Easy Like Black Friday Morning Weekly Roundup – # 4 – November 25th, 2011

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Click here to enter my free $201.40 giveaway for a chance to win 5% of My Personal Finance Journey blog income and give another 5% to a charity of your choosing! Deadline to enter is November 30th, 2011 (this coming Wednesday).

Each week (even though I missed the past several weeks! – Oops!), the purpose of the Easy Like Sunday Morning Weekly 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 week. This week, since I have gotten behind in doing a roundup for several weeks, I decided that I didn’t want until Sunday to put together this week’s edition. And, since it is Black Friday, that’s the reason for the minor name change! 

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 a week while putting this together), to remind us of the importance of slowing down at least once a week to take appreciation for that which transpired over the past few days.

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

Weekly Updates from Jacob’s Personal Finance Journey and Life

• I mentioned in the opening paragraph of this post that I missed doing a roundup the past few weekends. However, I did not mention why. 
• As far as my life in general, November has been a SUPER-busy month, as it often is for a lot of people in today’s society. 
• At the beginning of November (November 4-8), my girlfriend and I took a vacation to New York City so that she could run in the New York City Marathon. 
• Then, almost immediately when I came back from that trip, I traveled to Richmond for the Richmond / McDonald’s Half Marathon on November 12th. 
• This race is my favorite road half marathon running race of the year, and as usual, it was a very fun time this year as well. It was about 40 degrees at the starting gun of the race, but then warmed up to around 53 degrees F by the finish. 
• I was very satisfied with my finishing time of 1 hour and 31 minutes! 
• If you’re interested in seeing some pictures of me running in the race, you can click here. 
• Since the Richmond Half Marathon, I have been hustling to continue my graduate school research in Alzheimer’s disease in my lab. There was a slight time-crunch since we had to analyze the data from a previous aggregation/cytotoxicity experiment and then start another 8 day experiment in order to make some progress before taking off for Thanksgiving (right now! yah!).
• Since Wednesday, my sister and mom have been in Virginia with me to celebrate Thanksgiving. Currently, they’re attending a yoga class, so I decided to do a little blogging during the downtime. 
• We had a delicious Thanksgiving meal last night that my sister prepared. Included in the meal were 1) sweet potatoes topped with oatmeal, 2) a 10 pound free range, never frozen turkey from Whole Foods with celery/raisin stuffing (the most expensive grocery store EVER by the way, which I never usually shop at because it is overpriced. Good – but overpriced!), 3) bacon-wrapped brussel sprouts, and 4) fresh-made cranberry sauce (from real cranberries). Shown below is a picture of the complete spread! Sure was tasty! 
• As far as my personal finances go, I’ve encountered and am currently trying to sort through two big changes. 
• First, last week, I finally had time to analyze my earnings from this year for tax purposes, and have determined that I will indeed, owe a quarterly tax payment in January (ahead of the normal time that taxes are due). This is due to the fact that I owe taxes on self-employment income and also from my graduate school NSF fellowship, neither of which withholds any taxes automatically. 
• Since the amount of taxes that I owe is fairly large, I’ve been investigating opening up a self-employed retirement account as a way to reduce my tax liability. I’m fairly certain I’ve narrowed the choice down to an individual 401(k). 
• However, it was a very difficult decision due to a plethora of differing opinions on the subject, a lack of information available directly from the IRS, and changes in the tax laws over the years. 
• As such, I’ll be sure to put together a future post covering the various considerations in my decision-making process, as I think this would be very helpful to people in the future when they are going down the same path that I was. 
• Second, I had been planning (and saving money) for several months now in order to install a stacked clothes washer/dryer combination unit in my condo that I purchased last year. 
• However, after recently deciding to make my second bedroom my office/blogging space (reducing total storage space in my condo), I’ve decided that placing a washer/dryer in my house would not be the best use of space because it would effectively monopolize all storage room in the biggest closet.
• Therefore, I’ve decided to indefinitely delay my plan to install a clothes washer/dryer in my condo. There’s always a possibility that I’ll change my mind about this in the future, but for now, I’m going to devote the money I had been saving for this purpose to other outlets.    

My Favorite 10 Posts of the Past Week

Guest Posts from Personal Finance Bloggers on My Personal Finance Journey

Over the past week, there was one guest post here at My Personal Finance Journey.


Corey from 20’s Finances and Passive Income to Retire posted about, “What Does a Passive Retirement Look Like?” Thanks so much Corey for the post! It was great to hear about your plans. 

If you would like to guest post on my site, please click here to read more details about how to kick off the guest posting process. I’d love to hear from you!

Blasts From the Past

For the first 6 months after I started this blog, I pretty much “blogged in a cave.” What I mean by this is that I cranked out over 200 very good blog articles in this time period, but since I didn’t know any better, I didn’t reach out to other bloggers, get involved with the online community through commenting on other sites, or do any kind of site promotion at all. As you can imagine, some of the articles written during this time period didn’t get the attention that I think they deserved corresponding to the content contained.

The Blast from the Past section will feature one old My Personal Finance Journey article each week that I feel is high quality, but was published prior to my blog having any sort of real readership. This week’s article is listed below:

Hamster Revolution Email and Electronic File Management System – This post discusses the current email storage management system that I use to manage email with my day job as well as blogging activities. It discusses a electronic filling system consisting of the “COTAP” folders – one for clients, output, teams, administrative, and personal files/emails. It really works, and I have enjoyed using it ever since I wrote this post in July of last year!

This week’s award goes to Jeff Rose of Good Financial Cents. Last week, when I was trying to sort through the seemingly overwhelming decision about which type of self-employed retirement account to open, I came across several of the posts that Jeff wrote about the subject during a Google search. It was amazing how helpful the articles were – much more helpful than any IRS tax publication, Ask.com, or Wall Street Journal research. I began reading several other articles on his site and thought it was amazing how accessible he makes very difficult personal finance topics seem when he explains them in his posts. So, good job Jeff, and I look forward to reading more! 

If you know of someone in the PF blogging world that is really doing amazing things, feel free to send me an email for consideration in future roundups.

Giveaways

Blog Carnivals Featuring My Personal Finance Journey Articles

Top 10 Referring Sites to My Personal Finance Journey This Past Week

However, I have several other domain names purchased, and I am currently learning WordPress Self-Hosted to get these sites live as soon as time allows! I’ll be sure to keep you all updated on progress.

Well, that wraps up this week! If you have any suggestions or recommendations for things you’d like to see in this weekly roundup, just let me know by sending me an email!

As always, thanks to all the readers for creating such a great community here at My Personal Finance Journey. Your interaction is what keeps me going on this blog!

Until next time – Jacob