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Roundup: MBN, Thanks For All The Fish
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This week I left the Money Blog Network. It was an amicable separation and wish them all the best. As such, the weekly roundups will continue but will feature fewer links and more in-depth discussions of the articles that I link to. One of the values in roundups isn’t that you get a shotgun blast of a dozen posts but that you get a little more insight into my thoughts on what other people wrote (I hope!). The roundups will also include some non-personal finance articles that I found informative or entertaining, I hope you find them as entertaining as well.
After this week’s interview with Jeremy of GenXFinance, I’ve come to better appreciate the insight and knowledge he brings to the table when discussing investment matters. That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate his thoughts before my better understanding of his background really does help me appreciate it when he discusses news like how Fidelity reopened their Magellan funds. It’s crucial to understand that despite incredible historic returns, so incredible they closed it to new investors for a decade, and despite that those returns made Peter Lynch a household name, it’s really not the same fund and only time will tell if investing in this flagship product makes good sense.
I’m surprised no one discovered this earlier but it wasn’t until this week did I learn that you should set aside coupons for four weeks before you should use them. Trent at The Simple Dollar shares the idea that the Sunday coupons are the first promotional push by companies and that actual in-store sales will appear approximately four weeks after the coupons. Now, I’ve noticed that sometimes the coupons coincide with in-store sales, but for everything else I think this “lag” time makes for more effective use of coupons.
Nickel shares an idea from a reader that I’ve seen several times before and always thought was unrealistic. The idea is to move to a cheaper cost of living country in order to lengthen your retirement. The “downside is that it is so far from friends and family” is a pretty huge downside! I think that moving to a place in the US with a lower cost of living might be more reasonable than a developed country, there are a lot of reasons why other countries are less expensive to live in and those are undesirable reasons!
Herbal supplements aren’t FDA regulated, which is something I never thought really matter all that much, but that means you have no idea what the heck is inside of them. It also means that you have no idea that those pills were stuffed by a random person sitting in their living room with their unwashed hands as they smoked a cigarette (that’s if you don’t mind taking pills of ‘who knows what’). Thankfully I don’t take herbal supplements or I would’ve thrown up in my brain.
Okay, let’s say on the off chance you still have your appetite, how about a ranking of places that will give you free food if you eat a ridiculous amount? Stacy at Mental Floss put together a list of crazy places with this offer… one of them, Sunni Sky’s in Angier, North Carolina has Cold Sweat Ice Cream. That’s right, spicy ice cream! (and you have to sign a waiver to eat it!)
I hope you all have a great weekend, don’t eat anything bigger than your head (unless you can get it for free), and don’t buy any herbal supplements from shady online vendors that email you. If you do want herbal supplements, I can some that can help you lose weight, gain confidence, improve intelligence, and costs only $59.99 for a bottle of 20.
{ 6 comments, please add your thoughts now! }Related Posts
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If you don’t want to move to a whole different country, you could always move to a part of the US where the cost of living is lower.
Very true, but moving isn’t that simple, you leave behind a lot of things just to have a cheaper cost of living? I don’t know…
Jim, I agree on the moving thing. That would be pretty tough to do, esp if you’ve lived in the same area your entire life. In the case of the commenter who brought this up in the first place on my site, they are from Indonesia, and currently living/working in Australia. So in that case, moving to Indonesia would essentially be moving back home again. That’s a very different scenario, and likely to be much more acceptable.
“Don’t eat anything bigger than your head.” Very good advice for me to follow, particularly given the size of my head. Let’s just say I can’t buy hats off the rack.
WRT coupon delays: Have you checked out http://www.thegrocerygame.com? The whole premise of this site is linking up store sales with coupons to get the best price. The site has a pretty fancy database that monitors the price of goods to find the best deals over a 3 month rolling window. I’ve heard of folks saving $100s on groceries relative to regular grocery store prices; and perhaps 10-15% over discount stores, like walmart.
I enjoy the roundups and am looking forward to seeing more of your thoughts and some other interesting links. It’s rare for me to click through the links in roundups when it is only a one sentence comment, so everyone linked here should be happy for more of your thoughts too.