My Financial Journey

I’m currrently moving my site to a new webhost.  Was currently hosting with a windows web host and well seeing as how I blog on wordpress there certianly is a lot more you can do with a linux host and I’ve had some unexpected downtime with my existing host so I figured I might as well go ahead and bite the bullet.  I’ve made the DNS changes so hopefully in the next 24 hours the change happens.  I’m sure there will be some hiccups initially, but please bear with me.  Hopefully this means a faster more reliable site for all of us.

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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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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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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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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!

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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.

• It’s common sense, but I’m an idiot - realized how to do simple math to decide whether to pay off HELOC or not
• $100,000 by Age 30 - came up with my first financial goal. It’s been a popular post for me.
• PFBlogs.org - Site was born about this time last year and MFJ has been a friend of ever since - best aggregator around
• Credit cards better for my net worth than high yield savings like ING Direct? - Realized the joys of rewards cards
• Wal-Mart wallet photos for a whole lot less - Method I came up with to save money on wallet photos.

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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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