Recommended Articles

Here is my recommended articles post for the week. As always I try to choose the more original and novel articles out there.

Ask Mr. Credit Card hosted this week's Carnival of Personal Finance, which included my article "Advanced Portfolio Building". I also wrote two additional articles on the same topic this week. You can find them here and here.

Tezza from 4EvaYoung wrote an article titled Buying is for Suckers (she is referring to houses). I wouldn't go as far as the title of this post suggests, but you may remember that my article Rent is not Waste was selected editor's pick in last week's Carnival. I agree with practically all of the arguments Tezza is making. Tezza also adds a couple of excellent points, including the following: renters do not typically over-extend. Buyers of homes have a nasty tendency to buy more home than they need, thinking that they will either grow into it, or sell it for a profit. Talk about locking up valuable capital in bricks and mortar.

Free Money Finance has a post about strange and unusual job interview questions. I have had a couple of strange interview questions in my time. One interviewer put a batman action figure in front of me and asked me how I would market the masked crime fighter. In another interview, I was asked to suggest ways to prove that the light in the fridge does not stay on when the door is closed. In yet another interview I was actually asked to estimate the weight of a Boeing 747. Believe it or not, I actually heard of this question before, and had a good idea of how to approach the problem. People that are interviewing with me these days get some unusual questions that they can blog about. I tend to ask people to perform tasks that they would be faced with on their first day on the job. Just last week I asked several candidates to solve some Excel problems for me. The way I look at it, if I expect you to perform the task on your first day, I want to know you can do it, before I hire you. Am I crazy?

Chief Family Officer has a post about sending her boys to private school at a steep price. Her readers responded to the article with some fairly vile comments. I am amazed that she let some of those comments stay published. In any case, I can certainly understand the dilemma. My oldest started kindergarten this year and he is going to public school. The schools in our neighborhood are very highly rated, so I am very comfortable with that decision. However, I can certainly understand the desire to give your kids the best education possible. Education is the one investment that is better than any portfolio. In my humble opinion, that is.

Quest for Four Pillars has a post explaining how he decided how much life insurance coverage his family needs. My life insurance coverage is enough to replace my annual base salary 6.4 times. I am not sure whether this will be sufficient on its own should fate take me away from my family before my time. It's probably pretty close given that term life insurance payments are not taxed, and that the money can be invested as soon as it is paid. I may need to re-evaluate my coverage.

As always, I will add a couple of more recommendations later this week.