Community In Action - Pursue Your Dreams Edition

Posted on May 1, 2008

First was an article on Life Hack called Personal Development, Canine-Style. It is a long read, but well worth the time. It is written from the perspective of a man’s dog while the owner’s life and finances grow over the years. It shares some of the potential dangers that come with chasing our dreams and getting on top of our finances. Great life perspective with an funny amusing edge.

Second, I wanted to highlight one of the best Personal Finance blogs on the net, The Simple Dollar. This story is quite inspirational. Just about two years ago he hit financial rock bottom, and now he has quite his steady job to pursue his dream of making a living as a writer. I suspect that he we will make judging from his motivation and body of work. Here is one of his recent pieces that provides a wonderful framework for making your dreams look possible. If you haven’t ever checked out his blog, I highly recommend it.

» Filed Under Bloggers, Chasing Dreams, Links

Community In Action - Found Money Edition

Posted on September 29, 2007

Here are some good articles from around the personal finance community :

Five Cent Nickel shares his story about doing the right thing with found money. It is always encouraging to see others live right.

Debt Beater shares his top five immediate benefits for starting a budget. I totally agree with budgeting starting good communication and exposing problem areas, even though it takes time to find your budgeting groove.

Consumerism Commentary shares a cool link that lets us know how many earths we would need if everyone in the world lived like us. My score was 2.2 earths. It was pretty eye opening to think I can have so much, because others have so little(even if it isn’t totally true).

Finally three great articles from the Silicon Vally Blogger : investing mistakes, a renting vs. buying discussion, and expand your yard by tearing down fences(my favorite). Driving through suburbia it sometimes seems silly that every house has a fenced in $1,000 play set and a beautiful park down the road. Other times I yearn for my own!

» Filed Under Bloggers

My Sitemeter and pMetrics Addiction And Other Things We Do Too Much

Posted on August 15, 2007

Hi, my name is Frank and I have a problem! I am addicted to Sitemeter and any other web site tracking package. My new love is pMetrics. The statistics are tailored for blogs and it lets you easily track your visitor’s movement within your site. It combines my favorite reports from other sites into one visitor overview page. Plus it is much faster than loading than everything else I have tried. I haven’t needed to visit SiteMeter or anything else since I signed up. I know The Happy Rock is a small site, but that just means that there is more chance I haven’t received a new hit since I last checked. It is a shame that doesn’t stop me from checking.

Every blogger can probably relate to this type of stat fascination. The real problem is that incessantly checking these stats adds no value. I would even go so far as to say that it probably hurts my overall productivity in life and for The Happy Rock. Here is how:

Wasted Time - Time spent doing something that I could easy do just a few times, rather then a few times an hour is a real waste. I really don’t have time to waste either.
Lost Focus - The preoccupation with stats and interruptions that the addiction causes probably has the biggest impact on my daily life.
Lost Perspective - Constantly focusing on one task can shape our strategy to revolve around only small piece of the puzzle. The usually translates into bad decisions.

For the blogger and non-blogger, the bigger question is what do we do when we can’t stop ourselves from getting too much of a good thing or too much of things that provide little or no value? We all have plenty of these things in their life.

The start of the process is getting the problem out in the open, like I am doing here. It has been a day since I have written this, and just by sharing and listing the negative consequences the lure of stat checking has already lost some of its power.

What things do you know in the back of your mind you should avoid altogether or drastically cut back? J.D @ Get Rich Slowly shared yesterday that he recently got bitten by an old Magic The Gathering addiction to the tune of $161. Let’s start by getting the problem out in the open and listing the negative ways that it affects our lives and our money in the comments section. In a future post I will post reader tips and some concrete ways that I am going to deal with my pMetrics addiction.

Disclosure: pMetrics is an affiliate link, although that doesn’t change how good it is!

» Filed Under Accountability, Bloggers, Productivity

What bloggers are saying about canceling cable and TV.

Posted on July 18, 2007

Yesterday I posted some eye opening statistics about TV viewing. Today I wanted to wrap up the canceling cable experiment by searching the blogosphere for some bloggers that had already tried giving up cable or had relevant posts. Here is what I found :

Gary Lee just recently canceled cable and is still adjusting.

Boomie @ The Wastrel Show downgraded to basic cable just a week ago.

Lazy Man tried to hack a cable free solution.

Clever Dude talks about not upgraging his viewing experience.

FMF @ Free Money Finance admits he doesn’t have cable.

And finally Trent @ The Simple Dollar discusses 10 reasons to cut out TV in one of his most popular articles. He then talks about dropping cable in a later post.

Enjoy

» Filed Under Bloggers, Experiments, Links