Earn What You Spend

Welcome!  This week I’m proud to be hosting the Carnival of Personal Finance - the traveling blog carnival that brings you the best from the personal finance blogosphere.  
Some have written recently about the end of personal finance - and I respectfully disagree, largely because of the great writing you can find by reading some [...]

Tonight at the New York Public Library I attended a discussion between award-winning columnist and author Thomas Friedman and Nandan Nilekani, Co-Chairman and one of the founders of Infosys Technologies, Ltd.  These are two immensely interesting and well-spoken men, so I jumped at the opportunity to hear them live.
The discussion at first centered on well-known facts: the [...]

So what would a return to the Great Depression look like? Drake Bennett of the Boston Globe asks just this question, and finds a repeat would look quite different from the last.  
In essence - 
Unlike the 1930s, when food and clothing were far more expensive, today we spend much of our money on healthcare, child [...]

The consumer credit card crisis is underway.
Consumer debt has far outpaced real growth in wages:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Source: Innovest
And we’re beginning to see the ramifications of this.  From this morning’s NYTimes:
After years of flooding Americans with credit card offers and sky-high credit lines, lenders are sharply curtailing both, just as an eroding economy squeezes consumers.
Currently, the total losses amount to [...]

In the newest issue of The Atlantic, Virginia Postrel writes an interesting article, The Case For Debt. I was surprised the author could miss the sea of red flags about too much debt at the consumer, corporate, and national level.  But miss it she did, and in fact she tries her best to make the ‘case’ for [...]

Flexo, at Consumerism Commentary, shows some of the real power of having a firm grasp of your personal financial situation.  How much money do you have in the bank?  How much do you owe?  How are your investments looking?  Are you setup for long-term success, or only short-term spending? 
Every month, we see Flexo’s personal balance sheet, [...]