As I mentioned before, when I first began my financial turnaround, I constructed a tight budget and stuck to it like glue for the first few months. That tight budget was invaluable - it taught me how to ride the proverbial bicycle that is personal finance management.

One of the biggest tools I used during this process was PearBudget, which was a free Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that helped automate many of the basic tasks of developing a budget. That spreadsheet is still available for free online - it requires Microsoft Excel, but it’s still one heck of a useful tool. While I didn’t end up using that PearBudget sheet for my own budget (I used it to evaluate a lot of ideas, but I had a lot of fun hacking Excel to do things exactly how I visualized in my head - not really in a way that makes sense to anyone else), I used it a ton in figuring out my own ideas and assembling them.

Not too long ago, I discovered that the people who developed PearBudget were converting it into a web application - and I was immediately apprehensive. I am very concerned about personal information security, especially when it comes to personal finance and the modern web. Here’s what I wrote on that issue a while back when reviewing other online personal finance tools:

The problem is something I like to call “information creep.” When you use these tools, you expose your personal information to them. With Mint, for example, you transmit your account information through mint.com and then through Yodlee to aggregate your info. Intuit (the Quicken Online folks) communicates directly with your account providers to scoop in information. Wesabe is perhaps the least onerous - you don’t directly submit account information to them, ever - but their tool isn’t as robust because of this limitation and they still do create a history of your spending.

In all three cases, you’re building up a substantial data set about yourself. With Quicken Online, they don’t milk the data (at least not on the surface) but you are charged a fee for their service. With Mint, it’s free - but they make their cash by showing you targeted ads based on that data. Again, Wesabe has the best method at the moment - they’re currently handling everything via venture capital money and plan a “Wesabe Pro” to generate revenue.

If that doesn’t concern you, consider this: the more information you have out there about yourself, the more likely it is that some sort of identity theft will happen no matter how secure individual sites are. It only takes one little accident for your data to get into the wrong hands - and even the most secure of places can have a little flaw. The more places you put your data, the more “little flaws” you’re exposed to.

I had zero interest in using PearBudget Online unless there was a compelling solution to this issue - and their solution is actually pretty good. Basically, it doesn’t want any of your account information. None. Instead, you just enter your expenses and income as raw numbers and add them into the categories you’ve defined yourself. Since your account info there is essentially anonymous and there’s no association to your real financial data, the privacy concern is almost nonexistent.

Even better, PearBudget distinguishes itself from other such online tools by not including ads in the service - Mint, for example, uses targeted advertising to cover the bills. PearBudget has a 30 day free trial, then charges $3 a month for the service - a nominal fee if you find it useful.

So how does it work?

A Brief Walkthrough of PearBudget Online
When you first visit PearBudget Online, you’re guided through a wizard that lets you define the categories in your budget (they offer a bunch of suggestions and groupings, but let you add your own as you want). You then identify them as regular expenses (ones you have every month) or irregular ones (like property taxes), identify how much you spend monthly on the regular expenses and annually on the irregular ones, enter how much income you get (you can identify as many income sources as you want), and you’re done! It generates a spending plan for you. Seriously, try it out - it only takes a few minutes and it’s really slick. To try it out, I entered a bunch of dummy data and it took me about three minutes - but when I saw how slick and useful it was, I wanted to do it with real data - and so I did.

Once you’ve set up your categories, you basically have three modes: plan (where you look at your spending plan and possibly add new spending categories as you see fit), enter (where you enter receipts as you spend money throughout the month), and review (where you look over how your spending matches your budget).

I was genuinely impressed with how slick the software is. For most people trying to figure out a budget, it’s a great way to dig in and get started very quickly and effortlessly. It’s very flexible - you can define your own categories however you like, which is something that I think is essential when budgeting in the real world, as everyone groups their spending in different ways. PearBudget lets you group it pretty much however you want.

My Thoughts
First, the bad. I really only have one significant criticism when it comes to PearBudget Online. First, it does cost $3 a month after the 30 day trial. While that’s a nominal fee (in my eyes), some people will be hesitant to dive in and really try the tool because if they get involved with the tool, that $3 a month effectively becomes another bill. One option the creators might want to consider is to have a “free” account that displays ads or a paid account that does not. I, for one, would pay the $3 not to have the ads. Alternately, a person could just do the whole thing offline and use the old PearBudget spreadsheet for free.

