Easy Like Sunday Morning Weekly Roundup – # 3 – October 30th, 2011

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Click here to enter my free $205 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 October 31st, 2011 (tomorrow!).

Each week (even though I missed last week! – Oops!), the purpose of the Easy Like Sunday Morning Weekly Roundup 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.

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 last weekend. However, I did not mention why. 
• The big happening for My Personal Finance Journey over the past week has been that I spent about 20 hours (the majority of last weekend – hence why I missed the roundup) researching and putting together a historical analysis guest post of the passive investing strategy called The Permanent Portfolio. The late Harry Browne introduced this strategy in the 1980’s, and it has been garnering much press recently due to favorable performance by the actively managed Permanent Portfolio mutual fund.
• I won’t go in to the details of what The Permanent Portfolio is (you can read all about it in a good post by J.D. at Get Rich Slowly if you’re interested), but I submitted the post to Ramit at I Will Teach You to Be Rich to see if he’d be interested in featuring it as a guest post on his site. I hope to hear back from him this week about whether it’s a good fit or not. 
• One of my higher-priority blogging goals for the 2H2011 is to guest post more (at least once a month) in order to expand the audience reach of my site, so this was a good step in the right direction.
• As far as my personal finances go, this past week has been slightly atypical in that I’ve spent more money than normal on going out to eat and office/school supplies (had to purchase a new backpack and some office supplies aka blogging expense items!). However, I didn’t get too out of control, and the spending ended up being within allowable limits. This last week served as a good reminder of why I make sure to transfer a certain percentage of money as it is received to my savings accounts before having a chance to spend it.
• As far as my life in general, this past week, I have been continuing my graduate school research in Alzheimer’s disease in my lab. Myself and another co-worker are running a cytotoxicity assay this week to try to determine if the drug molecules we have discovered inhibit the toxicity of the protein aggregates implicated with the disease.
• In addition, last weekend, I did my first running race (a Fall 10k in my hometown) in MANY months. I felt pretty strong during the race and was very satisfied with my time. You can view some pictures of me at the start and finish lines of the race by clicking here. I would have pasted them in this post, but I didn’t want to get in trouble with the copyright laws. 
• Also, last night, my girlfriend and I went to a Halloween Party dressed as Star Trek officers from The Next Generation. Shown below is a picture of us all dressed it! ENGAGE!!!

My Favorite 10 Posts of the Past Week

Guest Posts from Personal Finance Bloggers on My Personal Finance Journey

Over the past week, there were no guest posts here at My Personal Finance Journey. Let’s change that, shall we?!

If you’re an individual PF blogger (not a company that has a blog) and 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:

Why Following Hot Mutual Fund Manager’s DOES NOT WORK! – This post discusses my foolish decision to invest in a “hot” mutual fund, The CGM Focus Fund, after hearing about its praises from a book written by Jim Cramer. Boy, was he wrong and did I make a mistake! Take a look at this article.

The winner this week is Sam from Financial Samurai for his work with building The Yakezie group (of which I’m a proud member). From what I’ve heard in my relatively short (1.75 years) stent with blogging, blog networks tend to only “come and go.” What’s meant by this is that they are not sustainable because members quit, or when member bloggers become more popular, they get too busy to participate. However, Sam has been able to craft Yakezie in such a way that nearly everyone that joined a year ago when I did STILL participates actively today. Pretty cool stuff. Nice work Sam!

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