Surfed the web all week long (anyone still surf the web?) to find 30 free e-Books (some are just pamphlets).
I guess they’re not really free, as they’re all funded by our tax dollar. Categories include basic personal finance, consumer awareness, credit & credit cards, saving & investing, mortgages, retirement planning, estate planning & insurance, and finally privacy & security.
Click the image above to check out the books. You might as well — seeing as how we’re paying for them already. Yay!
This week’s Epic Edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance is hosted at The Digerati Life.
There’s a pretty spiffy article from Power Wealth, which presents a 3-Step program to get-poor-quick. Do exactly the opposite and you’ll be set!
There is a very, very good reason why this post is showing up in the middle of the night.
Last year, I tried to buy some new rims for the car. The deal didn’t pan out, so I just sort of pretend I never wanted the wheels in the first place. All was well until the tire tread on my Bridgestone Potenza RE950 started wearing out.
And so, after some tough decision making while in the bathroom, I decided to buy some new wheels along with the new tires. My justification? Uh… I can save some money by putting them both on the car at the same time? Hah.
Of course, the wheels were delivered to my house after I left Southern California for Northern California. I never got to put them on at the same time.
Here are some reasons why this purchase was stupid:
Other than those reasons above, they’re pretty cool. Cost a little bit under $400 for all four. About 12 pounds each at 15 x 6.5, 4 x 100, and +38 offset.
Can’t wait to put them on the car one day… heh.
Related Post:
Super creepy.
From [The Digerati Life].
Related Post:
The original title for the post was “Meeting a Personal Finance Blogger is Fun.”
So just a few days ago at around 10 PM, I said good bye to fellow PF Blogger, Jonathan of MyMoneyBlog.com (as it was getting too late for us old farts).
Jonathan was in the Bay Area and he decided to contact me and Noah for some three-way male bonding. We chatted, had sandwiches, played ping pong, and gave Jonathan a quick demo of Mint.
As Jonathan and Noah got heated up in a ping pong match, I suddenly had one of those “life is weird” moment. I realized that, indirectly, I was here, interning in Mountain View because of the two guys in front of me.
You see, I started Stop Buying Crap back in April of 2005 due to a Google search result that landed me at My Money Blog, and in turn, I met Noah through my blog. It really is a new world, when strangers from the internet can somehow influence your life, whether directly or indirectly.
One thing I noticed right away when talking to Jonathan is how much similar some of our values in personal finance was. Although I was never too involve with the entire personal finance blogging community (too large to keep up), I always have an impression that the community contained a group of super-nice people (some of us in the east coast are even throwing a happy hour get together). Meeting Jonathan reaffirmed that belief, and made me realized that I certainly wouldn’t mind labeling myself as a personal finance blogger.
It’s a big change in my mind, I think. Back in the days, I would never label myself as a blogger , even though I post more frequently than I do today.
I was always imaging the potential response. “You’re a blogger? WTF is that?”
But today, it’s a part of something I do. It certainly isn’t my only label, but for now, I am definitely a personal finance blogger (even if I’m crappy, sporadic one).
And so, although I don’t post as regularly as before (for a long time now), and I’m hardly a regular contributor in community discussions, I still consider myself a part of the community (and the community includes the readers too). And why not? It’s a great community.
It’s a community of people with different ages, different locations, different ethnic backgrounds, different net worth; but we all share the same common goal, to reach financial independence so that we can take care of our loved ones.
Pretty damn cool, I think.
Can’t believe I forgot to mention it on this blog, but the second anniversary (aww… it’s already been two years) of the Carnival of Personal Finance can be found at Get Rich Slowly.
J.D. did an excellent job with this edition, highlighting some of the recent best in the personal finance blogsphere. There were lots of great post, but I’ll just reiterate the picks that I mentioned on Mint’s blog (since they’re so awesome):
Check out the above post, or I’ll make you eat cat doo-doo.
Or not.
I believe I’m fairly fortunate in that I’ve only been depressed a few times — maybe once or twice in my life. (And by depress, I mean seriously depressed that it affected my daily life.) So perhaps I’m not exactly a good example, but my point is that I have never been depressed about my personal finance before.
For my regular five readers, you would remember that I was in debt (only about 10k). The debt certainly gave me stress and anxiety, but it never bother me enough to cause depression.
I was talking to a friend over the weekend and long story short, he was seriously depressed about his finances. His debt is getting out of control, he worries about making ends meet, and he feels entirely overwhelmed and powerless.
Things brighten up a little bit after we talked for a bit and I shared my experiences and he shared his… but of course as anyone with debt knows, the concepts in reducing the debt is simple enough, while accomplishing it is another story.
Have you ever been depressed due to your finances? What did you do about it? How did you get out of it, or are you still in it?
Although I was depressed due to a completely different matter, I’m fairly certain depression can be alleviate (if somewhat) by opening up to people that care about you. Certainly, bottling it up all inside and dealing with it alone is not a solution in getting out of a depression.
Depression from finances does have a sore point — no matter how much you talk to someone about it, it probably won’t fix the underlying problems until you start taking action to repair or amend the financial problems.
Tough situation, I’d say.