Aside from that, the tool is impressive to use and handles my security concerns better than any online tool I’ve seen. If you’re trying to budget, I heartily recommend giving PearBudget Online a try. If you’re concerned about the $3 a month fee (and for people on tight budgets, this can be an issue), give the old PearBudget spreadsheet a whirl - it helped me out once upon a time.

Over the last week, SuperCook has quickly become one of my favorite websites. Basically, SuperCook is a database of recipes that works in a very clever fashion - just start entering ingredients in the upper left and it will start listing recipes on the right. Every time you add another ingredient, it finds recipes using only those ingredients and only a minimum of additional items. So, let’s say you add “tomato sauce,” “pasta,” and “pork” - it’ll suggest spaghetti with marinara sauce, which you’ll only need parmesan cheese for.

It’s not perfect yet (there’s some limited ingredient misidentification), but the potential for an amazing amount of utility is in place. I found a wonderful simple grilled fish recipe very quickly just playing around with the tool. Quite simply, this is a wonderful online tool for anyone who cooks at home.

Naturally, I began to look at this tool through the lens of how can it save money for me and my readers. Here are some ways you can apply this tool to save money in your own kitchen.

Dig through the cupboards. You likely have some stuff buried in the back that you haven’t thought about using in ages. Plug it into this tool, add a few other seemingly compatible things you have lying around, and see what recipes this tool gives you. Ideally, you’ll come up with a number of interesting recipes.

Sit down with your grocery flyer. Find out what foods are on sale this week, then use the tool to see what sort of recipes you can make from these items that are on sale. Fish fillets, lemon juice, and potatoes are on sale? Pop all of those into this tool and it’ll spit out some recipes. Just go through the whole flyer and enter everything that seems tasty and you’ll find a big bundle of complete and nearly-complete recipes just waiting to be used.

Buy in bulk. If you have an opportunity to buy food in bulk, this tool can be phenomenal for helping you generate a ton of ideas for what to do with it. We’re considering buying a quarter of a cow for our deep freezer, so we’ve been looking at lots of beef recipes. I entered “beef” into this tool and was flooded with ideas, so I started thinking of foods that, in my mind, would be tasty with beef. There are more ideas here than I can possibly use, and I’m further convinced that the purchase is a good idea that will save us some real money.

Inspire yourself. Often, the one thing that gets me into the kitchen after a long day at work is inspiration - the idea that I can quickly cook something quite delicious for my family. All I have to do for some inspiration is to put in a thing or two that sound really tasty to me right now - say, chicken and parmesan cheese, and see what I can find. Then I keep adding stuff I know I have around the kitchen until I find a recipe.

SuperCook has very quickly become a part of our family’s meal planning routine, and it’s already saved us quite a bit of money by helping us figure out what to do with what we already have in the cupboard in conjunction with what’s on sale at the grocery store. Check it out.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about web-based personal finance tracking tools, especially since Intuit launched Quicken Online and Mint won the TechCrunch 40 award. These conversations have led in many directions - clearly these tools are useful, but are they worth the security concerns? Let’s take a look at what these tools have to offer and what the security implications are, and I’ll offer up my own take at the end.

What Do These Tools Do?

In a nutshell, Quicken Online, Mint, and Wesabe seek to provide centralized perspectives on your personal financial situation. They do things like categorize your credit card and checking spending into groups like “hobbies” and “food,” keep track of your net worth over a long period, and can even help you define and work towards goals. They aggregate your information automatically, helping you to see your spending and saving across all accounts at once. In other words, they’re all pretty nifty and offer some serious benefits.

Quicken Online
Having tried all three, I found Quicken Online to be the most usable and useful - but that may be because I am familiar with the desktop version of Quicken. Basically, Quicken Online is a web-based version of the classic Quicken software package. It collects information from all of your accounts and lets you review it in countless ways. You can set up goals, view the changes in your spending and saving over time (as you build up the data), and even helps you manage the lag between issuing a check and having it received by the people you’re sending it to. It’s easily the most feature-rich of the three and it’s ad-free, but it’s also the only one with a fee - $2.99 a month. Out of the three packages, I’m partial to this one - if I were to commit to using one of the three wholeheartedly, it’d be this one.

