Happy Black Friday, everyone! Hopefully, those who ventured out into the malls and shopping areas today (while following my advice, of course) purchased everything they needed and wanted today, without any incidents. There’s definitely no deal if you to get wounded in the process.
Now that all your shopping is out of the way, of course, it’s time to turn your attention toward giving to the less fortunate. If you’re planning to give in the next few days, you have some very good timing; donate between now and the end of the month, and Flexo of Consumerism Commentary will match your contribution with one of his own to the World Food Programme. If you want to double the impact of your contributions, there are few better times (even before you take the whole ‘holiday season’ thing into account). Now, on with the good articles of the past week.
Good Articles This Week
Fees Suck-Don’t Pay Them – The always pithy and witty Stephanie of Poorer Than You shares some tips on avoiding the large and ever increasing number of fees that infest our daily lives. Her chief piece of advice: negotiate your fees whenever possible (and never assume that it is impossible until you try). Great advice, and definitely something to try next time you make a major purchase.
Do You Really Want to Make Money Fast? – It’s a basic fact of human nature: we all want to get wealthy quick. But Studenomics points out some of the problems with getting large amounts of money quickly; sadly, it tends to disappear just a quickly. Still, I wouldn’t mind getting my own chance to show what I would do with a sudden, vast fortune, if you know anyone giving one away.
Hulk vs. Eeyore: A Six Step Process to Overcoming Friction In Life – I had to include this entry, if only as an example of one of the most lopsided possible battles in history. (Eeyore can take the Hulk easily; don’t let that down-turned face fool you, he’s a vicious fighting machine.) Anyway, Baker of Man vs. Debt provides some advice on avoiding emotional eruptions (Hulk mode) or just giving up (Eeyore mode) when we are confronted with problems in life.
Why Government Regulations Sometimes Work – It’s easy to assume that all government actions do is decrease the performance of the free market (especially as that is a major theme of many financial commentators). As My Life ROI points out, though, there are things that the government can handle better than private individuals and companies, particularly when it comes to those darn externalities.
Everything is Relative-Being Happy With What You Have – The Financial Samurai shares a few stories from the road (or a recent trip to Japan, actually) about learning to appreciate what you have. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you probably don’t feel like you’ve got everything you want in life. On the other hand, if you’re reading this, you have more than many people on this little planet; in this season of thanksgiving, be sure to thankful for everything that being a part of the industrialized world itself has to offer.
Related Websites
Financial Samurai
on November 28 2009
Thanks for the shout out Rog. I enjoyed reading your guest post on MLROI and will be including it in my Katana wrap.
Congrats also for breaking the 1 million Alexa ranking mark here!
Cheers, Sam-urai
Roger
on November 28 2009
You’re welcome as always, FS; keep writing good posts, and I’ll keep linking.
As for the Alexa thing, I’m a bit confused by your comment; I see 2000 something when I view the Alexa badge on my front page. No where near 1 million. I’m not sure what’s happening, but we seem to be seeing different things.
Financial Samurai
on November 28 2009
Go to alexa.com and type in your website. The 2,000 ranking on your badge is off. If you had 2,000, you’d probably be making millions/yr from your site!
Gotta redo the badge and claim your ranking.
Roger
on November 28 2009
Ah, okay; clearly, I’ve done something wrong; I see what you’re talking about now. I think (and this is just wild speculation on my part, frankly), that I accidentally just copied and pasted the example badge or something.
Still, it’s something to shoot for, hunh?
Financial Samurai
on November 29 2009
Yup, definitely something to shoot for. My original goal 2 months ago was to shoot to break 500,000 by year-end. Now the goal is to break 100,000. It’s just a fun thing to do, and the ranking really does correlate with traffic.
Roger
on November 29 2009
I’ll have to do my best to keep going higher and higher, I suppose. Next stop, breaking 900,000!
MLR
on November 30 2009
Thanks for the inclusion. Externalities are fun, eh?
And as FS said, congrats on breaking the million mark!
Hopefully I can keep directing some more people your way if you keep writing awesome guest posts for me! :p