• Tweet ^[1]
• Email ^[2]

• Tweet ^[1]
• Email ^[2]

For those who follow my Twitter account @bargainr ^[3], 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 ^[4] 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 ^[5], 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.

Here are this week’s gems:

• College Inc. ^[6] is the latest documentary from the PBS show Frontline. If you were ever curious about the for profit education world, this introduces you to it.
• Co-signing a loan is a dangerous game, Jeremy at GenXFinance takes a look at what you need to know before you co-sign ^[7]. My recommendation is that you don’t do it. There are always alternatives and while it may be emotionally and socially difficult to say ‘no,’ it’s usually better for the both of you.
• The New York Times Bucks Blog has a two part mini-series about student loans. With the recent changes (integrated in the CARD Act), those with student loans will want to check these out. Part one ^[8] and part two ^[9].
• Flexo shares how he earns a little side money from blogging ^[10].
• Wondering how you can ruin your financial before you turn thirty? Frugal Dad comes to the rescue with an eye popping forty-four ways you can ruin your financial life ^[11] in about three decades. #6, “Accept a job you hate right out of school because it pays a lot.” doesn’t seem that bad, does it?
• If you do any traveling abroad, it’s important to understand how your credit cards handles foreign transaction fees ^[12]. There’s no sense in paying a few percent per purchase if you can avoid it.
• Unsure how CDOs and all that junk worked? This video presentation ^[13] by Andrew W. Lo, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Financial Engineering and affiliated with the Sloan School of Management, at the National Science Foundation is required watching. It’s long but good because you will understand these instruments better than anyone else you know.
• Hate how our legal tenders looks? Redesign it and you can win $500 in the Dollar Redesign contest ^[14]. They weren’t a fan of the new $100 bill ^[15].

Finally, this has nothing to do with anything… except it’s a cool way to do browser speed testing ^[16]. By the way, Chrome, the browser I happen to use, is the one being tested against a potato, sound, and lightning.