Mint
Mint is probably the most visually stunning and intuitive to use, but it’s also the one that makes me the most nervous about security. Mint offers many of the same services as Quicken Online, but without a fee - instead, they target you with very specific ad offers based on analysis of how you actually spend your money. If I was having trouble getting my finances in order, this would make me somewhat nervous, as it seems to be tempting fate. Still, their interface is stunning and, minus the offers, is probably the most useable of the three.

Wesabe
Wesabe is the most established of the three, is also free, and is likely the most secure. They never take any of your account information - instead, you use a tool on your own computer to build a report without account data in it, and this report is shipped off to Wesabe. They never see your specific account data. Also, they don’t mine their data to place targeted ads - instead, their business model revolves around selling “Pro” accounts with more features. It also has a lot of social networking aspects - you can quickly find people with similar financial goals and find out, in a broad sense, how your spending compares to the Wesabe community. It’s actually quite fun.

The Big Drawback

First of all, I don’t question that each of these sites have integrity when it comes to security. In fact, Wesabe was the first of these three tools to launch and I strongly criticized their security initially - and was pleasantly surprised by the openness of the company to discuss and resolve these issues. I believe that Mint, Wesabe, and Quicken Online all intend to keep your data safe.

But that doesn’t solve the problem.

The problem is something I like to call “information creep.” When you use these tools, you expose your personal information to them. With Mint, for example, you transmit your account information through mint.com and then through Yodlee to aggregate your info. Intuit (the Quicken Online folks) communicates directly with your account providers to scoop in information. Wesabe is perhaps the least onerous - you don’t directly submit account information to them, ever - but their tool isn’t as robust because of this limitation and they still do create a history of your spending.

In all three cases, you’re building up a substantial data set about yourself. With Quicken Online, they don’t milk the data (at least not on the surface) but you are charged a fee for their service. With Mint, it’s free - but they make their cash by showing you targeted ads based on that data. Again, Wesabe has the best method at the moment - they’re currently handling everything via venture capital money and plan a “Wesabe Pro” to generate revenue.

If that doesn’t concern you, consider this: the more information you have out there about yourself, the more likely it is that some sort of identity theft will happen no matter how secure individual sites are. It only takes one little accident for your data to get into the wrong hands - and even the most secure of places can have a little flaw. The more places you put your data, the more “little flaws” you’re exposed to.

What Do I Do?

I think tools like Quicken Online are great if you have a plethora of accounts to manage and have a hard time seeing the big picture. In that case, the benefits exceed the drawbacks - tools like these can really help you get a grip on things.

In my opinion, though, it’s not the best solution. The best solution is minimizing your accounts so that you’re not bogged down in account management. Do you need eight credit card accounts? Kill the ones you don’t use, save for perhaps your oldest one, and try to get down to two or (at most) three. How about five different retirement plans? Roll them together if you can - spend the time to see what your best option is and you’ll find yourself with a lot less effort to manage accounts.

Right now, I have one checking account, one savings account, two credit card accounts, one investment account, and one retirement account. It’s simple enough that I don’t need to use a tool like Quicken Online to see all of this information, and I don’t spend much time with account management either. I keep my net worth calculations in a spreadsheet - and it’s pretty clear from that data whether I’m doing well or doing poorly.

If you keep things simple to begin with, you don’t need complex tools to manage it. Quicken Online, Mint, and Wesabe are nifty tools, but you can often get just as much benefit by just simplifying your money - and then not expose yourself to even a tiny security risk, monthly fees, or highly targeted ads.

Other Perspectives

I felt it appropriate to include some additional viewpoints on these products from other blogs that I trust.

J.D. at Get Rich Slowly thinks Quicken Online looks promising, likes Mint with some caveats, and thinks Wesabe is a stellar Quicken supplement.

Lifehacker offers screenshot tours of Quicken Online, Wesabe, and Mint.

I get contacted quite regularly by groups who are creating Web 2.0 personal finance applications, and I’ve taken test drives of a lot of them. I’ve even been asked to advise on a few that are in the pipeline. If you’d like to sample a few, I’ve linked to a few of the best ones at the bottom.

What are they? These tools are basically online versions of Quicken. They allow you to aggregate all of your personal finance data in one place so you can get a clear picture of how you’re doing. Most of them have very slick user interfaces, too. Even better, they allow you to share some aspects of the data so you can compare goals with other users.

Yet, even though the features of many of them are amazing and I can easily see the usefulness of them, I haven’t yet reviewed any of them in detail, nor do I plan to.

