Carnival of Money Stories

Hurrah! The Carnival of Money Stories is here! This week we have a nice variety of tales from the financial front. I think you’ll enjoy all the posts here.

First, though, I’d like to remind you that the Carnival of Money Stories needs hosts! Mrs. Accountability, our organizer, has put out several calls for hosts and is feeling frustrated enough at the low response that she’s even wondering if she should let the carnival go dormant. That would be too bad, because when it’s done right, this is a unique carnival. No one else is focusing on well-written narratives as they appear in the blogging form. It’s just not that hard to put a carnival together. Besides performing a small service for your fellow bloggers, posting a carnival quickly jacks up your own Alexa ranking. Consistent blog-carnival hosting will, over time, help to drive up your blog’s traffic. So, even if you’re not feeling altruistic these days, consider the benefits for your own site. Go to the Carnival’s blogsite, where you can find a link to sign up in the first post or at the Hosting page.

Editor’s Picks

♥ Thinking about starting an eBay business? Think again! Before you jump off that cliff, go to Mom’s Plan and read Melissa’s hair-raising story of her misadventures with eBay.

♥ The Financial Blogger considers what life would be like without a business partner.

♥ Any of us who have been moms or dads will get a kick out of Melissa’s story of the kids and the furniture over at Parenting Family Money. LOL! One of the great joys of old age is being able to gaze fondly at other people’s cute little kids and think, “Ahhh! We’ll never have to do that again!”

♥ Wanna feel the hair stand up on your head? Tool on over to Money Thinking and contemplate Money Thinker’s The Plague of the Pre-existing Condition. Yipe!

The Rest of the Best

Bucksome Boomer is enjoying a spate of breathtaking vet bills. Pet ownership is not for the financially faint of heart!

Ask Mr. Credit Card raves about the glories of his Chase home mortgage, whose online statements are combined with his credit-card statement. Says he: “I absolutely love how easy it is to log in and make a payment to both my credit card as well as my mortgage payment.”

At Credit Card Assist, BHazelton writes about the consequences of marrying into credit-card debt.

Mad Kane has an entertaining limerick competition going, on the subject of lateness. The result is some nice light reading that, refreshingly enough, no one can connect to a paid link.

At Yes, I Am Cheap, Sandy generates some good commentary by reycling a story on executive pay from The Christian Science Monitor.

What would happen if your broker went out of business? Good question! At Moolanomy, writer Tisha Tolar explores two hypothetical scenarios.

Jane Sanders, over at Debt Management, ruminates about the value (or, more to the point, risk) of deferred payment plans.

At Boomer and Echo, Echo looks back on the decision to install a watering system and wonders if it was a wise move.

Guest blogger Sunil contributes a  post to Free Money Finance in which he describes how he and his wife saved 20% on a new car purchase(!!).

Money Beagle questions whether buying gas at Costco is necessarily cost-effective.

Simple Debt-free Finance ruminates on the banks’ responses to the CARD act, many of which (no surprise) will cost you money.

Evan, proprietor of My Journey to Millions, knows he and The Wife are going to have to buy a new house, now that they have a little future millionaire. He tries to figure out how much the mortgage is likely to cost them.

Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff is starting to make some respectable income from her writing enterprises, when her own site’s income is added to what she earns writing for other sites. Proprietor Crystal is calculating how much she will need to earn consistently from blogging to allow her to quit her day job.

Intelligent Speculator wonders what what “rich” really means.

At Money Help for Christians, Craig Ford is trying to decide whether the next computer purchase should be a PC or a Mac. Readers are madly sharing their advice.

MD at Studenomics craves to be “location-independent,” and he recently tried a little experiment to see if it would work. He ruminates at length about the possibilities.

Uh-oh! Over at Spruce Up Your Finances, Ken is getting up to a little creative malingering: He’s discovered the “Boss Button” for the online NCAA March Madness games!

My own contribution: Another Day, Another Dollar…Another Few Dollars Lighter.

A large number of bloggers submitted posts that represented a lot of work and sometimes contained useful information, but that don’t fit the Carnival of Money Stories.

Alas, a list is not a story, even though some lists, such as this extremely interesting accounting from Coupon Sherpa of items whose prices are going up or down, are quite interesting.

A gathering of consumer advice, such as this nicely written production from John at Passive Family Income, is not a story.

A how-to process piece, such as Mike’s series at Experiglot on starting a business, is not a story.

I mention these because they’re excellent articles, and not to be able to regard them as Money Stories frosts my cookies. Many other candidates that would be fine for a different PF carnival were rejected only because they were not stories. A “story” is a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end that traces a rising action to a high point and then drops off in a dénouement. It’s like an anecdote or a short story. We all write these occasionally, either as stand-alone posts or to incorporate them into posts whose purpose is didactic. Those are the kinds of articles the CoMS is looking for!

Mrs. Accountability will host the Carnival of Money Stories next week at Out of Debt Again. Be sure to send your best new stories—check in at the CoMS site for details.

Image: Paulo Juntas. A parade in the Carnaval de Sesimbra, Portugal. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

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