MONEY CLIPPED

Just in case you missed them the first time around…

Video: The Cost Of Zero
Thu 10 Apr 2008

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April is National Financial Literacy Month and now the month is almost up. Did you learn anything this month that will help you manage your personal finances?

The Institute of Consumer Financial Education released the quiz below to help people gauge financial knowledge and awareness. Grab a pen and piece of paper and see how you do. The answers to the first set of questions are at the bottom of the post. The second set of questions are more to get you thinking about how you are managing your finances.

1. Late payments on bills are a minor problem or no problem at all when seeking a home loan. (T) (F) (Not Sure)

15. Which of the following best describes your monthly spending plan or budget:
I do not have enough money to have a budget.
I would like to have a monthly budget, but do not know how to make one.
I have a budget for the monthly bills but not for everyday expenses.
I have a monthly budget and I use it to plan for all of my monthly expenses.

Scoring: TRUE/FALSE 1-10 F,T,T,T,F,F,T,T,F,F

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Last month I held a contest to win “Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant”. Entrants simply had to state the book that has had the biggest impact on their personal finances.

I thought the results were interesting and worth sharing here.

There was a large diversity of books and authors mentioned but 5 books dominated. These are the titles, in order, that received the most mentions:

#1

Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey

#2

Mad Money by Jim Cramer

#3

Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki & Sharon Lechter

#4

The Everyday Cheapskate by Mary Hunt

#5

Young, Fabulous, and Broke by Suze Orman

Honorable mention goes to The Millionaire Next Door and Your Money or Your Life for getting multiple votes:

The authors most often mentioned by name or who had multiple titles mentioned were:

* Dave Ramsey
* Suze Orman
* Jim Cramer

Obviously there’s nothing scientific to these results. One can assume most of the entrants either enter contests frequently or follow personal finance and money blogs and that probably has some bearing on their responses. Still, its interesting to see how these personal finance books rank not by sales but by how much their readers felt influenced by them.

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Who would’ve guessed that golden corn would end up being a commodity as important as, well, gold?

Corn is suddenly headline news and it effects pocketbooks in North America and food pantries elsewhere. This is serious business and if you’re having as hard a time as I am trying to understand it, here’s a easy place to start. PBS produced a documentary called KING CORN about 2 college grads who plant an acre of corn and see what happens next. It is a trip into the confusing and somewhat bizarre world of American agriculture and crop subsidies. Here’s the trailer:

Now, I found this documentary fascinating but I don’t necessarily trust the editorial objectiveness of PBS. For that reason, I’ve been exploring some questions on my own and here is some of what I’ve found. Unfortunately, much of it is contradictory so You’ll have to weigh each answer or opinion based on how trustworthy you find the source.

Who is helped and who is hurt by farm subsidies?

The reason I’m taking this so seriously is everytime I fill my tank at the local MurphyUSA gas station, I see a sticker that says “10% ethanol”. Not only does that not make it any cheaper to fill my tank but it also makes me wonder if everytime I fill up using that blend, am I taking the food out of the mouths of starving children?

According to one report I saw, the amount of corn it takes to fill an SUV tank would feed one person for a year. Now I don’t drive a SUV but still…

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You wanna do something to make you feel all warm and fuzzy Earth Day?

Watch this little video and then turn off your computer, your monitor, your modem, router, printer and whatever else you have hooked up. Then leave it off all day. You’ll have a smaller carbon footprint for a day and you’ll save a little on your electric bill.

If you’re at work, take some PTO for the day. Your boss obviously hates the planet if he’s making you use electricity and stuff on Earth Day, right?

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Founding member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ National CPA Financial Literacy Commission, Stanley Breitbard, was the recipient of the 2008 William E. Odom Visionary Leadership Award from the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy.

Congratulations to Stanley and thank you to all those who help promote personal finance literacy!

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The latest edition of the American Economics Blog Carnival is up over at Stuck In Traffic.

If you’re into reading personal finance blogs then you need to check out this carnival. These economic posts provide you with the theoretical foundation upon which is built the practical advice you find on PF blogs. If you really want to make money and be successful, you need to understand economics and this blog carnval is a great place to start.

Here are my 5 favoraite posts from this edition of the carnival:

Find Out Little Known Facts About American Financial Crisis
at Personal Finance Strategy

Are Bernanke’s Hands Tied? 8 Reasons the US May Be in Worse Trouble Than You Think
at CurrencyTrading.net

And don’t forget to read my own contribution to the carnival:
Measuring A Nation’s Wealth: Alternatives To The GDP

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