Why not? All of these systems have one key issue that concerns me: personal security. I’m not talking about whether your data is safe from hackers. What concerns me is trusting my key personal finance information to a Silicon Valley startup company. Almost all of these products come from relatively small, non-public startups that are currently running on venture capital money.

To me, this is a giant red flag waving around in the sky. I watched an awful lot of dot-coms blow up in 2001 and their data went away to … who knows where. Where will the data go if these companies go under? Will the owners dispose of that data ethically? Will they sell it? Most of them have privacy disclaimers, but a legal document doesn’t really help if your bank login information and your credit card data is floating around on a laptop in Armenia.

The one key piece that these organizations forget is that your personal information and logins are extremely valuable. Your logins provide access to your money and your personal data, and if these logins fall into the wrong hands, bad things can potentially happen - lost funds, identity theft, and so on.

The best solution to this is to minimize the number of places that have your key personal data. I trust my banks and my credit card holders - and that’s pretty much it. The fewer places that my personal data resides, the better.

This sounds like an indictment of these tools, but it’s not - they have a lot of potential. But that potential lies with integration with the banks themselves, like ING or HSBC. Make it so that the access to your accounts lie with the bank itself, the entity that already has your information, and the risk to personal data issues is reduced. These tools shouldn’t be a separate entity from these institutions, but integrated into their online interface.

In other words, Mint et. al. should evolve to be the front end for online banking services. I like the ING Direct interface (after all, it’s my primary bank), but if that site had the interface of Mint, with all of the interesting tools and such and was already within the secure environment of a bank that already had my data, I’d feel far more secure about trying out such a tool.

In the future, I hope to jump into such a tool head first - my enthusiasm would know no limits. But the security issues keep me from signing up with this first generation of Web 2.0 personal finance tools.

Want to see what I’m talking about? Here are three of the best Web 2.0 online personal finance tools. I recommend looking at them, but I don’t recommend giving them any personal information.

Mint is the “hot” one at the moment, having recently won the TechCrunch 40 “contest.” I also think their user interface has the most potential if used in the ways I describe above.
Wesabe is probably the most personable of the lot - the CEO will directly answer your questions. I also think their security model is the best of those out there right now, but it still makes me nervous.
Yodlee is the most established of the group, but the interface isn’t nearly as slick.

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices.

One of the most valuable things that a person can do when learning about personal finance issues is to get a diversity of perspectives and ideas. The more ideas you learn about and the more perspectives you get, the better your undersanding of personal finance will be and the more likely you are to make strong choices.

The advent of blogging has made this much easier than before - it used to be that you would have to read lots of personal finance books and magazines to get a variety of perspectives. Now, with just a mouse click or two, you can read lots of different perspectives and ideas for free from the convenience of your own computer.

I encourage you to spend an hour digging into the archives of a personal finance blog so you can really begin to learn the basic perspectives of a particular site. Here are some things you can do, using The Simple Dollar as an example at first, then giving you some pointers to other sites if you want to look for excellent ideas and opinions elsewhere.

Read the “About” page. Find out what kind of perspective the blogger is offering. Quite often, this will clue you in to some of the assumptions of the writing on the site.

Sample some of the “best” posts. Look for a “best of” section and, if you find it, sample a few of those articles. This will give you some very tasty morsels to start off with.

Dig into the archives. Most sites provide an archive of some sort that’s easy to browse through; on The Simple Dollar, the best place to start is probably the one page chronology of all posts. I usually find it best to start from the beginning with a site, not necessarily reading everything, but focusing on those articles that are interesting to me.

Ask questions. Don’t hesitate to leave a comment or directly contact a blog if you have questions. I strongly urge you to be complimentary if you write to someone, though - if you look through a blog’s archives, recognize that all of the writing is a labor of love by a single person (or a small group) and they’re basically giving the material away for free for you to read, paying for the server space where that information is stored.

Here are a few blogs that are worth digging into that I particularly enjoy:

Get Rich Slowly has an about page and has a wonderful single page archive to get you started.

Money, Matter, and More Musings has an about page, a page of the most popular posts, and also a single page of extensive archives.

Generation X Finance has an “about” page and a extensive, well organized archive.

Any of the other sites listed in the sidebar here are also worth digging into.

