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November 30, 2010, at 6:00 am If you're new to BFS, please subscribe to my RSS feed. It shows me a vote of support and keeps me motivated to keep your attention. If you have any questions or comments for me, please contact me and I'll get back to you asap. Thanks for visiting! This is a guest post from Andreas. This is an awesome guest post – thank you Andreas!
I don’t know about you but I love music, listening to music is one of my favourite things to do. I was sitting back relaxing the other night with a glass of wine, and a very famous song started playing on the radio, and funily enough the result was this article. So here’s my top five songs about personal finance.
Can’t Buy Me Love – The Beatles (1964)
“I may not have a lot to give but what I got I’ll give to you, I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love.”
Being from the UK myself The Beatles are one of my favourite bands, and you can simply ask Sir Paul McCartney if money can buy you love. I think this is a fantastic song and it simply reminds us that money can’t buy you friends or family. No matter how much money you make, or how much money you want to make, you should always remember the important people in your life, and they should always come first.
Money, Money, Money – Abba (1976)
“I work all night, I work all day, to pay the bills I have to pay, Ain’t it sad, And still there never seems to be a single penny left for me.”
Number 1, Abba what a band, and Number 2, what a song! I think the lyrics above say it perfectly, and I’m sure many people can relate to the above quote. Sometimes it constantly feels that we’re working up a very steap slope but stick at and you will be rewarded for your efforts.
Independent Women — Destiny’s Child (2001)
“All the women who independent, Throw your hands up at me, All the honeys who makin’ money, Throw your hands up at me.”
Destiny’s Child are a great band and this song has to be one of their most famous. The words quoted above are awesome and I think they hold a gret financial message and I’m not just going to link it to women. The message that I like to think is behind the lyrics is that making money and being independant is so important if you want to be happy and succeedand I totally agree with that.
Mo Money Mo Problems – Notorious B.I.G (1997)
“It’s like the more money we come across, the more problems we see.”
For me personally, one of my favourite songs, and I’m sure the late Notorious B.I.G had his reasons for saying what we did, but I’m sure we would all like to know if it’s true?! But, one point I think is worth noting is that with a lot of money comes great responsibility, and really tough decisious, it’s not just all sunshine and rainbows.
Money (That’s What I Want) – Barrett Strong (1959)
“Money don’t get everything it’s true, What it don’t get, I can’t use.”
One of the most famous money songs? Probably, and rightly so because it’s a classic! The first line in the song says “the best things in life are free” and I completely agree with this, Barrett goes on to say that love is a thrill but it doesn’t pay the bills, and yet again hes completely right. In my opinion it’s all about getting the right balance between your personal life and your financial goals, your love for your family and friends helps you be who you are, but it won’t pay your bills for you.
I know there are plenty more finance and money songs that I could list but these are my favourites, if you have any you would list in your top 5 then put them in the comments section, thanks!
Crystal’s Comments: I immediately thought of “Material Girl” by Madonna and my husband quickly named off “It’s All About the Benjamins”.  What songs popped into your head?
November 29, 2010, at 6:00 am
Welcome to the Carnival of Money Stories #82! In honor of all the eating I’ve done for the past 4 days, today’s carnival is going to be filled with funny weight-loss tips*. I hope you enjoy your Monday as much as possible and come back to visit BFS!
Editor’s Favorites – “When eating donuts – only eat the center part.”
Shopping - ”Use Parental Block for the Food Network on your TV – Eat PIN Number/Password.”
Credit - ”Unfollow some calories (Twitter reference)”
Net Worth - ”Set a goal to lose as much weight as your stock portfolio has done in the last year.”
Business - ”Like the silent tree falling in the forest…. food actually has no calories if no one sees you eating it.”
Career - ”Eat your food with one chopstick.”
Investing - ”LMAO is a great way to reduce weight in the hindquarters.”
Other – “Only eat food that you can catch & kill with a toothpick”
I do apologize if you don’t see your post here – either it wasn’t a personal money story that fit the guidelines we hosts get or it came in after 5pm EST and was forwarded to the next host. Please submit your posts to the next edition of Carnival of Money Stories using the carnival submission form. The host next week will be Money Beagle.
*I found these tips at Ezine Articles.
November 28, 2010, at 6:00 am
During the Yakezie Alexa Ranking Challenge, you helped BFS soar from an Alexa ranking of more than 8 million in March 2010 to 49,852 on October 31, 2010. Thank you!!!
After posting my first ever Blog Statistics and Income Update, it was obvious that we needed some new goals, lol. It’s also obvious that everyone else is as nosey as me and enjoys a peek into another person’s stats, hahaha.
Goals for New Year’s Day
Here is what we are shooting for by New Year’s Day – January 1st, 2011:
Alexa – Maintain a Ranking at or around 50,000
Visits – 35,000
Feedburner Subscribers – 300
Twitter Followers – 200
Update
Here is where we are at today:
Alexa – 50,275 (On Target-ish)
Visits – 25,774 (9226 To Go)
Feedburner Subscribers - 195 (105 To Go)
Twitter Followers – 182 (18 To Go)
We are well on our way! I’ll be posting these updates every week and hopefully we’ll blow the targets out of the water just like we did with every other goal we have set since March!
I will also continue posting monthly and yearly blog statistics and income updates from here on out, so stay tuned to BFS, Crystal Clear Thoughts, and Dog’s Life For Me at the beginning of every month to get a complete breakdown including what income each site brought in!
