Well, after buying Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and having it delivered on release day, we finally finished reading it this past week. It took us longer than normal because we read it as as a family with my wife and I taking turns reading chapters aloud (two of our boys are too young to read it themselves).

We set Tuesday night a our goal for finishing it because the boys headed back to school on Wednesday and we didn’t want anyone spoiling the end. I’m not going to review the book here because: (1) doing so would be way off-topic, and (2) I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. So… I’ll just say this: Although it dragged a bit in the middle, we definitely enjoyed the book overall.

With that said, here’s a quick look at some of the articles that caught my eye this week…

FMF talked about the 60 million Americans that apparently don’t pay taxes.

MBH opened a bank account for his daughter.

Flexo provided a rundown of the top ten used cars for under $10k.

Jim got skittish about the market and sold a bunch of Target Retirement 2050 shares.

JLP is out of town, but his fill-in Cathy provided some tips for brown-bagging your lunch.

SVB outlined ten wealth-building strategies.

Jeremy talked about the relationship between biofuels and beer prices.

4M likes it when the market goes down.

Lazy Man had a guest post about investing with DRIPs. This is actually how we got our feet wet with investing about ten years ago. We’ve since switched over entirely to mutual funds.

Ben talked about spousal IRA contributions.

Sun said that 4 week T-Bills are looking good again. He also linked to a couple of great articles on how to calculate the effective yield of T-Bills and how to invest in them.

My Retirement Blog put together a list of the eleven (yes, eleven!) different types of IRAs that are available.

Finally, NCN talked about discussing finances with your spouse without getting in a fight.

That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend, and stay cool! (We’ve had four consecutive days with record high temperatures.)