Save and Conquer

More carnival listings this past week! There were some great posts.

Our post, The House Always Wins, was listed in the Carnival of Personal Finance, #159: The First Zero-Emissions City. The theme gave information about a “zero-emissions city” that is being built from the ground up in the UAE. Nice to know our oil money is building something that should not hurt the environment and that the world can learn from. There were 87 posts in the carnival. Some that I liked were

• Retirement Savings 101: All about retirement accounts (and why to start saving now!) at Money Values. This is a very good post describing most all retirement accounts. It goes well beyond that and describes “why” and “how” as well. There is also the promise of a follow-up post on guidelines for how to use and invest in various retirement accounts.
• “The Second R” or “How I Became a Reuse Addict” at Frugal Fu. Reuse is a very important “R.” I have been reusing stuff since my mother made me bring home lunch bags in my back pocket for at least a week’s worth of reuse. (I got a new bag when the old one got too fluffy and thin and tore along the folds from sitting on it for a week.)
• It’s the principal of the matter … Literally! at Budgets Are Sexy. Good advice on how to prevent getting overcharged by at the checkout. It is something that I have done since I was a kid.

Our post, Frugal Events for the 4th of July, was listed in the Festival of Frugality #132 – “Frugal is, as Frugal does” edition. I may do a post on how that event at Wilder Ranch went. Some of my favorites posts in the festival were

• Is being frugal patriotic? at at FrugalMomLA. We are reminded that the time of plenty (the last 50 years) is only about 30% of our country’s history. The rest of the time, people were necessarily frugal.
• The Value of Pictures and Memories at the Writer’s Coin. I too enjoy taking pictures to give me memories of vacations and of special times past. And with today’s digital cameras, it doesn’t cost anything to take lots of pictures, experiment, take silly shots, and then just keep the ones you like. (Backups of the picture files are important, though. Besides two sets of backups on our server, I also keep a separate backup disk locked in a fire safe.)

Our post, I Normally Hate Rebates, But…, was listed in the Money Hacks Carnival #19: The Independence Edition. Money Hacks posts are typically short, but they have some really neat ideas.

My favorite post, by far this week, was a long series of Monopoly game enhancements at Our Fourpence Worth. The listing in the Money Hacks Carnival was the third in the series of Monopoly enhancements. I like all of them. The introductory post is called Monopoly Game Expansions for Learning Money Management and Investment Principles. The entire series can be seen by clicking on the category link of Games. There are forms in these posts for

1. tracking a Monopoly personal savings account
2. a Monopoly personal check register
3. a Monopoly certificate of deposit form
4. a Monopoly personal credit card account.

Rules for how to use these game additions are included in the forms and in the posts. I can’t say enough about these game enhancements. It does mean that the game can probably go on for days and days. Kudos and Thank You to Penelope Pince and Madoline Hatter!

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