Carnivals of Fun For Personal Finance Posts

This week a there have been some great personal finance carnivals out there. I encourage you all to stop by and take a look at all the great posts. I guarantee you'll have hours of enjoyable reading and find some new favorite posts. Teaspoon Finance is proud to have a post participating in the following Carnivals. The Teaspoon Finance post participating this week at these carnivals was: Do You Have an Emergency Fund? - If Cash is King, Then Don't Neglect His Good Looking Brother, the Prince of Credit!

Carnival of Personal Finance
This weeks Carnival of Personal Finance #114 is hosted at The Simple Dollar. Trent at The Simple Dollar spent a ton of time reviewing the 60+ posts submitted and choosing his editors choice posts. I confess that I haven't had a chance to read all the posts, yet. I plan to by this weekend. I did go through and read all the titles that caught my eye and from those, read many many of the posts. From those, I found 2 that are my favorites from the Carnival of Personal Finance #114:

• 110 Personal Finance Calculators (@ millionaire mommy next door)
  Now this was an amazing piece of effort by the millionaire mommy to put together this amazing resource list of calculators. I plan to have fun browsing these calcs over the coming weeks and I'm sure they're going to give me lots of wonderful ideas :- ). I'm sure you'll find at least one, if not several here that are of immediate interest!
• How To Know Instantly You’re Being Conned (@ dough roller)
  I've been watching Mind Control with Derren Brown on the SciFi Channel recently and that dude can have your mind reeling! So, previously to that show, I figured, 'Hey, I probably can't be conned. I'm a very logical street wise Joe'. But, after this show, geeze, there's just may be a whole new level of con men out there. I enjoyed dough roller's post and it has some great advice on thinking about those 'too good to be true situations'. Definitely check this out. If you don't think you can be conned, go check out an episode of Mind Control on SciFi channel and you'll be back at dough roller's site double checking ;-)!

Wow, that was a lot of reading! I couldn't read all 60+ articles, but definitely viewed all post titles and read through each post that caught my eye. I encourage you to stop by the carnival site and read through and find some new favorite posts of your own.

I'll be following up with additional Carnivals that Teaspoon Finance was a part of with my post: Do You Have an Emergency Fund? - If Cash is King, Then Don't Neglect His Good Looking Brother, the Prince of Credit!

PFSN - Not a contagious disease, but possibly a hot new trend in personal finance

PFSN, Nothing to check yourself for. Just a little abbreviation I made up for a possible new personal finance trend prediced to pop up. Saw a recent article on PFSNs (Personal Finance Social Networks) on Google news recently. The article from the Intl Herald Tribune talks about how online social networking is meeting personal finance. If the experts are right, then there could be 2 million of these savvy personal finance social network users by the end of 2008.

The author mentions 2 sites in particular geezeo.com and wesabe.com. It's an interesting concept that I look forward to learning more about over the coming months. It's like an online version of Microsoft Money (or Quicken) meets Facebook (or Weight Watchers). Jason Knight, chief executive of wesabe.com says:

"Social finance is a way for consumers to find out if there's real value where they're spending money."

The sites allow you to link to all of your online bank and credit card accounts. It can pool all this information and perform some data correlation and categorization based on what other users input already. This allows the sites to offer category suggestions and tips based on your specific expenses and entries in your financial data.

An online version of Money is a great idea, once people get past the privacy and security issues. Combine that with the encouraging support aspect of networking and sharing questions and advice with like minded members of your community could be a winner.

Etan Horowitz of The Orlando Sentinel wrote an article sharing his experience testing out three of these sites wesabe.com, expensr.com, and buxfer.com: Online Finance Help. He was impressed with the capabilities of the sites. He was especially impressed with wesabe.com:

The best of the bunch is wesabe.com, which uses your spending history and favorite merchants to generate money-saving tips from other users or "Wesabeans" who have similar habits. If you spend your money on groceries or magazines, you'll see tips about saving money on these items. One user filled me in about $5 movies at AMC theaters before noon on weekends and holidays.

It sounds like there's a bit of upfront work, as is usual in any kind of automation. But it get's a little easier, according to Etan:

Uploading and categorizing expenses takes a lot of time at first, so you may get frustrated. But if you have the patience and want more control over your finances, give one of these sites a try. Both Buxfer and Wesabe will start to automatically categorize your repeat expenses after you do it once, so that makes things easier.

The original Herald article mentions other flavors of social finance that you may already be familiar with. Finance blogs like this one where we can interact with folks of like-minded finance goal interests to share posts and comments about topics of interest. Also social finance sites like Prosper.com, Zopa.com, and LendingClub.com where networks of folks can join to lend and borrow money from fellow members.