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Blogs I’ve Been Following This Week
Welcome to another rousing edition of Black Coffee, your off-beat weekly round-up of what’s been going on in the world of money and personal finance. Here’s what caught my attention over the past week…
Moolanomy - My regular readers know that me and the people who come to my yard sales love free stuff – the big difference is my yard sale customers seem to think everything should be free. Heh. In any case, this week I noticed Pinyo had a very nice article on some really great free software for Windows. By the way, astute readers of this blog (which I know are all of you) are already aware that I was recently accepted into Pinyo’s Money Hackers Network, which I am very proud to be a part of! I guess that makes Pinyo my boss! But please, folks, I better not see any e-mails accusing me of kissing up. After all, I would never compromise my integrity by supplying gratuitous links simply to score brownie points. Never! Never, never, never.
Bret Frohlich - Bret had an excellent post this past week on the subject of fixing healthcare in the United States. As always, Bret provided a very cogent analysis of the problem and offered up several of his own solutions for improving healthcare. Of course, I couldn’t resist adding my two cents to the debate also.
Debt Free Adventure - Matt has got to be the hardest working guy in the blogosphere. Everywhere I look, I seem to run into one of his articles, whether it is on his own site or as a guest contributor somewhere else. This week on his site he had an interesting piece on how he decided to balance contributions between his emergency fund savings and paying off his debt. His plan is called the 75/25 method, which sounds eerily similar to my 78.3/21.7 method which I touted a while back – but it never seemed to catch on for some reason. 
Plonkee Money – No new posts this week, but I stopped by anyway just to check in! 
Moolanomy - Did I mention my boss, Pinyo, at Moolanomy had a really awesome post this week on free software for Windows?
Credits and Debits
Credit: I have faithfully argued on this blog that health care is a commodity and should not be considered an entitlement that must be provided by the Federal government. So it was a real pleasure to find an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day from, ironically, a British physician named Theodore Dalrymple who wrote this brilliant piece on why health care is not a right. Here is just a snippet to whet your appetite: “Everyone agrees that hunger is a bad thing (as is overeating), but few suppose there is a right to a healthy, balanced diet, or that if there was, the federal government would be the best at providing and distributing it to each and every American.” Dalrymple also uses his first hand experience in Great Britain to throw water on the specious claims from those who continue to insist that universal health care is better than our current system in the US.
Debit: The House raced Friday to pass legislation pouring an additional $2 billion into the popular — but financially strapped — “cash for clunkers” car purchase program. Rep. David Obey (D-Wis), is quoted by MSNBC as saying “consumers have spoken with their wallets and they like this program.” Correction, Mr. Obey: Consumers have spoken with the taxpayers’ wallet. And I don’t like subsidizing my neighbor’s new automobile any more than I like helping him pay for his mortgage for that house he otherwise would be unable to afford. But that’s just me – you probably think I’m just a selfish and out of touch Libertarian.
Debit: More evidence why bailing out the financial sector was a bad idea: Citigroup Inc., one of the biggest recipients of government bailout money, gave employees $5.33 billion in bonuses for 2008. In a report detailing the payouts by nine big banks, Citigroup gave 738 of its employees bonuses of at least $1 million, even after it lost $18.7 billion during the year. Does anybody in Congress feel like a chump yet? Anybody at all? Probably not Rep. David Obey (D-Wis), who I’m sure would tell us “the bankers have spoken with their wallets and they think the bailouts were a great idea!”
The Way-Back Machine: Past Posts You May Have Missed
From December 2008: (Almost all the way back to my blogosphere big bang.)
What the Heck Does a Household CEO Do? – I always preach to my readers that in order to be successful in managing their personal finances they should run their households like a business. That’s how I have always run my household. I am the household CEO and the Honeybee is our household CFO; both jobs have specific duties that complement each other. This article is my job description for the household CEO and I follow it religiously.
Update: My Shameless RSS Experiment — Week 7
It is week seven of My Shameless RSS Experiment. This past week, in an amazing turn of fortune, I got 143 new RSS subscribers – putting me over the top on my modest quest for 100!! Thank you all for your incredible support!! Then I woke up from my dream… Unfortunately, my subscriber totals actually dropped by one this past week. I knew I should have toned down the political rhetoric. Oh well, hopefully I will recover that subscriber and then some in the coming weeks.
As always, if you like what you’re reading, please take a moment to subscribe. I’d really appreciate it! And, as always, thanks to all of you who have already chosen to follow me here at Len Penzo dot Com!
Carnival News
Last week I had posts featured at the following carnivals:
- Twenty Something Finances (Editor’s Pick!)
- Carnival of Pecuniary Delights
- Everything About Personal Finance
Hey! If you liked this article, please be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed!
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Ha ha! The 78.3/21.7 method… I promise I didn’t steal your idea. I’m not quite sure why that didn’t catch on.
In all seriousness though – thank you very much for the compliment. I love what I do so to me it’s not even like work.
Cheers
Hey great list of sites.
Great work on the growing subscriber base as well. Maybe I should have a huge logo as well
Jae,
Read it again… Len said he LOST one subscriber. lol
All I know is it wasn’t me! I won’t desert you Len!
Pepper
@Matt: What is really amazing to me is that you manage to combine quantity with quality – not an easy thing to do, but you do it so consistently well!
@Jae: Alas, I think you missed the fact that I was dreaming. A subscriber count of -1 for the week was not what I had in mind when I started my experiment! lol Actually, I realize things fluctuate from day to day and week to week, and that was my first down-tick week since the experiment started.
@Pepper: Bless you, Pepper!
lol sorry I was too interested in seeing how you increased subscribers
But feedburner is quite erratic especially on the weekends so I’m sure you’ll be up. My count fluctuates by 50 regularly lol
I am not too worried, Jae, about the raw numbers; this experiment really is all in good fun.
Although it would be cool to be able to say that my count fluctuates by 50 regularly! lol
Some day… maybe.
Len
Nice job, Len! I’ve subscribed. I’m also trying hard to grow my RSS subscribers – my site was faulty for much of its first 9 months and this has meant my RSS never grew during that time – so I’m trying to get it back. Please check out my site and subscribe if you like it:) Yes, the numbers do fluctuate but I think it shows how many of the feeds were pulled – so if it says 98 you may still have 112 subscribers.
What if it says minus 5?
lol
Seriously, ME, I appreciate your “patronage.” Your subscription officially made up for last week!
BTW, I’m already a happy subscriber to Money Energy!