Don't Quit Your Day Job…

If you saw $1,377.71 lying on the ground, would you pick it up?

I hope you would. That’s the sort of savings you could find from opening a Roth IRA. Any increase in your future tax rates means you made money simply from choosing the right account to invest in. Sound good? Read the article.

Check out the 210th edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance. They are linking to the article “Eggs and Baskets”. Find it under the category ‘Bald Bull Does Bull Market Investing.’

Carnival of the Capitalists features the article “The Minimum Wage Mistake.” Check out this week’s edition at the CotC site.

A commonly heard refrain in the personal finance world is ‘Keep 3 months of living expenses in an emergency fund!’ If fact, this is heard so much it’s almost become a mantra for people taking control of their finances for the first time. Where does this ‘3′ come from? Why do you keep it? All this and more will be answered, read on…

My article “A Penny Saved is 1.76366843 Pennies Earned” was included in this week’s Money Hacks Carnival!

Head over to this week’s carnival, hosted at Own the Dollar, and check out the 69th edition of the carnival. The article is located under the heading “Frugality & Saving Money – $10,000 Federal Reserve Note 1914″.

If you come into money, don’t ignore paying down debt as an option. Oftentimes paying down debt can save you much more money than you can earn with another option. Additionally, paying off a loan in full will increase your future cash flow. Read on for a look at debt as an investment and a closer look at tax-equivalent yield.

However you got it, you’ve got it now. Cash, and a good chunk of it at that. The big question for you now… Where are you going to put it? When you realize the mattress isn’t a good place to stash it, read on for some ideas!

“Bennet Sedacca announced to the world at 10:15 on the morning of March 5, 2008, that venerable Bear Sterns & Co., the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank was in trouble, big trouble.” The first paragraph opens with a bang. Ten days after Sedacca made that call, he was proven right. Bear Sterns was no more. William D. Cohan’s House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, explains how Bear Sterns got there.

Next month, the minimum wage in America is going to raise from $6.55 an hour to $7.25 an hour. The $6.55 to $7.25 jump is the last of the increases to the minimum wage under the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007. The minimum wage is a sexy law; politicians can stand hand in hand with the lowest income workers and say, “I’m fighting for you!”. Unfortunately, the low income workers are holding the hands that hold them down.

Rortybomb, a blogger and financial engineer from San Francisco posted an interesting spreadsheet based on the stress test results. Hunting through the stress test results, he found a chart on page 6 with ‘Baseline’ and ‘More Advanced’ numbers. Since that’s enough to do a linear extrapolation (of course, with two data points that probably isn’t the most accurate way to do it… see his background post) allowing you to set your own estimate for worst case unemployment numbers. Read on…

Stock Option Grants, Employee Stock Purchase Plans, Restricted Share Grants, 401k Plan Options, Outright Stock Grants, even Index Funds. There are a lot of ways for you to invest in your own company’s stock. However, is that really a good thing?