Trolling the Blogoverse: 5/23/07 Edition

The latest Carnival of Personal Finance is up at FIRE Finance. I just wanted to comment on a few posts…

The first is from The Happy Rock, who talks about getting out of debt and all the happy things that go along with being debt free. I can really relate to the “less stress” comment. Although I literally have nearly 100 times more debt from my mortgage and student loans, I kind of stress about my credit card debt, probably because I know that the mortgage and student loans are the good debt, while the credit card debt is just from “other” purchases and is bad debt. This is a nice connection to the post from Queercents, who talks about the different between good and bad debt. I’m trying to reduce the credit card debt, but it’s like a yo-yo diet: it goes up and down, usually within a range of almost being debt free to very stress inducing.

Everyday Finance talks about a gasoline boycott chain e-mail. I have also received a chain e-mail stating to not buy gasoline from a particular company or on a particular day to “punish” the company or lower the price of gas. Dan does a good job of explaining why this is not a good idea. Essentially, we are just transferring the purchase of gas to another day or another company, so the net effect is no different. What would really make a change is to reduce our overall consumption of gas and oil products. This is the only way to reduce the price of oil.

Shadox over at Money and Such has a good discussion of the fear of investing and how it relates to risk.  I have spoke previously about risk as it relates to investment types and the risk tolerance of the investor.  While our discussion overlaps, Shadox takes it to a more personal level, specifically talking about how an individual may become a little more comfortable about investing in equities (as opposed to someone like me that has jumped into stocks without looking back…).

Finally, the Digerati Life talks about the investment strategies of some of the more popular financial bloggers here and here.  It’s always interesting to see how others are investing.  One thing I noticed was that most of the people were invested in funds rather than individual stocks, some ETFs, and a couple mostly into index funds.  I don’t have enough at this point to invest in so many different funds, but it’s always good to get different ideas before I do.