To Summarize ...

It's actually quite hard to summarize my experiences blogging about finance. Certainly I think I've learned a lot about myself as a money manager, what I should invest next, how I can save to invest. There are a lot of life lessons in seeing how one functions, and I've realized, quite frankly, I'm a bit sqeamish when spending money. I can live with that.

We're still in the process of getting our life insurance taken care of. Funny or not, this is one of those major things I had to do to get my finances straight. Because part of investing is preparing for the future, and life insurance does that. Just this week we had a home nurse come and check our weights, heights, blood, urine (urgh), etc. and infinitum, to make sure we don't smoke, don't overdrink, don't drug, don't have HIV or diabetes or any of those other million risk factors that will cause our insurance company to lose out on their investment in us. It's kinda creepy to think this much about the potentialities of death when the whole idea of investing is to prepare for a comfortable, financially secure future. There's a whole lot more to this than just the stock market.

So what have I learned? I've also learned that being financially smart means doing a lot of little things in preparation for the glory days of retirement, and it also means giving up some of the frivilous things now. I'll pay off my car next March and then drive it, literally, until it implodes, hopefully in 4 or 5 more years. We'll keep updating this fixer-upper to add value to our property. And I won't skydive, because that makes my life insurance null and void if I die from it. And who wants that?

As an investor, I found out that I'm moderately risky, like to watch money grow, and I can do it based on dollar-cost averaging. Maybe that's investing in moderation, but because I don't make a killing as a teacher, so what? It's something. My goal has been to highlight my assets, protect them, and grow them, while marking down debt like mortgage and student loans. It'll take time, and that is probably the one thing I find frustrating the most. It takes time to both grow money and get rid of debt. For those of us who are impatient, this can be excruiating, like Chinese water torture. But I think the reward is worth the wait, right?

Final Paper and Presentation Considerations

Touch on the following points:

1. What your blog is about (highlights)
2. What is your blog community? What are the similarities and differences among blogs? (give a few examples)
3. What are the issues that arise in writing a blog about this topic? (the how and why questions)
4. Where to go from here? Suggestions for future blogging…

Week 7 In class discussion

Here are some links for our International blogs discussion:

Salam Pax's blogs
Where Is Raed?
Just Zip It

Peter Maass's Slate article
"Salam Pax Is Real"

Or this article from the British newspaper The Guardian:
"Salam's Story"

What else did you find?