Recommended Articles

I ran into a bunch of good personal finance articles this week, and here they are in random order... well, OK, not that random:

First up is this article from Smarter Money. It is very well written and is all about how much money people make, complete with statistics and charts. If you always wanted to benchmark your income against that of other folks, you can satisfy your curiosity with this article. Let's just say that after reading the article and comments, I feel that I have nothing to complain about.

Similar to my article from a couple of weeks ago, this article from Brunette on a Budget (very nicely designed blog, incidentally) asks the question "does money buy you happiness?" She thinks, yes. I am not so certain, but you know what they say: at least you can choose your own kind of misery...

Saving to Invest has a relatively new PF blog that is doing phenomenally well. In fact, he is putting me to shame after only a few months in publication, in terms of both traffic and subscriber growth. This is his take on what it takes to succeed as a PF blogger. I can't argue.

Finally, My Two Dollars has an article about how Comcast is about to start metering users' use of the Internet and kick out customers that use more than a certain amount of data per month (250 Gigabytes is the current monthly limit). As I commented on the article itself, I am of two minds about this. On the one hand this is a throwback to the dial-up, metered web surfing on the 90's... it's also guaranteed to slow down innovation and new services. Forget about downloading Netflix movies over the net, for example... On the other hand, because of my job I understand the ISPs' business very well, and I know that it is tough for ISPs to economically design and run networks with a small minority of bandwidth hoggers. The solution in my opinion is to throttle down the speeds to the biggest bandwidth hogs during peak times, but to let them run wild during times when there is spare network capacity.

Finally, this week I participated in two carnivals. The Carnival of Personal Finance was graciously hosted this week by Broke Grad Student and the Festival of Frugality was hosted by Fire Finance.