Tour de Personal Finance 2011 – Final Championship Sprint on the "Parisian Champs-Élysées" of Personal Finance

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The 2011 Tour de Personal Finance has been an absolute 100% success (far beyond anything I could have imagined!). A big thanks goes out to everyone that has participated in the Stages and to the hundreds of voters who have stopped by to support their favorite authors/articles. 


Later this week, I’ll write up a Tour de Personal Finance recap, post-race show, and awards ceremony to talk about what happened this year and how I envision the event growing in the coming years. But, that’s enough of that commentary for now!


Without further ado, let’s continue on with the final, 17th Stage (the final championship sprint) of the 2011 My Personal Finance Journey Tour de Personal Finance (to follow all of the action, click on the Tour de Personal Finance category link and scroll down to read all the posts involved in this subject).

• This isn’t your grandparents’ recession (Grandparents): 
  Ever since the recession began I think there’s WAY too much blaming of the victims. I’m good and sick of hearing pundits grumble about how lazy and soft Americans have become, and how we ought to take a few lessons from the Great Depression. Here’s the thing: The world was a different place back then. Heaven knows I’m no apologist for slackers, credit-card spendthrifts or people who won’t take anything but the “right” job, but a lot of the advice our elders offered/modeled isn’t relevant today. Plenty of folks are in big trouble not because they’re lazy, but because of complex personal, local, national and global economic issues.

Cadel took the race lead by doing a consistent ride throughout the high mountain stages and then throwing down the gauntlet with a STELLAR final time trial yesterday in Grenoble to take the yellow jersey only the day before Paris!

Alberto Contador, the all-around favorite for overall victory this year, came up lacking in the final mountain stages of this year’s race. In my opinion, Contador most likely was the best rider in this year’s Tour de France, but since he doesn’t focus his training solely for victory in the Tour (he wants to win races in May and September as well), he wasn’t in peak form. This just makes me realize and appreciate how hard and rare it is to find a rider such as Lance Armstrong who can win the biggest bike race in the world for 7 years IN A ROW without making a single mistake. It really is a testament to Lance’s ability as a rider.

***Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/petitbrun/5664890889/lightbox/