Weekly Roundup - Back to the Grind Edition

Written by Nickel - 4 Comments

This week marked the official end of summer in our house, as the kids are now back at school. Is it just me, or is there something unnatural about starting back to school in early August? When I was a kid, we got out of school in early June and started back on the day after Labor Day. Now, the kids get out a month earlier and go back a month earlier. The problem with all of this? I still don’t get into the summer mindset until early June, at which point there’s only two months left.

And now, here are some articles for your end-of-summer reading pleasure…

Ron put together a great list of tips for increasing your productivity.

MBH talked about eBay’s new feedback system. He also put together a list of 118 finance bloggers that use Twitter. In case you’re curious, you can follow my Twitter feed here.

Jeremy talked about how correlations among asset classes affect your portfolio. If you’re interested in asset allocation, check it out.

SVB talked about grading your personal finance skillz. Speaking of which… I just published a couple of articles on this general topic this week: The State of Financial Education in the U.S. and Ten Things Teens Should Know About Money.

NCN took a look back at the financial impact of their new baby.

JD talked about hidden price increases at the grocery store.

Connie talked about why gas costs so much. I tackled this question a couple of months ago when I wrote about what goes into the price of gas.

Smithee finally woke up and smelled the coffee — no more bottled water for him.

JLP talks about how you know when you’ve saved enough.

Finally, PaidTwice talked about how to get the most out of coupons.

Published on August 7th, 2008 - 4 Comments
Filed under: Link Love
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About the author: Nickel is the founder and editor-in-chief of this site. He's a thirty-something family man who has been writing about personal finance since 2005, and guess what? He's on Twitter!

Comments (scroll down to add your own):

Thanks for the link to the Twitter users. I’ve been using it myself. Also we’ve been noticing the “get less, pay the same marketing technique” locally as well. We’ve switched brands on a few things just to stay at the same price/volume we could get a few months ago. It’s an interesting thing to check up on next time you’re buying your groceries…
Comment by PCU — Aug 8th 2008 @ 11:46 am
When do your kids get out of school? Early May?

I’ll be a junior and we don’t go back until August 27th…we get out June 4th.
Comment by Ryan — Aug 9th 2008 @ 10:37 pm
Yeah, early May.

Comment by nickel — Aug 9th 2008 @ 10:47 pm
When I was a little kid going to school in an American colony overseas, we had year-round school: three months on and one month off. This probably was because our fathers’ long leaves were a month long, so the three on-one off schedule made it possible for families to plan stateside or European vacations at times other than the summer.

In terms of what it did for our education: Over the vacation we did forget a little of what we’d learned, but not much. I can imagine if you were out of grade school for three months, you’d blow off a lot of alleged learning. Before we came home, I was sick and out of school for about six months, but testing showed I was still over a year ahead of my grade level. In the overseas school I was a mediocre student; in San Francisco I instantly morphed into an A student.

Part of it was because I hated school when we lived overseas…I’d have had a nervous breakdown if I’d had to stay in that place for nine uninterrupted months. Ugh!

Sending kids back to school in August, while it’s still hotter than a two-dollar cookstove, doesn’t make much sense if you’re going to let them out the first part of May — they still have three full months in which to forget everything they were learning.
Comment by Funny about Money — Aug 10th 2008 @ 10:29 am