May 23rd – May 29th
The Friday Five is a new series where I share what I consider are the week’s top-five money related articles from around the web. There are a lot of great personal finance websites publishing amazing content daily and I feel that I must share them with you. I hope you enjoy my five favorite articles of the week.
If you haven’t, please read my latest post on Saving for College and please follow me on Twitter and like Million Dollar Ninja on Facebook.
In no particular order here are The Friday Five
1. Katie A at CNA Finance writes, What Happens When Teens Learn How to Manage Credit? This is Katie A’s first post and it is a wonderful post. It shows how learning how to manage our credit at an early age pays off. She was able to achieve a 700+ credit score by the time she graduated college. If you’ve read my story you know that this wasn’t the case for me. The sad part is that she didn’t learn this from her parents. She was lucky enough to come across a wonderful teacher and she happened to pay attention in class – also not one of my strengths.
2. Shannon at Financially Blonde writes, Talk To Your Kids About Money. In the post above, Katie A was lucky that she learned about credit cards at 15, but it certainly wasn’t from her parents. Shannon writes about the importance of talking to your kids about money early in life. I know it’s cliché, but if only I knew then what I know now my financial situation will be a lot different. She recommends talking to your kids about money as early as possible and as often as possible. It’s better if we brain wash them to be savers than TV and society brain wash them to be spenders.
3. Dan at Suburban Finance writes, How Spring Cleaning Earned Us $432. In last week’s Friday Five, I mentioned a post about the benefits of spring cleaning our finances. This week we learn how we can make money while spring cleaning our house. Dan and his wife decided to have a garage sale and he writes about which items sold well, which didn’t sell so well, pricing strategies and haggling strategies. We all tend to collect a bunch of junk throughout the years so a little spring cleaning could help us create more space – for more junk – and make money in the process.
4. Mrs. PoP at Planting Our Pennies writes, You Never Know What Something Is Worth Until You Sell It. Since we’re in the subject of selling stuff, Mr and Mrs PoP decided to sell their Jeep on Craigslist. This is an interesting post because it shows how we tend to undervalue our possessions. They ended up selling their Jeep for much more than they thought it was worth. They did use Kelly’s Blue Book to get an idea of what their car was worth, but after seeing what other similar vehicles were selling for they decided to up the price to see what they could get for it.
5. Travis Pizel at Money Ning writes, Keep Track of Your Monthly Bills… By Throwing Away Your Statements. I love this post because I hate paper statements. I get all my statements online – I just wish I could stop all that other paper junk mail I get all the time. Travis explains how he deals with his bills without paper statements and maybe you could use his way of doing things. He also tells us why he doesn’t use automatic withdrawals – Kate (my fiancee) loves automatic withdrawals, I on the other hand stopped all my automatic withdrawals to force myself to check my accounts.
I guess some type of spring cleaning was the hot topic this week in the blogosphere.
Please check out all these great articles and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
On a side note, I’m very excited about this weekend. Kate and I are going to check out the great city of Boston. This is going to be the first time in Boston for me – I hope I like it. We decided to take the bus there because it was so much cheaper than driving and paying for a garage to park our car for three days, but this is our first time taking those discount buses so I’ll let you know if it’s worth it. My only hope is that the weather cooperates because we’re going to be doing a lot of walking. We have a big list of places to eat that we gathered from friends, but if any of you are familiar with Boston and know of good spots please let me know.
Don’t forget to check out The Friday Five every week and please don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and like Million Dollar Ninja on Facebook.
Josh @ CNA
Hey, thanks for mentioning Katie’s posts, I found the Friday 5 last week and I’m glad I did. Thanks for letting me know about the great reads around the blogosphere!
Stefanie @ The Broke and Beautiful Life
Check out the Freedom Trail. It’s really awesome and FREE.
You definitely don’t need a car there and I’ve take discount buses a million times with great succses.
Shannon @ Financially Blonde
Thanks for mentioning my post this week!!! My hubby went to school in Boston and we love to visit there. It is definitely a walking town but the duck tour there is one of the best. Hope you enjoy your visit!