Welcome to the 114th Carnival of Personal Finance! For those unaware, the Carnival of Personal Finance is a series of weekly posts hosted by various blogs in which we highlight great posts on various personal finance topics. For my regular readers, consider this a long, long version of my morning roundup.

Below, I picked out ten articles from all the submissions that I enjoyed the best, labeling them Editor’s Choice. From these, I picked out one sentence and included it in this post, so you can get a flavor of the writing style before you click!

After the ten Editor’s Choice picks, you’ll find a long list of entrants from various personal finance blogs. I strongly encourage you to visit articles that interest you!

Editor’s Choice

Sometimes I get really mad when I think about the 13 years that I have been working and not saving because I was financially ignorant. I have a 17 year old brother that is looking for his first job and, knowing my parents, is just as clueless as I was.
Saving A Sibling In Debt (@ one snarky chica with issues)

I’ve compiled a comprehensive collection, organized by category, of 110 personal finance calculators and helpful tools. They’re free, found online and designed to help you find fast answers to your financial questions.
110 Personal Finance Calculators (@ millionaire mommy next door)

Small companies, like small ships, carry a high risk in the stock market and are more volatile. While investing in small company stocks, or small caps, can double your money, a single bad news can tank the stock. Big companies, like big ships, do not move as fast in the stock market but they are generally less responsive to the daily market fluctuations.
Understanding Stock Market Risk Tolerance: Big Ships vs. Small Ships (@ growing money)

You have a cellphone that works? Great, you are better off than most people in most other countries. You know what those newer ones do that yours still does? Make calls.
Want What You Have, Not What They Have (@ my two dollars)

In Silicon Valley, a lot of people have been fortunate enough to do quite well financially. And having worked as an engineer around here for almost two decades, I witnessed both some highs and lows in the technical and financial front.
Top 10 Wealth Building Ways Of Ordinary People (@ the digerati life)

The media feeds the frenzy that the sky is falling because that’s what the media does. But the hyped-up fear of the unknown is usually worse than reality. And the market is currently reflecting the full force of the (unknown) bad news.
Going Against The Flow (@ free money finance)

I had lunch with a friend who likes to talk money with me. She has financial savvy, but her partner mismanages almost every cent he earns. During lunch she howled, “Why doesn’t he just burn his money in a pile right in front of me? It would be the same thing as what he does with his money!”
Sleeping With Money: Navigating “You Did What With Our Money?” Moments (@ queercents)

Since both my and my wife’s parents live in Ukraine (as well as many relatives) the topic of international phone calls to Ukraine has never been off the table and we have probably tried every possible way to save on international calling. Here are a few tips that will help you call Ukraine (and other ex-Soviet countries) without braking the bank.
Calling To Russia And Ukraine - Money Saving Tips (@ pro bargain hunter)

The recent mine disaster in Huntington, Utah, in which 6 miners are still missing, has again brought national attention to the dangers of mining and other hazardous jobs. While there have been several mining disasters in the United States over the last 2 years, according to the United States Department Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, mining is not actually considered the most dangerous job in the US. In fact, it is not even in the top 10.
Is A Job Worth Your Life? (@ cash money life)

There are some burdens in life you carry forever. These are memories of things you wish you hadn’t done, but did nevertheless. Here is one such burden that I have been carrying for years.
The Weight Of Stolen Money (@ money, matter, and more musings)

Other Entries

5 Key Strategies For Getting Out Of Debt (@ the happy rock)

Current Mortgage Rates for Mortgage Refinance and Purchase Loans in US. (@ Mortgage Rates)

5 Signs You Might Be A Rate Chaser (@ online savings blog)

5 Things I Will Spend My Dimes On (@ lazy man and money)

7 Costly Retirement Savings Mistakes To Avoid (@ moolanomy)

7 Ways To Improve Your (Golf) Game On A Budget (@ life in the rough)

37 Tips, Facts, and Rules For Trading Stocks In A Bear Market (@ falk investing)

Attention Costco Shoppers (@ insureblog)

Best Cash Back Credit Card List On Gas, Groceries, Restaurants, Etc. (@ hustler money blog)

Blogging About Personal Finance Changes The Way We Think And Use Money (@ money ning)

Budgeting for Dummies, Part 1: Creating A Budget (@ i’ve paid for this twice already)

Car Dealer’s Worst Nightmare: Cash Or Pre-Arranged Loans (@ saving with me)

