It’s been a while since Bargaineering has been in a somewhat active “blog network” but I’m happy to announce that we’ve joined the Yakezie, an informal group of personal finance bloggers looking to help each other out. I sometimes miss the camaraderie of the blog networks in the past so I hope will bring some of that back. If nothing else, it’ll be fun!

Also, if you’re an aficionado of home remodeling, you need to check out my friend Fred’s Home Renovation Before and After Contest. You need to share your home renovation project story, submit some pictures, and starting June 20th they’ll select one winner each Sunday. Winner gets a $50 gift card to Lowes, Home Depot, or Amazon and they make a $100 donation to Habitat for Humanity. If you did a renovation, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t enter this contest.

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I don’t follow baseball extremely closely, not until after the All-Star break anyway, but this past week Armando Galarraga was robbed of a Perfect Game. A Perfect Game, and I use capitals because it’s only been done 20 times in the history of baseball (two of those, Dallas Braden and Roy Halladay, have come this year), is where the opponent is held to no hits, no runs, and your team has committed zero errors.

Armando Galarraga, pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, was one out away when Jason Donald was called safe at first base on not-that-close call. Unfortunately on replay, and to some in the stands, it didn’t look close at all. First base Umpire Jim Joyce later admits that he missed it and apologized to Galarraga. To his credit, Galarraga took it very well and acted very professionally about the situation.

All in all, it’s a pretty crappy result.

Here are some gems from this past week:
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The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico just keeps on going (though it’s down to a smaller leak)… it’s been spilling since the Deepwater Horizon exploded April 21st. Since then, oil has been “leaking” out at a staggering rate. These pictures are just sad. The effects of this disaster will be felt for decades. In Alaska’s Prince William Sound, where the Exxon Valdez spilled millions of crude twenty years ago, the herring have yet to return.

In other news…
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The big financial news of this week, besides the correction in the markets, has to be the Senate passing the financial reform bill – Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 (S. 3217). As they work to reconcile this bill with the one passed by the House in December, we’ll discuss some of the more significant amendments that affect us directly. There are a lot of new banking regulations, new regulatory bodies, and the like but we’ll start taking a look at things that affect people directly (banking regulations affect us indirectly).

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I’m sure you’ve heard about the TEA Party, “Taxed Enough Already,” and how they want change (if you haven’t, turn on the news!). Well, did you also know that, according to a USA Today’s article, we are paying the lowest amount of taxes in 60 years? Federal, state, and local taxes consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest since 1950 and far below the 12% average of the last fifty years.

Remember, the tax brackets are just a starting point… after deductions and credits, very few people pay anything close to their marginal tax rate.

Here are this week’s choice cuts:
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For those who follow my Twitter account @bargainr, you get treated to interesting links as I find them throughout the day. Many of them are personal finance in nature, some of them are not, but I hope everyone finds them somewhere in the spectrum of entertaining and educational.

Well, not everyone is on Twitter (let’s be honest, it’s a huge time sink) so I thought it would be best if we revived Weekend roundups with some of these interesting links sprinkled in!

Before we begin, I want to pay homage to a bookmarklet I recently discovered – Readability With a click on a bookmark, you can turn any page into something slightly prettier and easier to read. May I recommend you load up this page on the four stages of burnout, put it through Readability, and read it. The article is important but it’s difficult to read sans serif, black text on a brown background.
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Whew, the end of yet another week. Can you believe it’s already November? It seemed like only yesterday I was trying to figure out what to get my wife for Valentine’s Day and already we’re planning for Thanksgiving in a few short weeks. It’s been a heck of a year so far, though we still have a little bit to go, and while things haven’t been too rough, I know that everyone’s been dealing with challenges this year. One thing we can be thankful for is that we’re still here, still kicking, and 2010 is just a few weeks away. Keep your head up and keep fighting, you only fail if you give up.

I hope you enjoy this week’s picks:

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A year or so ago, I’d do weekly roundups highlighting some personal finance articles that I really enjoyed each week. Sometime within the last year, I fell behind and soon abandoned these articles because I felt like they weren’t adding much value. Well, over the last few weeks, a few new readers have told me that they discovered Bargaineering from roundups on other sites.

So, I’ve decided to bring these Weekly Roundups back in order to share with you some other websites I personally enjoy and hope that you will to. These will be once weekly and I will try not to link to the same sites because that really doesn’t help you find new and fun places to spend your valuable time.

And yes, that’s a Pontiac Firebird. It’s not a Phoenix, but it’s close enough!

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