The Amateur Financier

It’s that time of year for all good (and wicked) little boys and girls to put on their costumes, go gallivanting around town, and gather up candy from the townspeople.  Yes, that’s right, it’s nearly time once again for Halloween.  It’s one of my favorite holidays (and not just because my birthday falls a mere four day before); how many other days do you get the opportunity to dress up and pretend to be other people, regardless of whether you are eight or eighty?  Other holidays might offer more in the way of presents or religious and spiritual significance, but for sheer possibility of childish glee, it’s hard to beat Halloween.

I’m not sure how things are done in all the other states, but here in Pennsylvania, we’ve developed the habit of not actually Trick or Treating on Halloween itself.  Instead, each community has a particular day of the week, and during the week before Halloween, that day of the week is when kids go out to get candy.  Wednesday is when my community held Trick or Treat, while it was on Thursday for my fiancee’s town.  It’s kind of good, in that you don’t have to worry about what day of the week Halloween falls, but it causes some problems when children from other communities take advantage of the different Trick or Treat dates and go to different communities to get candy.  (Yes, it is a problem we hear a lot about in October, although how bad situation has gotten is up for debate.)

Now, for your Halloween pleasure, enjoy a few of the best posts from this past week.  No Halloween-themed posts yet (that’s for next week, I hope), but still a great deal of good information was created last week:

Dammed Lies, Statistics, and the Great Recession – As we recover from the ‘Great Recession’, there’s going to be lots of discussion of just who got hurt the most in the downturn.  Frank Curmudgeon covers one report claiming that during this downturn, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.  While it’s a good turn of phrase (and a commonly encountered cliche, to boot), as Frank points out, it’s too early to make such a determination from official government reports, which tend to be rather slow in coming.  We’ll have to wait a while yet before we can determine just what the fall out from this downturn really was.

Traditional and Roth IRA Contribution Limits for 2010 – You’ll probably hear much about this from the financial media soon, but My Life ROI has gone through the IRS’s Publication 590 to discover the contribution limits next year.  I’ll admit I don’t know all the details of the contribution limits for 2009, so I can’t say for certain, but it looks like the limits are the same for next year.  That means, another $5000 I get to add to my Roth!

Put a Stop to Junk Mail – Stephanie of Poorer Than You continues on her quest to help everyone protect their identity, this time focusing on how you can stop getting junk mail (and having your personal data coming into your mailbox every day).  Besides being a good way to help protect your identity, anything that causes you to get less junk mail is always a plus in my book.  Being able to do both at the same time is, as the Mastercard commercials would say, priceless.

92 Quotes about Debt – Apparently, Baker of Man vs. Debt and I share something beyond merely both writing a PF blog: we are both big into quotations.  Here are 92 quotations (my speech coach in college would be all over me if I referred to them as ‘quotes’) from proverbs, historic figures, and the ever verbose ‘Unknown’ to help shed some light on this thing called debt.  Enjoy reading through them as much as I have.

10 Ways to Speed Up Your Student Loan Repayment – While getting a college education can be very useful to your success in life (some people would even argue that it is downright essential), it comes with a price: student loan debt.  Studenomics has some advice on how we, the indebted college grads, can reduce our student debt burden.  I’d just offer one more piece of advice: whatever you do, do it quickly; as with any type of debt, the longer you wait, the more interest can build up, snowballing into ever greater debt.  Try to chop some extra off in the beginning so you get a running start at repayment.

10 Free Online Budgeting Applications - Last week was a big week for lists, apparently; Lazy Man and Money is the third entry in this edition of the Weekly Thoughts (which is itself a list…) to make a blog entry in the form of a list.  In this case, we get several budgeting applications you can find online provided  for our future financial growth.  Many of them I’ve heard mentioned before, (and even use myself), but a few, like Buxfer and Thrive were new to me, and might just be what you are looking for in a budgeting system.

Forbes Forgot a Key Ingredient to Becoming a Billionaire – Apparently, even Forbes has a sense of humor; they wrote a humorous take on what is needed to become a billionaire, listing five characteristics you need.  Luckily for us, the Financial Samurai caught one they missed: inheriting the money from your parents.  Certainly seems easier than, you know, working, saving, and investing.

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