My Financial Journey

The Carnival of Personal Finance #90 is hosted at Map Girl this week and uses a circus theme.  My post on 20%+ guaranteed return on your money in 2 easy steps. is in SideShow One.  As usual there are tons of entries in the carnival of personal finance and map girl did a good job of ranking them so that you can get to the good articles without having to completely weed through the 90 or so entries.

Anyway if you are even lazier here are a couple that I thought were really good.

• FiveCentNickel presents How to Profit from 0% Balance Transfer Credit Card Offers.
• Wisebread has a great post for job survival. How to survive (and thrive!) in a job you hate.
• Make Your Nut presents Dispelling Popular Myths about Credit Scoring, Volume 1
• Get Rich Slowly presents Cheap Alternatives to Cable TV.
• Grad Money Matters presents An Interview with Trent (The Simple Dollar), Jim (Blueprint for Financial Prosperity) and J. D. (Get Rich Slowly)

The Festival of Frugality #64 is being held at Getting Green this week. Getting Green is a newish blogger to the personal finance community but hit the ground running and posts a number of high quality articles each day, so after reading the festival be sure to check out his other posts.

My article about How to go about frugal landscaping – Part II is up toward the top.

Some of the other articles that I really enjoyed are

• Buying on Sales Does Not Save you Money! over at My Two Dollars. Amen! It drives me nuts when I hear people say how much they “saved” because the bought a bunch of stuff on sale.
• 25 Realistic Ways to Spend Less and Save Money in College – Note it’s really only 24 ways (Don’t drink alcohol is one of them, better luck convincing a wolf to go vegan)

March Madness has hit the personal finance world over at Free Money Finance and the four posts I submitted to the tournament all made it through the first round (granted one of them had a bye).

In the 2nd round I believe Reasons why you should not save for retirement won a close battle with The Digerati Life’s Walking In A Winter Wonderland for $1,300.

Then Get Rich!! Play the lottery!! Somebody has to win drew a tough 2nd round post in Blueprint for Financial Prosperity’s 25 Steps To A Wildly Successful Personal Finance Blog, but is currently pulling out the upset. I think jim’s (BluePrint) article is a very good article and I have referenced it to many new bloggers who come to me with questions, however I think my lottery post takes a pretty neat look at the true odds of winning the lottery and if I hold out to win this battle royal it will be quite an accomplishment for my little underdog blog.  Anyway the voting is open in this round until Wednesday afternoon so get out and vote (even if it’s for jim 🙂 )

Edit: He’s even bringing the big guns out now and is out on the campaign trail

I’ll let you know when my other two articles play and will give links to all of the bloggers and articles I play.  Otherwise just hang out court side at Free Money Finance and wait for the next batch of games to start.  I can’t wait to see who makes it into the sweet 16.  One thing’s for sure the articles will all be top notch.  I was just happy enough that FMF let my articles into the tourney.  The wins are just gravy.

FreeMoneyFinance is having his March Madness battle royal tournament of personal finance articles.  If you aren’t familiar with the concept read below

Here we go with the first round of Free Money Finance March Madness (if you wonder what’s going on in these posts, see my article announcing March Madness and/or click on my March Madness category link and scroll down to read all the posts involved in this subject.) I’ve listed each “game” (one post versus another) in segments along with the wording provided by the author when the post was submitted. Be sure to comment which one you like the best out of each set of two as commenters have the chance to win a free book. Here we go:

Anyway my article on “Reasons why you should not save for Retirement” is squaring off against Suspension of Disbelief’s “13 Personal Finance Helpers” in Game 31.  If you like my article go and tell FMF about it in the comments and while you are there vote on all of the articles in the first round.  You have two days to finish up your votes.

I have 3 other articles in the tourney, but their games have yet to come out.  Just by commenting over at FreeMoneyFinance you have a chance to win a free book,  so head on over to FreeMoneyFinance and join in the Madness

The 63rd Festival of Frugality is hosted over at Stingy Students.  Stingy went with a stars of Food Network theme.  I’m a pretty big fan of the food network, especially Alton Brown (partly because his food is usually very practical and you learn a lot in the process).  Some of the other chefs are fun to watch, but you probably won’t find me even know where to get half of the ingredients they use.  Anyway my article on the Fine Line of Frugality is located under Ina Garten.

Here are some other articles that I enjoyed
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Read More Read More

This week’s carnival of personal finance is being held over at the binary dollar.  I’ve talked in the past about how much work goes into hosting a carnival, especially now that they have grown to be so big and you get so many submissions.  So when you do something creative like Binary Dollar did this week, you really deserve some credit.

This week’s carnival is all GUI based,  in other words there are no words.  Just a bunch of celebrity pictures in different categories.  Each picture links to a article submitted to the carnival.  Dawn at FrugalForLife did something similar with the carnival of personal finance a few weeks back and I love it.  The carnivals tend to get pretty boring, especially due to their frequency and the large amount of submissions.  I think it’s great when the host thinks outside of the box like this and makes things interesting.

Anyway go check out the carnival.  I don’t want to put words into BinaryDollar’s mouth, but  I’m pretty sure he thought my post was the best of the carnival, because well check out my celebrity icon