Issues of the Day

Today the Carnival of Personal Finance #136 was hosted at Green Panda Treehouse.  My post $272 of Found Money was included along with a ton of other great content.  I know that I'll be spending some time today browsing through all of the great links.

In other news, I had to bite the bullet and reformat my computer last night.  My operating system had gradually descended into unusable territory so it was time to rebuild the system.  Because this happens with a predictable pattern (thanks Micro-shaft) I was fairly well prepared.  I already have an external backup drive in place so it was only a matter of copying over the most recent additions to the My Documents folder and exporting my Mozilla bookmarks (which are now full of great personal finance blogs).  I highly recommend everyone buy an inexpensive external drive (or two) and make regular backups.  From a purely financial perspective, all of the information you would loose in a hard drive crash could be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars.  There are also the irreplaceable digital pictures, home movies, or other priceless data that you will want to save for a lifetime.  Think of a backup system as insurance for all of the hard work you have put in creating, downloading, researching, and writing the content stored on your computer.

I also had a few more of my Found Money auctions come to an end.  I have added almost another $100 to previously posted amount of $272 so the current total is over $350.  I have four more auctions that will close next weekend which will likely put me into the $500 territory.  I can not wait to get this money applied to my credit card balance.  Of course I am only human and I did spend some of the money to buy a much needed printer (I did not have one at all before and I really needed it).  I researched the best budget printer and ended up finding a great solution for $50.  That will be my only indulgence, so look for my credit card balances to drop by at least $400 extra in time for my February Net Worth Update coming up in 10 days.     

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