MONEY CLIPPED

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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Some personal finance principles apply to all of us and there are plenty of great personal finance (PF) blogs out there that address them. However, each of us has to apply the various theories and rules of personal finance to our own particular situations or lifestyles. That’s where niche PF blogs can come in very handy.

A PF blog that addresses a lifestyle, philosophy, or scenario similar to your own can provide advice and insight that you’ll find much more applicable than the generic advice that’s so plentiful. Here are some great examples of niche PF blogs:

Dimes to Dollars
Who it addresses: Military couples and families

Dual Income No Kids
Who it addresses: Childless couples

Queercents
Who it addresses: Gays,lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered

Eco Street
Who it addresses: Those who wish to live Eco-friendly lifestyles

The Budgeting Babe
Who it addresses: Young, working women

Christian PF
Who it addresses: committed Christians

Young Money
Who it addresses: high school and college students

If you are thinking of starting a personal finance blog or already have one but want to stand out more, maybe you should consider going niche. Think about how your life might be categorized and what personal finance issues are unique or unusual. For example, a rural farmer in Montanna has to contend with very different practical finance matters than someone who is a bartender in Miami. Or maybe your religious or social values demand you manage your money according to specific principles. These things are great fodder for a niche personal finance blog.

If you aren’t a blogger and can’t find a site that addresses your specific fiance issues, odds are you aren’t alone and maybe its a sign that you need to take up the cause!

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UPDATE: Feb. 16, 2008
The feed I created using Dapper no longer appears to work. I have no idea why. I plan on trying to recreate it at some point. If I’m able to get it to work and remain permanently viable, I’ll post it here as an update.

(original post)
I like seeing what gets posted on Lifehacker under the tags: finances, personal finances, budgeting, budget, and money. Unfortunately, the way the site is set up, hunting for those posts is a pain.

To the best of my knowledge, Lifehacker has only one RSS feed and it includes everything- you can’t subscribe to a feed of just the money posts or the budget posts. So the easiest way to keep up with those posts was to bookmark the individual tag pages:

http://lifehacker.com/tag/finances/

http://lifehacker.com/tag/budgeting/

Not the ideal scenario but it works. I tried using a service I discovered on Lifehacker called Dapp Factory to create an RSS feed of just the posts with those tags I listed above. I only met with limited success. You can see the result here:

Dapper Feed Of Lifehacker Money Posts

It didn’t really create an RSS feed but if you subscribe to it in Firefox, it will add it to your feed bar and when you click on one of the topics, it will take you to that page on Lifehacker. In other words, it just creates a folder of the above bookmarks. Its not ideal but it beats the alternative of sifting through all of Lifehacker’s posts.

I have to admit, I didn’t spend a lot of time working on creating the feed using Dapper and I found the interface a bit confusing. If there is anyone out there who is familiar with Dapper or a similar service for creating custom feeds, you might be able to succeed where I failed. If anyone does get a feed of just the money tagged posts working, please let me know so I can share it with everyone.

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The recent $7.1-billion loss by French investment bank Société Générale due to the action of a single employee, Jérôme Kerviel, has raised my interest in rogue traders. It is a sobering thought that a single anonymous individual has the power to wreak havoc on that scale.

Here are a few other rogue traders from recent history that you may not have heard of:

Nick Leeson
Who Lost: Britain’s Baring’s bank
How Much: $1.5 billion
Sentence: more than 6 years in prison
Footnote: Barings closed in 1995 as a result.

Toshihide Iguchi
Who Lost: Daiwa
How Much: $1.1 billion
Sentence: 4 years in prison and fined $2.6 million
Footnote: performed 30,000 unauthorized transactions

John Rusnak
Who Lost: Allfirst Bank (part of Allied Irish Bank)
How Much: $691 million
Sentence: 7.5 years in prison
Footnote: nicknamed the “Brogue Trader”

Yasuo Hamanaka
Who Lost: Sumitomo
How Much: $2.6 billion
Sentence: 8 years in prison
Footnote: aka “Mr. Five Percent” because that is how much of the world’s yearly copper supply he controlled

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Its hard to accomplish much without having some sort of plan. Like most people, I want to see a rise in my personal wealth during the next year. Here’s the short version of my plan:

BUY LESS CRAP
Easier said than done but I’m feeling up to the challenge!

READ MORE MONEY BOOKS
Free from the library, of course. I plan on covering a wide variety of topics from personal finance to economic theory.

AUTOMATE MORE OF MY SAVINGS
I’m convinced this is the most sucessul and least painful way to save.

INCREASE MY WEB SITES’ TRAFFIC
I have several sites I operate with a partner and the more traffic we have, the more we earn.

BROADEN MY NUMBER OF REVENUE STREAMS
Honestly, I’m not sure how I’ll do this one but I’m feeling determined.

MAINTENANCE, NOT REPLACEMENT
Investigate repair options before buying replacements for things I own, including cars.

FINISH MY SECOND DEGREE
Just six more classes and I’ll have a second college degree! Hopefully it’ll pay off.

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CNN reported on the results of a survey of Americans’ perceptions of their financial fitness. I’m not going into the results here because the results are meaningless. Here’s why:

1. There’s no definition of “financially fit” so what it means is completely subjective.

2. The results came from 1002 online respondents (a small sample limited to those with Internet access)

So what’s the point of this thing?
PR. The survey was done on behalf of Countrywide Bank to generate a littel publicity. Make up a survey with “interesting” results comparing “financial fitness” and physical fitness and maybe some media outlets like, um say, CNN, pick up on the survey and Countrywide Bank gets some easy media.

I’m picking on this survey but it’s hardly unique. These sorts of goofy publicity/marketing surveys and polls pop up all the time. Unfortunately, news outlets run these types of survey results as if they’re authoritative and many people view them as such because they trust the media to not mislead them. Political candidates will use survey results to bolster their economic stances.

Before you let the results of some money-related survey affect your financial decision-making or your perception of the economy, check out the source, look at the wording of the questions, and ask yourself what is the real motivation of the survey sponsor and check out the survey methodology. You might find some of your trusted sources aren’t so trustworthy after all.

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