Oy! The Carnival of Personal Finance is huge this week!

Wow! I can't believe how many submissions there were. Lots of great articles. I submitted Learning To Be Content On Birthdays in light of the one I just celebrated. By the way, the birthday party Saturday night was absolutely insane and wonderful. I had sssuuuccchhh a good time! I still feel a little hung over. Heh.

Amanda over at Value For Your Life wrote a great article on Risk-Taking For Regular People that argues the merits of making educated risks.

I'm quite glad I came across Sudden Windfalls over at Small Cents because it is such a neat little blog! I smell something new I'll be reading often.

One of the most ethical posts featured in this Carnival is over at Money and Values: Is Your Money Funding Genocide? While I avoid certain corporations that are unethical in their practices, this post addresses investing in Mutual Funds that may be supporting the Sudanese government with ethnic cleansing of non-Arab Darfurians.

I absolutely love Debt-Free Revolution's post on using a budget to get out of consumer debt. This quote particularly stood out, "Yes, my first three budgets were actually the nightmares the dreaded “B” word tends to conjure up." I just had my first month of budgeting, and erm, I need to tweak it. Desperately! This post was perfectly timed for me considering I was about to throw the concept out the window.

Evil Virus and Review of Carnival of Personal Finance.

I started typing this three hours ago and was viciously attacked by a virus from hell. While innocently meandering through the Carnival of Personal Finance posts, I was brutally assaulted with pop-ups when I hopped on to a certain blogger's site. I don't know how it happened, but a file was downloaded to my Windows file as System32. It's actually a horrid virus that is causing never-ending pop-ups to appear on my laptop... even when I'm not on the internet! I couldn't even finish the post because the pop-ups regenerate at a few per minute. Furthermore, I can't delete the file!!! I tried Spyware and Ad-Ware to no avail. Anyone have any suggestions on how to conquer this demon?

On to my review of the Carnival of Personal Finance...



I'm a total and complete Scrabble-freak. No surprise then that I enjoyed Scrabble & Personal Finance: 8 Lessons From Tiles by Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.

Speed Interviewing as presented by The Baglady is an interesting technique that I have never heard of before. I'd imagine it to be quite the adrenaline rush. I wonder how often this gets put into use?

I'm a big proponent of Fair Trade (although there are some faults, but I'll save that for another post). If you don't understand what the concept is, or why it is so important, head over to Money and Values and read the post Go Bananas for Fair Trade. I happen to love my Fair Trade jewelry and coffee.

Outside the Carnival realm...

I utterly adored Cheap Healthy Good's post on reasons Rachael Ray is not the devil incarnate (okay, not completely) despite her annoyingly cheerful demeanor.

GildedButterfly scored big with the find she made... on the street! I was blown away by her Street Shopping post. Not really acceptable out here in the Los Angeles region.

I am utterly horrible with organizing receipts. They end up in a pile in my backpack, on my dresser and crumpled in pockets. Queercents featured an awesome article Financially Organized: Receipts that had some useful tips.

For those of you not skilled in the art of saving, The Digerati Life has a list of 15 Painless Ways To Pay Yourself First.

Last but not least, for those dreamers out there (me included!), Clever Dude's post on what he would do if he won the lottery. I love how he breaks down into what he would do with certain cash values.

Editor's Pick at this Week's Carnival of PF

I went to check my stats out for the site and had a "OH MY GOD!" moment. My numbers are through the roof. That's always a pleasant surprise in the face of medical issues.

Thanks Million Dollar Journey for featuring Tale of Two Friends as an editor's pick for this week's Carnival of Personal Finance! For my lovely readers, I'll pick my own favorites and post them tomorrow morning.

Furthermore, MSN's MoneyBlog Smart Spending featured The Friend Who Is Always Broke which is a recap of the previously mentioned Tale of Two Friends.

Thanks also to Wooly Woman for featuring me in her Round-Up of the last week for us meal planner participants.

Time for me to catch up on my reading.

Midnight Review of the Carnival of Personal Finance

It's nearly midnight and I should be asleep. Seeing as that is not happening, I hopped on over to this week's Personal Finance Carnival at Millionare Mommy Next Door. Take a look under Frugality and lo' and behold, there's my article on saving money with a Student ID! My very first Carnival post! You should vote for it so I can get a free bag of candy. :-D

Vixen's Picks:

My absolute favorite is The Anatomy of Crazy Bosses over at The Baglady. My GM certainly is the Paranoid Delusional. She even has that bipolar trait.

Need help prioritizing? Check out 10 Thoughts on Setting Finanical Priorities over at Kim Staudenraus.

Financial Incentives To Being Healthy at I've Paid For This Twice Already provided some interesting insights on the direction health insurance is heading.

Definetly related to each other: The near crisis in A Contingency Plan at the Captain's wouldn't have been needed if he read Easy Ways to Get an Emergency Fund Started over at Green Panda Treehouse.