My wife and I vacationed in Washington state in the summer of 2004. During that trip, we camped above the snow line on Mount Rainier and visited Seattle, but the part of the trip that has really stuck with me was the three days we spent just wandering around in the northwest corner of the state, near Olympia National Forest. There is something about that area that I really felt comfortable with – part of me wanted to simply leave my life behind and live there. It was so strong that I can still feel it in the photographs from the trip. Strange, isn’t it? On to some personal finance postings.

Preparing For Life Without A Credit Card This is a brave step. I use my credit card as a tool now and it makes it much easier to manage my day to day finances, though I can see the beauty of not having one. (@ no credit needed)

Spendthrift Nation: Drowning in Debt The graph in this article is scary – and it says quite a bit about the direction that we’re headed in as a nation. I feel like I’m doing what I can to fight this trend with The Simple Dollar, but it’s like trying to catch a tsunami in a bucket. (@ queercents)

The Cheapest Ways To Do Anything An excellent compendium of frugality advice on all sorts of topics – if you’re into saving money, this is well worth the read. (@ the digerati life)

The Simple Dollar Retro: Ten Firefox Plugins That Save You Money If you’re using Firefox as your web browser (and you should be), there are a lot of ways to add plugins to it that can help you save money. Here’s a list of ten of my favorites. Hint: there’s a post coming very soon that will complement this.