A family situation has come up, and I will be out of town for the next several days. Please redirect any good wishes towards New Orleans. I’m glad that I have the means to buy a last-minute ticket across the country if that is what I need to do. Please forgive any delays in answering e-mails, etc.

Being Poor. Lots of buzz around it, hundreds of comments too.

One line that struck me was:

Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends’ houses but never has friends over to yours.

I don’t feel I’ve ever been poor at all, but I used to not invite my friends over because I was ashamed to show them our family’s small 2 bedroom apartment (which was smaller than the apartment my wife and I currently live in together alone), while they lived in big nice houses. I wonder if my parents ever knew. I hope not, they’ve provided me with more than I could ever ask for.

Anyways, read the post and the interesting comments too. Don’t miss the last line of the post.

Update: More comments here.

* Found via a commenter, Kyle Welsh’s blog. Thanks Kyle!

I wish the real carnival came to town this often too… but the next best thing, this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance and Carnival of the Capitalists are up. Is it just me or does every time I read “carnival” I think “funnel cake”? Maybe it’s just my diet talking.

I finally managed to put up a new site layout, to look more like my other blog, MyHealthBlog. The redesign was inspired by the clean 3-column formats of such blogs as LifeHacker, Blog Herald, The Daily Bite, and Jalopnik. Yes, it is 5am, and yes, I have been up since 8am. I’m not so slick with the html. Due to that and my overall weariness, please let me know if I broke something!

Carnival of Personal Finance #11 is up. Check it out at AllThingsFinancial‘s new blog!

…is the sound my hard drive made yesterday. Well, more of a clicking, but either way I think it’s dead. Warranty expired too. I’m glad I still have my laptop. At least I backed up everything recently. Should I get a new hard drive, or a whole new computer? They are so cheap these days, you can get a new Dell computer with a 17″ flat panel LCD for under $500. But my Pentium 3 seems just fine for everything I do, I don’t know what I need an extra 2,000 MHz for. I guess it helps out people who like to play video games, but those LCDs are calling out to me…

If you’ve been visiting this site within the last hour, you’ve probably seen some funky things going on while I tested out new background images and colors (even bright pink!). I ended up taking a picture of… what else? My money! My $20 bill to be exact. I wanted to take a picture of a $100 bill, but I don’t carry that kind of bankroll around. What do you think? I think it adds a little somethin’-somethin’.

This week’s Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Consumerism Commentary. Check it out!

This week’s Carnival of Personal Finance is up at InCashFlowWeTrust. Check it out, lots of submissions this week, even I somehow managed to do it.

I finally got all the paperwork for the purchase of my new car, which is actually my old company car which coincidentally came off-lease recently. I paid an even $8,000 after taxes and fees for a 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix. Kelley Blue Book and Edmunds both quoted approximately $8400 before taxes & fees for the private party value of the car, so I guess it was a decent deal. This car depreciated well over 50% of it’s price in 3 years! Poor GM. I did consider shopping around for a slightly cheaper used car with a more reliable brand, for example a Toyota Camry. But for the same price, I’d have to settle for a 2000 model with ~60,000 miles.
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This week’s Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Free Money Finance. Check it out. Sigh. Again, I have forgotten to submit a post. Every week I mean to, but every week I forget. There are so many pf bloggers now, and as much as I like reading them all I can’t keep up. I just end up reading 2-3 weeks of posts at a time. May we all retire rich and meet up in the Caribbean one fine day. =)

I was cleaning out my Inbox and ran across somebody who was wondering if my money was from my parents or other gift/inheritance. So I wanted to expand upon my initial About Me post and share some more about my financial past.

Let’s start with college. My parents did help me through undergrad, but I still took about $8,000 of students loans for each of my four years. So, $32,000 in total. I worked part-time every single year in college, working everything from restaurant host to tutor to parking lot attendant. This mostly went towards food and spending money. I also worked full-time every single summer. I’d say each summer I’d earn about $3,000 net, and $1k (edit: towards loans) from during the rest of the year.
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