It’s weekly roundup time! Here are a bunch of articles from across the MoneyBlogNetwork and beyond that caught my eye this week… [more]

Now that we’ve had a successful moving sale and have hauled a bunch of stuff to storage, it’s time to focus on things like improving our curb appeal… To this end, I’ve replaced the lights on either side of our garage door, and have also repainted our mailbox. After not quite four years in the elements, the brass finish on the cheapo lights that the builder installed had worn off and the lights were looking downright crappy. Similarly, the mailbox post had gotten a bit rusty, and the paint had faded a bit. [more]

A comment on my recent post on Emigrant Direct’s new and improved reward credit card got me to thinking about credit card rewards and frequent flyer miles. In general terms, I’ve always valued frequent flyer miles at around a penny apiece — I typically pay around $250 for a roundtrip domestic ticket (give or take), and they usually require 25k miles. Since most cards give you a mile for each dollar charged, that works out to a 1% reward, which is pretty standard stuff as far as credit card rewards go. [more]

FiveCentNickel participated in two carnivals this week. Here they are, along with links to my posts that were included in each.

The Carnival of Personal Finance, which is up at Financial Baby Steps, included my post on preparing for our moving sale.

The Best of Me Symphony, which is up at The Owner’s Manual, included my post on how to build a CD ladder. Also included was “Weaning and Worrying” from raising4boys.com.

In general terms, it’s always best to sell your house before you buy a new one. But that’s not always possible… Depending on how things work out, you may need (or at least want) to buy a new home before you sell your old one. The problem here is that many homeowners can’t afford to do this. If you’re ever in such a bind, one possible solution is a bridge loan. [more]

Well, the moving sale is done, and we survived… Although we had advertised an 8:00 AM start, people descended on us almost immediately when we started moving stuff out into the driveway around 6:30 AM. And by the time 8:00 AM rolled around, my pockets were already bulging with money. We kept the sale running until around 1:00 PM, at which time we hauled the last of our stuff back into the garage and closed up shop. When the dust settled, we had gotten rid of the bulk of what we were trying to sell, and we had taken in exactly $545. When you deduct the cost of advertising ($32.55 for a two day newspaper ad and $16.33 for signage) we ended up making $496.12. Not too shabby, and definitely worth the time that we spent. The leftovers, which amounted to two full loads in my Honda CR-V, went to charity. Thus, we’ll also be able to take a tax deduction on the unsold items.

For more information on moving, check out my Roadmap for a Successful Relocation.

I’m not sure how or when this might end up being useful, but I learned a cool trick from a commenter awhile back… You can do a reverse bank lookup by entering an ABA routing number at this site. I tried it out for a few banks (ING Direct, HSBC Direct and Emigrant Direct) and it seems to work nicely. So file it away in case you ever have a need for it.

I got an e-mail from Emigrant Direct this weekend announcing that they’ve improved their reward credit card. As I’ve mentioned before, Emigrant offers a 1.25% reward credit card. There are, however, some pretty major strings attached, including a requirement that you maintain an average daily balance of $10k in your Emigrant Direct savings account in order to receive the full reward. Well, it looks like the average daily balance requirement is still in place, but they’re bumping the reward rate up to 1.40%. All things considered, this still doesn’t sound like a great deal, but I thought it was at least worth mentioning.

With just three weeks to go until Tax Day, I thought it would be interesting to find out how y’all go about preparing your taxes… Thus, the poll question of the week is “How do you do your taxes?” As usual, I’ll go first. We’ve always done our own taxes, and over the past five or so years we’ve used TurboTax (although the Mac version used to be called MacInTax). While I consider myself to be a fairly tech-savvy guy, I still haven’t taken the plunge with regard to online tax prep… Maybe next year (but probably not). So, how do you guys do it? [more]

I just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve posted a fresh batch of referral links for the $25 ING Direct account opening bonus. If you haven’t taken part, keep in mind that opening an account through on of these links gives you an easy (and instant) 10% return on the minimum deposit of $250. Be sure to check it out!