Work on Your Money: The Missing Manual continues apace. I’ve finished the first seven chapters (happiness, goals, budgets, debt, frugality, income, and banking) and have just begun on chapter eight, which is about credit.

As part of this chapter, I’d love to profile a GRS reader who gets by on minimal credit. Specifically, I’m looking for somebody who doesn’t use credit cards at all, and who can talk about the implications. What are the advantages? What are the drawbacks? Do you know how it’s affected your credit score?

I know I could interview my friend NCN from No Credit Needed, but he’s already in the budgeting chapter! So, if your a “no credit” sort of person (as I used to be) and are willing to let me interview you, drop me a line.

Speaking of NCN, he’s the first stop in this week’s link round-up. Last month, he posted a story of how a silly little experiment helped him get out of debt. He once used online billpay to send a credit card company $5 every day for a month. By doing this, he taught himself that he really could afford saving $5 a day — and he saw the power of the “debt snowflake“.

Jonathan Fields says, “Daddies, don’t let your babies grow up to be strangers.” Getting caught up in making more money so you can provide “nice things” for your family may actually lead you away from what they need most of all: You. This is great advice for all mothers and fathers. Remember that it’s your relationships that matter most, not the soccer, the schools, and the Stuff.

Last week, when I posted the little story about my conversation with a bank teller last week, I never expected it to attract so much attention. “Is there a generation gap in saving?” I wondered aloud. Here are some responses from around the web:

For the record, I’m not saying there is a generation gap (and, in fact, in the comments Jim shared stats that show saving is about the same for all age groups except the elderly). I was just recounting a conversation!

Here are some more quick hits (man, I’m loaded with links today!):

One last thing before the carnival summary — I busted a gut looking at Cats4Gold:

Here’s the weekly summary of financial carnivals. These are great places to pick up new tips on saving money:

Final note: The category archives have a new layout. There used to be just 5-10 posts per page (with excerpts), but I found those tedious to wade through when searching for an old article. Now each archive page has a huge list of the posts in that category. For example, here’s the list from the self-improvement category (which is one of my favorites). What do you think? (Or does anyone besides me even use the category archives?)

This article is about Spare Change  Wednesday, 18th November 2009 (by J.D. Roth)