Recommended Articles

Here are some of the personal finance articles I found most interesting over the past week:

Money Smart Life has an article about how to use your last few days in an old job to improve your chances for success over the longhaul - solicit truthful feedback from your colleagues. This is an excellent idea and one that I will suggest to my wife as she gets ready to leave her current position (more about that in a future post).

Pinyo of Moolanomy fame offered a succinct and well written article explaining what short selling is, and why people do it. This topic is very timely given the turmoil in the financial markets and the recent restrictions that the SEC placed on short selling financial institutions' stock.

Jeremy of GenX finance posted about the risk of compounding your investment losses by investing less in a down market. He is right on the money, but my take is that if your losses are not allowing you to get a good night's sleep, investing more is probably not the right strategy for you. Always invest using a strategy you can live with, even in down times. BTW, Jeremy was also featured in Business Week's print edition this week, in an article titled "Where the Pros are Putting their Own Money". You know who else is featured in the same article? Prof. Jeremy Siegel of the Wharton School of Business and Prof. Harry Markowitz, a Nobel Laureate. You know you are doing something right when you are mentioned in the same list as those big guns. Good going dude!

Free from Broke boils down this whole personal finance thing into a single equation: spending > earning = debt (I think it should say "broke" instead). Somebody's got to put that on a t-shirt and give it to the American public at large... many people in this country still think the equation works like this: spending > earning = leverage + higher lifestyle. And it does, for a short amount of time, before the manure hits the rotating wind making machine...

Also, check out the Carnival of Financial Planning and the Carnival of Personal Finance, in both of which I participated this week.