better for the economy, investing, and our own personal finances?
Comments, please! Speeches presented in chronological order. Since I can’t vote, I wonder who I might vote for. If you could grab the candidates for five minutes, what questions would YOU ask?
In the new month, we’ve been quite busy on new posts, so Dollar Traveler has been much more active than Blogging Travails. I’ll try to pick some of the best posts: in all, there were over 15 posts this week.
In blogging, the big news was the launch of Chrome from Google as a fairly polished and minimalist browser set to challenge both FF and IE.
In finance, we are pondering the next president’s economic policies and inviting debate on who will be better for the US and world economy. InvestorBlogger also reached its second birthday and we celebrated ‘a little’. Of course, with us nearly reaching a milestone in several ways, we posted the next story on the Dow Jones Series: Johnson and Johnson. The Dow has been on a wild ride this week: who knows how it will finish the week! We also looked at a simple tool for converting currencies.
InvestorBlogger finally created a static home page for the main blog, linking to the feature articles. I’ve sitll go to work on the actual pages at the footer, but the new site is finally becoming a coherent whole with identifiable streams of content. It’s quite exciting!
Apart from a few other newsbytes, photos, videos, and twitter updates, that was the week on InvestorBlogger Dot Com. You can of course subscribe to our feeds, or via email.
Enjoy your weekend.
I’ve found that a credit card can be a very good budgeting tool. I was always afraid of credit and seeing the amount of debt a lot of people have nearly convinced me that the cards weren’t financially healthy. But then my mortgage company offered me a card with 1% cash back applied to my mortgage principal.
It didn’t sound like much but I began paying my utilities with it, buying groceries and gas and just about everything else. It really added up. I just have to be careful not to overspend just because I have a nice credit limit. I have a record of most of my expenses, I save postage by using the card to pay online and I actually get cash back for buying things I have to get anyway!
I don’t have to carry cash anymore, either. Cash tends to be too easy to spend; now I think twice before I stop at White Castle, Safeways, or wherever. In my case, the credit card actually saves me money. I like the buyer protection, too, in case that new water heater is defective and I can’t get the company to fix it. It means I can get my issuer to deny payment if that company won’t accept responsibility for a defective product.
I pay the card off completely every month and I got one with no annual fee so I get all these benefits and the card issuer pays me! That’s a pretty sweet deal, to my mind.”
Share your experiences in this column with tips on good deals and bad deals! I too have applied for a credit card tied to a local store, Carrefour to take advantage of the bonus points and rewards schemes they offer. Still no word on the approval.