling for money. Another post I like is from The Buck Stops Here, Extra Income. This is one area that I have been trying to come up with different ideas, check out some of his. I haven't read all the articles yet, but I am sure that there will be a lot more that I will like.
Now that the spending holidays are upon us (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's) it is time to refocus and buckle down on debt. This is the time of year when it becomes real easy to lose your focus and start to spend and charge costumes, gifts, decorations, and all kinds of other holiday cheer. Though you don't have to be a holiday Grinch, be sure to keep the reins on your shopping and spending habits. Remember we are trying to get out of debt here. So instead of going all out on holiday shopping remember to be frugal and don't try keeping up with the Joneses. I know that my frugality and money thriftiness usually go out the door this time of year. So what am I going to do? Well I am glad you asked. It is time to bring myself down to reality and focus on our credit card debt again. Not that we have forgotten or fallen back into our old evil ways, but a friendly reminder of where we are and where we don't want to go will put the holidays into perspective. So here are some steps I plan on taking before the holidays.
1) Make a list of what we owe. In an effort to refocus, I want to make sure we have an idea of exactly what we owe and make sure that we are on track to repay and get out of debt hell.
2) Time to re-prioritize our repayments. We have been paying more that the minimum balance on all of our credit card debt, but I think I am going to start working on a reverse snowballing effect. I think paying off some of our smaller balances first, which happen to have the higher interest rates, will not only makes us feel like we have accomplished something, but will help us knock out our debt faster.
3) Update our budget. Now is the time to update our budget to include what we are going to spend over the holidays, we also need to adjust our budget for our impending arrival.
We usually go crazy during the holidays, so this year the wife and I are going to try and be more focused on our spending habits. This year we will need to be more frugal on our holiday spending and our gift giving. So what kind of plans do you have over the holidays? What are you going to do to save money and what are you going to limit yourself to? The most important thing to remember over the holidays is friends and family. These are the richest gifts you could ever have.
This weeks Carnival of Personal Finance is being held at Canadian Capitalist. I want to thank the Canadian Capitalist for including my article on the Twelve Myths About Credit Reports. Be sure to check out the Carnival. As always there are a lot of great articles on everything you need to know about personal finance. A couple of my favorites articles are Good Debt, Bad Debt by The Buck Stops Here, and The Courage to Live Debt Free- The Principals of Economic Security by Life Training Blog.
Seeing that I have been trying to clean up my credit report, I found this pretty interesting. Julie Sturgeon has an article on yahoo called, you guessed it, 12 myths about credit reports.
The myths are:
1) Paying my debts will make make my credit instantly pristine. Not true. Your poor payment history will still show on your credit report until it drops.
2) I must give permission for a for a company to see my credit report. Wrong. Pretty much any company can see your credit report with out your permission, only if ordering your report has to do with employment does the company need a signature for your permission.
3) Credit Counseling always destroys my credit score. Credit counseling doesn't count against your credit score, and most creditors don't even look at your credit report manually anyway so chances are that they will never see it.
4) Cancelling credit cards boosts my score. False. "Creditors want to see at least two or three pieces of active credit to prove you can manage debt responsibly" and the credit cards that you aren't using are not affecting your credit score.
5) To many inquiries hurt my score. Believe it or not this is not true anymore. If you are shopping around for mortgages or car loans, the credit agencies understand that you are trying to get the best rates, so this does not affect your credit score. Now if you are going to every department store in sight and applying for credit it will affect your score because these are considered hard pulls. Even checking your credit score at fico is not considered a hard pull.
6) Checking my own credit report harms my standing. As I said above checking your credit doesn't harm your credit score, but beware of companies giving free credit reports for purchasing their products. These companies are merchants the hits do count.
7) FICO Scores are locked in for six months. Not true, fico scores are dynamic so they constantly change as the information on your report changes.
8) I don't need to check my credit report if I pay my bills on time. In this day and age of Identity Theft you can't trust that you have perfect credit, or that the credit agencies have all of your information right. I knew that I didn't have perfect credit but when I pulled all of my reports it was full of wrong information. So check your reports yearly.
9) All credit reports are the same. Most creditors do report to the major credit agencies- TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian, but some don't. So your credit score accross the boards will never be the same because something showing up on one report may not show up on the other two. So if you are gonna check one report, you may as well check all of them.
