My post on the Dangers of Reverse Mortgages was featured in the 152nd edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance. Check out the carnaval for a number of great posts.
Also, my post on Investing for Kids was featured in the Festival of Stocks num 88
Thanks!!
Here are the entries for the Carnival of Debt Reduction, in the order they were received (mostly).
Joe was sick and tired of it all. That’s it, he promised himself, I’ve got to start on the debt reduction path. The first thing on his agenda was to stop receiving those credit card offers that kept clogging his mail box. It was driving him nuts. Day in and day out, they came, a seemingly inexhaustible supply. He was wondering how many poor trees were suffering so he could get another 0% balance transfer offer.
He started thinking to himself about all the ways he could increase his income. One way he knew millions of people were making money was through eBay. Maybe he could do some Tag Team Auctions. They seemed to work great for Kris over at Simply Us. He’d heard quite a few stories about all the money he’d make, but he also knew that with spending power comes credit card responsibility; so much for easy money.
That got him wondering a bit. He knew about money, having spent it like crazy for years. He knew that it was issued form the Federal Reserve Bank, and he couldn’t get enough of the stuff, but he thought to himself “do you get money?”; really understand it? The answer wasn’t too comforting. He realized his understanding of money and how to become debt free was rather unclear, and he felt a bit clueless.
He was worried that if he didn’t get a handle on his debt, he may have to declare bankruptcy, and that made his head spin. He didn’t want to go that route. He didn’t really understand it and wasn’t too sure what all those chapters meant. He’d heard of Chapter 11. Wasn’t there a restaurant named that or something? He’d also heard of chapter 7 and 13 bankruptcies. He was having trouble understanding chapter 12 bankruptcy, however. He usually didn’t even read books with that many chapters, and he was feeling kind of weak in the knees thinking about them all.
Maybe some money humor would cheer him up. After all, he was always so stressed out about it, something funny should be just what the doctor ordered, so he checked out the winners of the money limerick contest over at Mad Kane’s Humor. Now he felt sooo much better. He was in a much happier place and felt like doing something fun.
Being the nautical sort, ol’ Joe decided maybe a jaunt down to the boat show would be just the ticket. Was it ever! He found the ’55 Chris Craft Constellation he’d always wanted. It was a ’61, and the mahogany was refinished to perfection. Then he went to the boat show financing office. He discovered right then and there why you should never, ever use boat show financing. Those guys at the Credit & Credit Card Blog were right on the money after all.
Now he really regretted never doing any planning for his retirement, and thought maybe he should do some estate planning. He’d just read about estate planning strategies for the average Joe, and since that was his name, after all, maybe they applied to him. That made him feel a bit more serious again, so he headed home, thankful that he’d at least invested in some gold shares and was enjoying the power of the leverage factor. Maybe that would keep his head above water for a while.
What he really needed, like he thought before he got all side tracked by the beauty of that 55’ Connie at the boat show, was to reduce credit card debt quickly. Unless he could pull that off, he was just back at square one, and going nowhere fast. He thought to himself, “my debt relief plan is in a shambles.” He decided he had to find a top strategy for saving money, and fast. After all, his Grammy had always said that saving was akin to earning.
Thinking back on everything, he was pretty sure that his problem was that he had made a big mistake. He’d always heard “Don’t start with the wrong concept of wealth”, but he was pretty sure he had. He’d always focused too much on saving and budgeting. Well, it was kind of late now. That being said, he could always use 33 ways to save money that take less than a minute. A penny saved or a penny earned, or something like that. He wanted to pin it all on his parents, at least the sins of the fathers, but after thinking about it for a while, realized he should take some personal responsibility. After all, so many of the people he met these days wanted to blame it all on someone else, and get the government to help them out.
After his period of retrospection, Joe realized that much of his current financial philosophy was molded during college. He could never really answer the important question of how much college debt is too much? After all, your college education is really and investment on your future. Like any investment, it needs to generate a return. What kind of ROI do you need in order to make it a good investment? A trip to Free Money Finance might help answer the question.
Once he was out of college the question of other debt began to haunt him. When shopping for his first home, Joe was really sad he hadn’t spent more time in Finance 301 when he was in college. He would have been much better served learning about mortgages, than having fun cutting wakes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Thankfully someone started Searchlight Crusade and he was able to find out why the higher rate loan is often better. That was an eye opener. They never tell you that stuff in all those mortgage ads on the radio.
Paying off that college debt was even tougher now that he had a mortgage. After a visit to Simple Dollar, he was suitably enlightened by discovering the difference between debt snowballing and the high interest approach by seeing a real world comparison. That really made his brain hurt, and he decided it was time for a power nap. When he awakened he was ready for some real debt reduction.