My Favorite Blog Articles of the Week

So fantasy baseball is starting up again. Both Yahoo and espn have opened their sites for fantasy baseball 2009! If you couldn’t tell from my article comparing the stock market to fantasy baseball, I love fantasy baseball. I usually join at least 8 leagues, some of which are with friends and some are with random people. I was thinking about starting a league this year with my readers and hoping to make it an annual event. So shoot me an email (pfstartup@gmail.com) or leave a comment if you’re interested in joining my league. If I don’t find enough readers, which admittedly will probably be the case, I will start propositioning some of my favorite personal finance bloggers. Speaking of my favorite personal finance bloggers, here are my favorite articles for the week.

Links

Nickel over at FiveCentNickel discusses the difference between refundable and non-refundable tax credits. This is a great point to understand with it being tax season and so many tax credits being proposed in the stimulus package.

Pinyo at Moolanomy shares some thoughts and experiences about peer-to-peer lending. I’m just getting started with Lending Club and found this article very helpful. I’ve heard of people getting 10% returns on investments through peer-to-peer lending, so it’s definitely worth a look.

Patrick at Cash Money Life has an interesting series going about starting a blog for fun or profit. In his second post he discusses what to write about. It’s absolutely critical to pick a topic that you are passionate about, otherwise you will run out of content pronto.

Jim at Bargaineering wrote about strong arming your way to a better deal. This is a great post about getting the best deals on utilities or other negotiable services. It’s all about options. If you can prove you have similar options for less, the company will be forced to give you a better rate or risk losing your service. Nobody wants to lose customers in this economy.

SVB at The Digerati Life sponsored a guest post about saving your receipts to itemize your tax deductions. This post was especially helpful for me as I’m entering the first tax year where I will itemize my tax deductions now that I have a mortgage.

Pat at Smart Passive Income offers his advice about using advertising on your blog to make some extra money. I will definitely refer back to this post when I start to get enough traffic to even think about having private advertising.

I really enjoyed this post about how 401k investments did worse than cash over the past 20 years over at My Money Blog. It’s really interesting to note this as I don’t participate in my company’s 401k.

My Dollar Plan outlines all of your 2008 tax information in one place. This will be very handy when I begin to file my taxes.

The monthly goal update is available at Passive Family Income. I love to read about goal updates as they keep me inspired to achieve my own goals.

An interesting debate started up at Studenomics over who you can blame if you’re bad at handling your money. I personally blame the school system that has no requirements for a personal finance class. I would have benefited immensely with a personal finance class in high school. Not only was it not a requirement, but I didn’t even have the option.

Carnivals

I only participated in one carnival this week. It’s been a busy week, but I have to stop making excuses and start submitting more articles. The carnival I did participate in was graciously hosted by Dollar Frugal.

Random Thought

I suppose it’s that time of year, no not Valentine’s day. Not my bday or President’s day, but Brett Favre retiring day. How many years in a row are we going to be bombarded with sportscenter news alerts about good old number 4 retiring? I’m hoping it’s a false call again, the Jets release him, he signs with the Vikings and they are terrible in 2009. Is that too much to ask for?