10) A divorce decree automatically severs joint accounts. Actually it doesn't so if you want your ex off of your credit you better contact your creditors, and either close your current accounts or have your ex sign off of them.
11) Bad news comes off in 7 years. Some of it does, but some bankruptcies can stay on your credit report for up to 10 years and if you pay off a previous outstanding debt, it may stay on your report longer than 7 years.
12) I can always pay someone to fix or repair my credit. You can, this is done by the company flooding the creditors with letters of dispute. If the creditors can not verify the listing it must come off, but if the creditor is able to prove later that the listing was correct it gets put back into your file after 30 days.
I hope that this helps some of you out there. I know it cleared up alot of the myths I had about credit scores and how companies report your information.
I just wanted to thank Free Money Finance for including my article Teaching Kids About Money in the Carnival of Personal Finance this week. His site is definately worth checking out, FMF is one of my favorite blogs and has a ton of information updated daily. Just taking a glance at the topics of this weeks Carnival, I see a lot of good material, and a couple of other articles about kids and money. After I read them I may link to them through this article. Not related to the Carnival but of great importance, check out FMF on October 2nd. He plans on publishing a post every hour for 24 hrs, will be giving away gifts, and donating $1 for each unique visit to a charity of his choice. So If you see all 24 posts he will donate $24 dollars for your visits. Very cool, check out his site.
Now that my wife and I are getting ready to have a child, I have been thinking alot about how we plan to educate him/her, especially about money, saving, and investing. I know that when I was growing up I just always knew it was there, we never talked about money or saving so I pretty much never did. I also didn't know about investing, but I sure knew about maxing out my credit cards. It wasn't until recently that I have gotten into investing and saving for retirement. Dan Caplinger's article Make Finances a Family Affair, on Motley Fool states that "Teaching your children about money is an extremely important part of your parental responsibilities. Because most schools lack any significant education about finances, it's up to [the parents] to create a strong foundation of knowledge that your children can use to guide their financial decisions. I know that I would be better off if I would have learned to save and invest at a younger age. One thing that many of the articles that I read left out is philanthropy. I believe that no matter how much you make, it is always good to give some money back to your community, church, people in need, etc.... I believe that this is a lesson that is very important to teach our children. One thing my parents did teach me was to give back, even if it didn't seem like much, helping someone else is always a good thing.
How do you teach your child about money?
1) Start at an early age with change and a piggy bank.
2) Give a weekly allowance for chores and split up the money into savings, spending, and giving(philanthropy).
3) As they get older get them started with a savings account(maybe a high interest savings account).
4) When they are old enough teach them how to invest and make their money work for them.
Hopefully I will be able to give our child a better understanding of personal finance than I had. What do you think? and what are some other things that would we could teach our child about money and finances?
Well I am pretty excited, I made it in to my first carnival. I submitted an article to The Carnival of Personal Finance #65 which is being hosted by No Credit Needed Blog. I would like to welcome anyone who comes over from NCN or actually anyone who reads this blog. Even though I am pretty new at this I hope I can share some of the information that I am learning. I haven't had a chance to read any of the other blogger's articles yet, but I am sure that there is a lot of great information out there. If you haven't checked out this carnival, do so. There is always a ton of great information.
According to Money Magazine it can as long as you change the way you shop and the way you think. Instead of buying fancy luxury cars, new boats, expensive wines and foods, and racking up charges on your credit cards; Money suggests that you invest in things that will make you happy. Mainly family, friends, and experiences. Have family and friends over for a BBQ, learn something new that will be a challenge to you, such as a musical instrument or golf, trips or vacations can create lasting memories and happiness, pets -though destructive and expensive- can not only bring you happiness, but can ease stress and lower your blood pressure. On the other hand impulse buys, expensive toys, new tech gadgets, only give you a short amount of pleasure, and then you are on to the next best thing.
I believe that frugality also can bring you happiness. No matter how much money you make if you live within your means and are frugal, I believe you are happier. Though I am just starting to get out of credit card debt and investing in my family's future, I feel a sense of relief that I am working towards a goal of financial freedom. This makes me very happy. Do I believe that money can make you happy? I believe that being finacially free can. What do you think?
