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Month: February 2007

Personal Finance March Madness

Personal Finance March Madness

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FreeMoneyFinance is getting into the March Madness spirit by starting his own tournament featuring the 64 best articles in all personal finance land. Each personal finance blogger is allowed to submit 4 articles to the selection committee and the top 64 will get put into the bracket. From there it’s head to head competition until only one article remains. The winner gets all kinds of goodies and not to mention bragging rights for an entire year.

You have until the end of this weekend to submit your articles and the tournament kicks off Tuesday, March 6th.

Here are the four articles that I submitted to the competition. Stop by FreeMoneyFinance the week of March 6th and see if any of them made the tournament.
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Pay off Debt or Invest for Retirement

Pay off Debt or Invest for Retirement

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I recently had a reader who wanted me to write an article on whether it’s better to pay down debt or invest. Seeing as how I was recently profiled over at No Credit Needed I figured now was as good as anytime to tackle this subject.

What’s better, paying off debt or investing?
My theory is that I’d rather have less debt because I don’t like owing money even if the interest on debt is less than the return on the investment.

Regards,
John

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It’s one thing learn something it’s another thing to actually act on the information

It’s one thing learn something it’s another thing to actually act on the information

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A couple days ago my wife was reading CNN in the morning when she came across an article on a peanut butter recall, we both read the article and seeing how she is thinking about starting her own parenting blog I even mentioned to her that breaking news articles like that could fill some of her content on her blog. I sort of smiled to myself throughout the day as I ran across blog articles like this here, here, here, and probably about 5 other blogs. Well about 3-4 days go by and I’m about to leave work yesterday and my wife IMs me and says “My goodness MFJ do you realize you’ve been eating the bad peanut butter!” Sure enough even though we never purchaase Peter Pan, for whatever reason last time we went shopping we picked up Peter Pan crunchy peanut butter and sure enough the product number starts out with 2111.Also turns out that I spent most of last night praying at the porcelain alter, although I doubt it is because I was eating tainted peanut butter as the stomach flu has been going around my family.

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Festival of Frugality #62 at LazyManAndMoney is a HomeRun!

Festival of Frugality #62 at LazyManAndMoney is a HomeRun!

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This week’s festival of frugality is hosted at LazyManAndMoney and for being so Lazy he sure did a bang up job on this week’s festival.  If you have ever hosted a carnival you know how much work it is and to be able to make it fun an interesting is a real challenge.  The theme for this week’s festival is baseball greats.  LazyMan broke down all the articles based how on well he thought they were written and categorized them under the best baseball players of all time (Ruth, Williams, Mays, Mantle, and Herb Washington??)

My article on frugal landscaping is listed under the Ted Williams category.  Go check out the carnival and all of the great articles on frugality!

MFJ one year ago (Feb 2006)

MFJ one year ago (Feb 2006)

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Well my blog has been around for over a year now so I guess I can start highlighting some posts from a year ago. I think this is kind of nice because I can occasionally see what I was thinking a year ago. See if my attitudes have changed, if I’ve learned anything new since then, etc. I probably won’t do this too often as well my blog hit a dry spell for a while last summer, but one year ago this week was a pretty good one for my blog.

The fine line of frugality

The fine line of frugality

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I would consider myself a frugal person. I live well within my means and never make a purchasing decision without painstakingly going over the details to make sure I really “need” the item and that I am getting the best absolute price. However always looking to save money can lead you to tread a fine line when it comes to being frugal vs being cheap OR being frugal and being unethical or even worse. I want to discuss some of these borderline issues, give examples of where maybe I stepped over the line, and hopefully get some feedback from my readers as to where they think the line is on these issues.

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Clothes as an investment??

Clothes as an investment??

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Today I went clothes shopping. I bought a lot of new clothes. In fact I spent more money on clothes today than I probably have in the last seven years combined. Now to put that in perspective I can only think of one piece of clothing I have bought in the last 5 years or so (a pair of jeans last year) and well I really only spent $225 today, which for some people may be a casual shopping trip. I never buy clothes, in fact a majority of my wardrobe consists of clothes I wore when I was still in high school. The rest are clothes I’ve received for birthday and Christmas presents from friends and family or received as freebies through work or conferences.
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