As you probably know, today is Black Friday and it’s the day that many retails go into the black on their books. Doors at many stores open at 5am to huge lines waiting for tremendous deals like a sub-$400 HP laptop from Walmart. So I wanted to know, do you take part in the festivities and if so, what did you get? I think eventually I’m going to drive on over to Staples and pick up a free after rebate paper shredder but I opted for the best gift of all, as much sleep as I wanted we hosted eighteen people for our first Thanksgiving dinner at the new house. Can’t buy good sleep…

I didn’t even know this was going on until I saw Flexo do it at Consumerism Commentary.

Well, the first comment ever by a reader was one of my friends who wrote a comment as Ace Wags, later to be changed to King Asa, on a post in which I compared all the DVD rental programs (fourth article I ever wrote).

The first blogger to comment on my site, and subsequently link to it, was JLP of All Things Financial and his comment was on a post in which I discussed the merits of mutual funds:

Good article. I’m going to post a link to it as well as a link to your blog (that is, if you don’t mind. If you do mind, let me know and I’ll take the link down).

Keep up the good work.

JLP

Did I mind? Hahahahaha yeah right. Since then I’ve linked to JLP a few times, interviewed him once, and we’ve helped each other improve our blogging (he’s helped me with financial issues and I’ve made technical suggestions) and it’s been a great relationship. Thanks JLP!

Welcome to the fourth edition of the Personal Finance Blogger Spotlight series and this week I’m proud to introduce you all to Nina from Sitting Pretty Financially. She’s been writing for five months now and she is a great example of someone who has a day job but supplements her lifestyle with extensive real estate investments, motivated by the writings of Robert Kiyosaki. Nina’s a treat to read and I’m a huge fan of the quotes she uses to start every post. Without further delay, here’s a little about Nina.

If you are a personal finance blogger and would like to be interviewed for the Personal Finance Blogger Spotlight series, send me an email with your contact info and we can set something up. See this page for details on this series and to read past interviews.

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Alright, I sensationalized the blatantly false and unsubstantiated title but in an article about the increased incidence of mugging in Britain, specifically London, Simon Pountain, a police officer, supposed that one of the reasons why personal theft crimes like muggings have increased is because personal items have significantly increased in value. In a third of all street robberies, the cell phone was the only thing taken.

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I compared the major players in the online photo publishing a while back and found that Snapfish’s quality was the best (the proof is in the pudding, try the service yourself because they have free trial prints). Well, I found a 5 free photo greeting cards code CRES-T005 via Fatwallet. I always wanted to try these but never really wanted to take the plunge, this is just the ticket. I’ll probably sign up, get some more free prints (20), and try out these greeting cards. Who knows, if they’re any good I’ll probably order more since it’s over a month away from Christmas. (Caveat: The shipping isn’t free on these prints)

Sign up with Snapfish. (Code: CRES-T005)

We’ve all heard that the twenty-five year old milestone is the biggest deal in auto insurance. On that day you magically become safer and actuaries have tables and statistics proving this fact, otherwise auto insurance companies wouldn’t be giving you a discount. I invite you to review two posts in which I detail my insurance prices a month before I turned 25 and the insurance prices a month after I turned 25. Essentially I concluded that you can expect somewhere in the realm of ten percent until I opened up my next Geico bill. My six month fee fell even more from $377.10 to $348.30 (7.6%) for a total fall of over 20%.

I didn’t comparison shop with other insurance companies because I felt they may give me the same results, no reason why they wouldn’t, and because it would take a while to compile the data.

20% drop in auto insurance for turning twenty five (and waiting two months) would fall into the category of “big drop” in my book.

You’re probably thinking more about the turkey next week (mmm stuffing!) than you are about your tax situation, as you should be, but I wanted to touch on some things you might want to do now in order to help your out tax situation before it’s too late (i.e. New Year’s Eve). Besides charitable contributions, which should be in every employed person’s mind anyway, there are a lot of things that you should be doing now so you can capitalize on them come April 15th next year.

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Dawn at Frugal For Life has done a marvelous job (love the carnival image she always uses) at hosting a carnival packed full of useful information. Weighing in at twenty-eight submissions, the topics range from the classic question of your net worth to taxes to frugal living and learning how to spend less for the things you buy now. My own contribution is less personal finance in nature but more of a rant about the undisclosed dangers of Ortho Evra… I’m glad to see it made it even though it wasn’t entirely personal finance in nature.