Easy Like Sunday Morning Recap and Roundup – # 9 – September 23rd, 2012

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Each time, the purpose of the Easy Like Sunday Morning Recap and Roundup series is the same – for me to be able to connect with you, the readers, on a more personal (non personal finance informational transmission only) level, encourage community, and also to give back to the other bloggers around the blogosphere who have mentioned My Personal Finance Journey throughout the past few weeks or so. It’s been about a month since the last roundup, so we definitely have some catching up to do! 

As far as the theme goes, the title of the roundup gives it away. The roundup theme is named after the Lionel Richie song, Easy Like Sunday Morning (which I play once each time I put this together), to remind us of the importance of slowing down at least every once in a while to take appreciation for that which transpired over the past few days.

So, without further ado, let’s get started with this edition’s roundup!

Updates from Jacob’s Personal Finance Journey and Life 

• As far as my life in general, the months of August and September have been full of some interesting life changes changes compared to the summer months. 
• In graduate school, I am now officially in my 3rd year of my Chemical Engineering PhD program. 
• For the past 3 months or so, I have been learning a new microscopy technique called Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM). Essentially, what it involves is using a very tiny micrometer length ‘tip’ that feels along the surface that you are analyzing. The image is resolved by reflecting a laser on the tip to sense the height deflection that occurs. Shown below is an example of one of the images I generated while learning the technique. Take note of the of the scale bar on the right having a maximum of 5 nm. This is 10^-9 meters! haha
• In addition, this fall, I am serving as a Teaching Assistant for the first time in my graduate career for a Transport Processes class. So far, I’m really enjoying guiding the students through their homework each week with the various questions they have.

• In addition, towards the end of the summer, I had my parents come in to town from Arkansas and my sister come in from North Carolina, so it was nice to enjoy some of the local cuisine, breweries, and hiking areas along with them. Shown below is one of the pictures of me cooling off in a swimming hole with my Mom. It was fun! 

• As far as my personal finances, the months of August and September have treated me pretty well. 
• At the beginning of August, I was able to max out my Roth IRA contributions for the 2012 tax year. 
• Since then, I have started contributing any leftover money I have had to my Individual Self-Employed 401(k) with Vanguard. So far, I have made some good progress, with about $2,500 contributed thus far for 2012. 
• However, from now until about the year-end, I plan to begin investing more of my excess funds in to my blog to build for future growth instead of my personal finance retirement savings. 
• As far as my blog goes, the end of September and beginning of October will mark some VERY exciting changes for our site! Read on below to find out more:
• For about the past year, my graduate school schedule has been sufficiently busy to only allow me to produce about one very high quality post every 1-2 weeks. Aside from that, the only other posts that I’ve run have been the occasional guest post.
• Thus far, this set up has worked fine. I got to interact with readers through my periodic postings and learn many new things in the process. 
• However, I’ve reached a point on this blog where I feel the desire to provide more frequent and consistent high quality to you all, the readers, instead of simply throwing a post out to the blogosphere whenever my graduate school schedule permits. 
• As such, I want to introduce to the new complete My Personal Finance Journey Team that will begin helping me out with various things on this site going forward:
• Becca @ The Academic Wino – Becca is my girlfriend of almost 2 years now. She runs an amazing research-based wine blog (The Academic Wino). She has been helping out for about 4 months now on submitting various posts on My Personal Finance Journey to social media bookmarking sites.
• Cherleen – Cherleen has been a part of the My Personal Finance Journey team now for about a year. She helps me each week by commenting on various sites around Internet to let me know of good articles that arise that I may have otherwise missed. 
• In addition, I am adding several new staff writers who will contribute articles for the site on a regular basis. These posts will be spaced out in such a way that I’ll still have plenty of time to post my regular articles. But, instead of having one to two week breaks between regular posts while I am busy in graduate school and leaving you all out to dry, you will have some great new content to read! I am really excited about this new set up, and I hope you all are too. Listed below are the new staff writers that I have hand-picked for My Personal Finance Journey. 
• Miss T from Prairie Eco-Thrifter.
• ADP from American Debt Project.
• Travis Pizel, a writer for Care One and Enemy of Debt.
• Kelly from Cordelia Calls it Quits.
• Melissa from Mom’s Plans.
• Kevin from Out of Your Rut.
• Jeff from Sustainable Life Blog.
• Tahyna from DinksFinances (also a Certified Financial Planner!).
• Toi Williams from Fine Tuned Finances.
• Let’s welcome all of these writers to the site! 🙂

Guest Posts from Personal Finance Bloggers on My Personal Finance Journey

Since the last roundup, there were no guest posts here at My Personal Finance Journey. Let’s change that, shall we?!