Debt Free Direct Tour de Personal Finance, Stage 20 – Round 5, Posts 1-32

Without further ado, let’s continue on with the 20th Stage (there are only 4 blogs left the 2013 event) of the 2013 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).

We greatly appreciate Debt Free Direct for being the title partner of the 2013 event and for all their great support. If you’re interested in learning more about the help and advice Debt Free Direct offers to people in debt or their money-saving tips on how to prevent building up debt, click here.

A Quick Reminder On Prizes For The 2013 Competition

The 2013 edition of the Tour de PF will be doubly exciting because we have some very nice cash prizes to give away to the winner and also to charity to continue helping the community.

These will be as follows:

• Yellow Jersey (1st Place) Winner of the 2013 Tour de Personal Finance will receive $100 cash via PayPal.
• In addition, the Yellow Jersey Winner will also get to decide what charity they want me to donate $700 to in honor of their efforts/victory. 

To view the most up-to-date brackets of the competition, click the following link – 2013 Debt Free Direct Tour de PF Bracket

Going along with Tour de France cycling tradition, I’ve listed each competition within each stage as an “intermediate sprint” (one post versus another) along with the description provided by the blog author when the post was submitted.

Also, if applicable, I will give a brief description of the stage of the Tour de France that took place the same day as (or that has happened since the previous Stage of) the competition.

How to Vote

You can vote for the two articles (one from each intermediate sprint)  you’d like to see proceed in the Tour by commenting in the comments section below and telling which are your favorites. I’ve listed a keyword after each post title to make it easy to vote (as a made-up example, you can just comment: Sprint 1: Mutual; Sprint 2: 401k, etc.) 

Be sure to comment which one you like the best out of each set of two! Criteria for the best article is completely up to you, but you can use these factors as a guide: 1) post of your favorite blogger, 2) most interesting post, 3) most thought-provoking post, 4) most unique post, or 5) most actionable post. Here are today’s competitions:

Voting will continue until July 19th for this Stage!

Intermediate Sprint

• My Husband is Now WORKING FROM HOME WITH ME!!! (Husband): It’s important to work out a plan before leaping into self-employment.  It’s even more important when that entrepreneurial spirit hits both of the income earners of the household.  But after running the numbers, looking at worst case scenarios, and mulling the idea over…it was time for us to put on our big girl panties and jump in.     Here’s the post about the excitement and fear when we officially put all of our financial eggs in one basket and happily skipped away into the unknown…

VERSUS

• How My Retirement Plans Got Derailed – Big Time! (Derailed): I left my secure job at a major bank to open a small retail store with my husband.  We struggled along for three years, using up almost all our savings and making the terrible mistake of financing the business with our many credit cards. Eventually we gave up and closed the store.  With no money and over $100,000 in credit card debt, we sank to our lowest point of despair.

Tour de France Daily Recap

The Tour de France in real life continues today after a rest day yesterday with a medium-mountains Stage taking the riders 168 km from Vaison-la-Romaine to Gap. There shouldn’t be too many big changes today in the overall standings, but you never know these days now that most of the riders are clean of drugs! It makes the thing a little more unpredictable! haha 🙂

***Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/28149760@N04/9274241979/in/photolist-f8wV2M-cQzHuy