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It’s strange to have written so much about the national economy lately. I feel like a fish out of water. As a result, I’ve spent much of today getting back to basics, preparing stories about frugality, meeting goals, and making money. I also took the time to visit some other personal finance sites, where I found these gems:
- The newest member of the Money Blog Network is the group-written Wise Bread, a top-notch site about “living large on a small budget”. One recent article I liked featured six simple strategies for green gifting. Give seeds, activities, or DIY projects. Great tips!
- Last week, personal finance columnist Liz Pulliam Weston picked up my idea of the “Money Day”, a time specifically set aside to put your finances in order. Weston shared her own ideas about how to fix your finances in a day, including some I hadn’t considered.
- Today at The Simple Dollar, Trent has a crash-course offering six steps for a beginning stock investor:
- Determine your goals.
- Know your risk tolerance.
- For short-term goals, keep your money in cash.
- For medium-term goals, diversify.
- For long-term goals, invest in stocks.
- First-time investors should put their money in low-cost index funds.
These are great tips for anyone just beginning to enter the world of investing.
- Finally, Reader’s Digest has compiled a list of 75 tips to keep your car in top-notch condition. I like the idea of keeping an “auto log”. I may have to implement this.
Now I’m off to our monthly book group meeting. We’re discussing Fyodor Dostoevksy’s The Idiot, and rumor is I’m the only one who liked it!
.jpg "The Money Blog Network - Improving your bottom line")
January 26th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
You read my mind! I was looking today for other well-written, high quality blogs about frugality and personal finance but came up with a lot of crappy pages that weren’t updated as often as yours. You have now linked me to even more frugality blog sites so I can further feed this addiction. Thanks! Love your blog.
January 26th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Hey JD -
For the auto log, I use gasbuddy.com. The fuel logbook on their automatically calculates my MPG and tells me how much I’ve spent so far in the year on gas. Also, the main part of the site can tell you the cheapest place to get gas around, and by using some of the features, you can earn points, which don’t really do much, although you can use them to enter raffles for free gas.
January 26th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
I have used an auto log ever since my very first car. My husband does the same. We keep a small spiral notebook in our vehicles with pen and calculator. We use it to track MPG, but also note any service performed on our vehicles. It’s a very helpful reference to keep us on track with oil changes, tune-ups, etc. and also has helped us sell vehicles because it shows how we’ve kept up with such maintenance. Online logbooks are probably great, but I prefer using the notebook in my car because I can do it immediately and can easily pass it on to a buyer if necessary.
The other sites you referenced were helpful … it’s nice to see they validate what we are already doing!
January 26th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Instead of an auto log you can do what my dad does. He writes down the mileage of the car on the gas receipt. That way he knows exactly how much gas was put in the car and can enter the data in a spreadsheet during his weekly finance review.
January 26th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Great articles, and we use an auto log, and have saved big money by catching repair bills early.
Re: The Idiot, There was a film version by Kurosawa, of Seven Samarai fame. It was his epic, but the film was cut down by 100 minutes…over an hour!
Akira tried to get the movie piece and do a director’s cut later but to no avail as the parts couldn’t be found…
Useless trival #428
January 26th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Do you like Tolstoy? There’s an idea that most people either like Dostoevksy *or* Tolstoy, but not both, and I wonder if it holds up for the general public.
January 27th, 2008 at 9:11 am
I like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. And Proust. And Melville. I am a lit geek. There’s nothing I love more than spending a few hours with Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy, etc. I’d love to incorporate my love for literature here at GRS, but I’ve just never found a way to do it. I’ve started three or four entries related to the subject (”personal finance in classic literature”) but I’ve never completed them.
January 27th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Hi J.D.,
I’m a fairly recent ready of GRS, but I’ve learned so much already and you have inspired me to start my own personal finance blog and make drastic changes in my financial life. Thank you so much!
I thought “The Idiot” was great. Most accessible of Dostoevsky’s stuff, I think.
January 27th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Love the Green gift ideas. I just wrote an article about how to be green on my blog http://20somethingfinance.com. The article is titled ‘Be Green; Save Green: Reducing my Commute will Fund my Retirement; 10 Ways you can Save at the Pump!’. One of my ideas is to use an electric scooter as your commuting method of transportation, which is a great green gift idea.
January 28th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
I use an auto-log and have for the past several years. I’m actually planning a post to show the graphs and whatnot — especially of the depressing gas prices