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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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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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Need some extra money – sue a telemarketer

Need some extra money – sue a telemarketer

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I’m always looking for side jobs or easy ways to make some extra money on the side. Turns out that you might be able to make a decent amount of money by suing companies who violate the do not call list legislation, and what could be more fun than suing a telemarketing company. Generally I have a personal aversion to lawsuits and think that it’s gotten entirely out of control in recent history, but in this case I’m all for it.

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I’ve switched to full text feeds

I’ve switched to full text feeds

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Not wanting to be left out I too have switched to full-text feeds.  To be honest I’m not sure why I even had partial feeds to start with as I hate reading feeds that only give me a teaser and make me go out to the site to get more.  So it was pretty stupid for me to be offering partial feeds on my own site.  Anyway hopefully this will be a welcome change.  Unfortunately I haven’t found a way to make it entirely retroactive so my older feed items are still partial, but going forward you will be able to read my articles in their entirety with your favorite RSS reader.  Sorry it took so long.