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Good Financial Reading This Week

Mike at Gather Little by Little posted 7 Quick Numbers To Fix Your Personal Financial Situation a list of 7 rules of thumb regarding your finances. They included my favorite, the Rule of 72, as well as some I might disagree with, such as the 100 minus your age should be your stock percentage in your portfolio.

MSN money blog’s article Frugal or dishonest? You decide referenced stories from my fellow PF bloggers, Penelope Pince, FMF, and Smithee. A combination of MSN struggling a bit to come up with new material, and the blogging world’s quality really improving. A good selection of frugality gone too far.

John Chevreau discussed Jim Otar’s book Unveiling the Retirement Myth. In his soon to published book, Jim warns that most baby boomers have not saved enough for retirement and fall into the “red zone.” He feels that the concepts we take for granted, asset allocation, frequent rebalancing, asset dedication, diversification and the notion of stocks for the long run are all myths and need rethinking. A video interview with the author appears on the site as well.

Wise Bread offers Save Money: Take the Boring Challenge, a brief list of frugal ways to save that may get a bit, well, boring. I don’t find the list there boring enough. The suggestion to drop the Starbucks habit and make your own coffee? I’ve been doing that for years. Take a look, and see what ideas you can use to start saving.

Thomas J. Stanley, author of The Millionaire Next Door, a classic, has his own blog, and posts some very interesting articles. His recent Average Rich or Median Poor? offers us two data points, an average net household worth of $434,782, and a median net worth of $91,304. Median is the halfway point, half of families have more, half less. This disparity points toward a growing concentration of wealth. On average we may be a rich country, but the average person isn’t wealthy. An article that gets you thinking about how the numbers are offered to us and what happens when you a bit more closely.

Thank you, fellow bloggers for some good reading this week.
Joe

{ 3 comments… add one }
  • Mike August 30, 2009, 8:52 am

    Hey! thx for the link and enjoy your weekend!

  • Shaun Carter September 4, 2009, 12:47 am

    Actually, the mean is the same as the average not the middle point. The median would be the point at which half of families have more and half have less. Although I do agree with the main point that wealth is skewed toward the higher end of the spectrum. But in any successful capitalist society you will see this occurrence.

  • JOE September 4, 2009, 2:23 am

    Corrected the typo, thanks!

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