Deadly Sins, Getting a Raise, and Reducing Grocery Bills

Here are some recent articles from around the web.

Five Cent Nickel has the seven deadly sins that lead to debt. I would say it’s possible to fall into deep debt even without “sinning.” Even the best and most reasonable emergency fund can be insufficient to take care of a major medical expense.

A guest author on Get Rich Slowly presents an interesting introduction to “time-banking.” Time-banking is built around the basic concept of earning and spending hours. Everyone’s skills, whether they are a medical professional or a house painter, are worth one “time dollar” per hour. The hours that you earn are stored in a “timebank” and can then be redeemed for any service of your choice from any member of the timebank. Should one hour worth of surgery be worth one hour of painting? I guess it depends on the needs of the individual. Economies of small scale are interesting.

Mighty Bargain Hunter visualizes his contribution goals for his retirement and education accounts with a nice chart.

Are Your Odds of Asking (and Getting) a Raise the Same as Winning The Lottery?, asks Blog Her. It’s quite possible that the ability to simply walk into your boss’s office and successfully request a pay increase is a myth. Certainly that hasn’t happened to anyone I’ve ever worked with, whether in the corporate world or in non-profit. I didn’t just ask for and get the promotion I recently mentioned — I had to apply and interview for the position after it was vacated just like everyone else.

MyMoneyBlog has suggestions for reducing his grocery bill. Just today I was discussing with co-workers the increasing cost of groceries. Jonathan suggests hoarding, watching price trends, being a “coupon ninja,” and buying frozen or generic.

Finally, a number of individuals have emailed me in the past week or so to write about their latest projects.

* Guy Kawasaki has created Alltop, a short domain name with an aggregation of categorical news feeds from “all the top stories.” Consumerism Commentary is honored to be included alongside Forbes, The Motley Fool, and the aforementioned Get Rich Slowly in the Personal Finance Alltop channel.

* Mrs. Micah has created The Finwikian, a user-editable personal finance resource focusing on blogs in this particular genre.