Car Purchase: Confessions & Justification (Cont.) (@ grad money matters)

Caveat Lector! PF Blogs Are For Fun And Entertainment (@ mapgirl’s fiscal challenge)

Classifying Your Debt: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (@ clever dude)

Debt Reduction Is For Everyone (@ living real)

Do You Have an Emergency Fund? - If Cash is King, Then Don’t Neglect His Good Looking Brother, the Prince of Credit! (@ teaspoon finance)

Emergency Funds: How Much Is Enough? (@ million dollar journey)

Envelope System Video Tutorial (Step By Step Guide To Using The Envelope System To Manage Your Cash) (@ no credit needed)

Features That Add Resale Value To A Home (@ everything finance)

Financial Cliché VI: Leveraging Is (NOT!) Only for Rich Individuals (@ the financial blogger)

Financial Decisions With The Right Information (@ to one million and beyond)

Flying On The Cheap (For The Airlines, Not For You) (@ brip blap)

FNBO Blunder: Due Diligence 2nd Request Email (@ home finance freedom)

FNBO Direct Is Scary (@ the sun’s financial diary)

GOYB Challenge: Help Your Husband Make More Money (@ sahmmy says)

How Do You Manage Your Financial Life? (@ quest for a million)

How I Keep My Sanity When The Equity Markets Are Volatile (@ ask mr. credit card)

How Real Returns Get In The Way Of A Good Plan (@ advanced personal finance)

How To Know Instantly You’re Being Conned (@ dough roller)

How The Subprime Problems Heare Affected Retirement Funds In Japan (@ journey 2 retirement)

How To Make Your Money Greener (@ gather little by little)

How To (Not) Ask For A Raise (@ money and such)

I Will Never Be Wealthy If I Am Not Already Rich (@ family finance blog)

It’s Not All About The Money - The Baglady On Evaluating Job Offers (@ the baglady)

It’s Okay To Spend Money (@ five cent nickel)

Job Search (@ college of cash)

Keeping The Right Balance Between Money And Leisure (@ mortgage blog)

LendingTree Review: Do You Really Win? (@ blueprint for financial prosperity)

Make Money From Credit Cards: 0% Balance Transfer Profit Calculator Tool (@ my money blog)

Making A Big Fuss Out Of An Adult Shopping In A Junior Section (@ around the sun)

Married Money (@ my money and my life)

Money and Apartments (@ indebted 2 you)

More On Buying Your Own Health Insurance (@ being frugal)

More On Retirement (@ the amatureist financial journey)

My Personal Experience On Getting Out Of Debts (@ journey to financial freedom)

New Or Used? You Make The Call (@ how i will be rich)

Other People’s Money (@ plonkee money)

Personal Finance Isn’t Rocket Science, It’s Self Motivation (@ saving advice)

Power of Association (@ money monk)

Retailer’s Anger Reveals How You Can Make Money On eBay (@ money smart life)

Shorting Stocks - For Experienced Traders Only (@ my wealth builder)

“Smart” Computers Are Turning The Stock Market Upside Down (@ breaking the shackles of the 9 to 5)

Snooping To Find The Value Of Someone Else’s Home (@ one frugal girl)

Take A Peek Under The Hood Of My Savings (@ saving explained)

Ten Interest-Saving Typs Your Credit Card Company Doesn’t Want You To Know (@ frugal underground)

The Big Idea (@ 1 man’s money)

The Complete Newbie’s Guide to Buying Your First House, Part 3 - Shopping for a Mortgage (@ make your nut)

The Dow Is Falling Through Support Levels - Is The Worst Yet To Come? (@ generation x finance)

The Infrequent Bills Account (@ chief family officer)

Top Business Credit Cards (@ hustlerama)

Top Personal Finance Books: A CompleteKit (@ fire finance)

Volatility and Mr. Market (@ financial reference)

What Do I Need To Retire? (@ financial dominance)

What Happens When Your Mortgage Lender Goes Out Of Business? (@ the finance buff)

What Is A Yen Carry Trade? (@ money relations)

Why You Should Keep Your Money Invested In A Declining Market (@ finance is personal)

When Your Mutual Fund Speaks For You, What Does It Say? (@ money and values)

Wild Week In The Market Causes The Fed To Intervene (@ smart money daily)

You’ve Left Your Job, Should You Rollover Your Retirement Funds? (@ moment on money)

Recently, I downloaded the Consumer Action Handbook, an interesting 178 page document produced by the U.S. government’s General Services Administration. It’s an excellent free resource for basic consumer information of all kinds, including a huge collection of contact information for consumer advocates and customer service departments.

I thought I’d give this free document a walk-through similar to one of my book reviews, but shorter since you can download it and read it for yourself for free.

What’s Inside The Consumer Action Handbook?
The handbook is actually composed of four separate parts, though the first one provided the most interesting reading by far. The actual readable content is only about sixty pages; the last one hundred pages or so is a list of addresses and contact information for various consumer advocates and corporate customer service departments.

Part I - Be A Savvy Consumer
I found this first section to be an enjoyable read. It’s about fifty pages in length and is tightly jammed with basic information on tons of different consumer issues. A brief rundown: general buying tips, banking, cars, credit, education, employment, food and nutrition, health care, housing, insurance, internet, investing, phones, identity protection, privacy protection, home shopping, telemarketing and junk mail, travel, television, utilities, and wills and funerals. Each subject has about three pages or so devoted to it in a highly compressed fashion.

I learned a lot of interesting things from this part of the document - one item in particular saved me money right after I read it. We were about to purchase house insurance at the time I downloaded this and I realized that we were indeed insuring the lot’s value as well. This saved us a nice little bit on our home insurance.

Part II - Filing A Complaint
Many people have little idea how to appropriately handle a bad product or service. There are many techniques and avenues available to consumers who have purchased defective products or been exposed to faulty services and this section effectively summarizes these in just a few pages. This is excellent reference material to read if you purchase a faulty product and don’t know where to go in order to get a replacement or to make others aware of the issue.

Part III - Key Consumer Information Resources and Part IV - Consumer Assistance Directory
The rest of the document is an extremely thorough collection of contact information for consumer assistance of all kinds. The PDF is updated regularly to keep these addresses current, which means that it may be worthwhile to re-download this PDF on occasion. At the very least, once you’ve identified a useful contact from this list, visit the web site of that organization.

Is It Worth Downloading?
It’s an interesting read. For me, some of the information was almost common sense, while other pieces were quite intriguing. I’ve downloaded it and saved it in my reference materials folder on my desktop because I can see myself utilizing the information in the future, if for no other reason than to get a good starting place when seeking out who to contact about a consumer issue. If that’s of interest to you, download it and save it; if it’s not, the document is at least worth a perusal.

Recently, I wrote about the only personal finance sites I visit every day, and I made an offhand mention of having a lot of sites that I peruse daily via Google Reader, even if I don’t visit the site itself daily.

This begged an obvious question that several readers called me on: what do you read in Google Reader? Since I read about 100 blogs and the majority of them aren’t related to personal finance and personal development (think parenting and also the blogs of friends), and I’m constantly giving new blogs a try to see if they stick around for me, it wouldn’t make much sense to post all of the sites I have in Google Reader.

Instead, I went and took my list of feeds from about three months ago from my old feed reader, eliminated all of the ones that weren’t personal finance or personal productivity related, and then compared this list to the ones I read today. I was left with twenty five blogs, so here’s my recommended reading list.

43 Folders (personal productivity)
An English Major’s Money (personal finance with mature student perspective)
Consumerism Commentary (personal finance and consumer info)
D*I*Y Planner (personal development)
Dumb Little Man (a mix of things)
Fat Pitch Financials (personal finance)
Five Cent Nickel (personal finance)
Generation X Finance (personal finance)
Get Rich Slowly (mostly personal finance)
I Will Teach You To Be Rich (personal finance, entrepreneurship)
Lazy Man and Money (personal finance)
Lifehacker (personal productivity)
lifehack.org (personal productivity)
Mighty Bargain Hunter (personal finance)
Money, Matter, and More Musings (personal finance)
My Money Blog (personal finance)
My Open Wallet (personal finance)
Not Made of Money (personal finance)
Open Loops (personal productivity)
Productivity501 (personal productivity)
Queercents (personal finance)
The Digerati Life (personal finance)
What’s The Next Action? (personal productivity)
Wise Bread (personal finance)
Zen Habits (all kinds of stuff)

What about you? What sites (especially blogs) not listed here do you read for personal information and personal finance on the internet? Please post your favorites in the comments.