Feel free to ask any questions below. Thank you all for helping me reach my own personal goal of blogging full time by 2012!
Additonal Info
In case you didn’t know, Alexa traffic rankings are determined by the numbers of hits a site gets by people with the Alexa toolbar. If you want to be part of this ranking community, you can download the Alexa toolbar here.
If you don’t already, you can follow me via RSS or Twitter by following those links.
If you are a Yakezie member and don’t see yourself on my member list, please send me an email or leave a comment here to be added. I copied the list originally in early March and updated it in mid-June. Please let me know if you are still missing. Thanks!
If you are interested in seeing how I went from an 8 million plus Alexa rank to about 50,000 in less than 8 months, you can see My Blogging Schedule, which breaks down everything I do related to blogging.
THANK YOU ALL FOR BEING THE BEST READERS EVER!!!
November 27, 2010, at 6:00 am
To check out new content (and rants), please also check out my other blogs,
Crystal Clear Thoughts and Dog’s Life For Me!
If you would like to join an exercise-oriented group with weekly goals, consider joining the Crystal Light Challenge!
My Favorite Posts this Week
Guest Posts at BFS
Thanks so much for the day off! Hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
If you would like to guest post on BFS, please send me an email with your idea or post and I’d love to have you over for the day! If you are a business, please email me for more details. Thanks!
Other Info and Giveaways
Top 5 Referring Sites to BFS this Week
The top 25 of each month will be listed on the first Saturday of every month.
- Enemy of Debt
- Free Money Finance
- Frugal Scholar
- Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured
- Yakezie
Feel free to email me if you have any suggestions. I’d love to add a few more blogs to my regular reading list or at least give a shout-out for great posts or contests.
As always, thanks to all the bloggers that teach me something new every day. Thanks to all my commenters for making this blog the community I want it to be. Thanks to all my “lurkers” too.  I hope everybody is enjoying this as much as me!
November 26, 2010, at 6:00 am
I hope you all are having fun this Black Friday! I will be staying as far away from shopping as humanly possible, lol. I am also probably moaning from how much I ate yesterday and planning to eat this afternoon, so let’s talk about working off these meals.
Exercise can be a lot of fun in the right context. Some people enjoy the adrenaline rush and can have a good time working out anywhere. Other people, like me, have a much better time if the exercise is hidden into a fun activity or there is a partner involved. I cannot stand exercising just to exercise, but I don’t think about it if I’m playing a sport or walking with a friend.
I’m currently running the Crystal Light Challenge over at Crystal Clear Thoughts and have been thinking of all the ways I could exercise to succeed in my weekly goal of 90 minutes.
Here are some fun activities that I have participated in that helped me stay active in the past:
- Rollerblading as a mode of transportation. When I graduated from college and took a cubicle job, I immediately gained weight since I was no longer rollerblading all day long.
- Softball. I rarely thought about the exercise involved while I was running around the bases. I was just so happy that I hit the ball! I haven’t participated in my company’s softball league for 2 seasons and know I should go back. I think I was just trying to rebel.
- Karate/Self-Defense. I’ve also heard that kickboxing can fall into this category but haven’t tried it myself yet. I loved my karate classes and self-defense courses because I was getting a workout but was thinking about fighting instead. Kicking the crud out of padded shields is a lot more fun than treadmills in my opinion.
- Walking. I’ve had several walking partners over the last few years and always had a good time chatting while putting in my hour for the day. I’ve walked around neighborhoods, in parks, and on a treadmill next to someone. It’s always more fun than exercising alone. Now if I could just find another buddy…reliable and dependable exercise buddies are few and far between around here. 
What activities have you participated in that could give you a great workout? Do you already have a system you’d like to share?
November 24, 2010, at 6:00 am
You can also check out my staff writer post at Sweating the Big Stuff, Pets – A Bigger Expense Than Expected.
Invest It Wisely has challenged fellow bloggers to play devil’s advocate to their normal beliefs.
I am obviously a big fan of budgeting, so today I will be presenting you with the top 5 reasons not to have a budget:
1) Time. Forming a budget and keeping it updated does take time. First you have to decide on what system you’ll be using, then you have to create your categories, and later on you put in time to enter your purchases. I spend about 2 hours a month on it now, but it used to take an hour a week when we were really on the ball.
2) Records. You do have to know what purchases you made in order to keep up with each category total, so record-keeping is necessary. Receipts or a small notebook can help out. My husband and I use rewards credit cards as often as possible, so we use those statements and simply have a category for “Cash” for any withdrawals we make. I can also check our check book register to see if we wrote any checks.
3) Prioritizing. It is stressful to prioritize your spending if you have any tough decisions to make. Currently Mr. BFS and I make enough to cover our basic wants and needs, but a few years ago, we had to decide what we could buy and put everything unnecessary to the side. It’s never fun to tell yourself “no”.
4) Confrontation. Budgets can bring to light problem areas and stick them right in your face. I am surprised regularly about how much we spend on food and can almost hear my budget mocking me. You can get it to hush up by either changing your habits or balancing your categories so you aren’t creating unrealistic targets for yourself.
5) Insecurity. Keeping up with a budget could make some people feel like they must be bad with money if they have to keep themselves in check. I see budgeting as the ultimate form of money organization, but telling yourself that “you have to write it down or you’ll forget” may make some people cringe. No one appreciates being treated like a child – sometimes not even by themselves, lol.
Can you think of any other reasons to avoid budgeting?
November 23, 2010, at 6:00 am
There is a war happening online. It’s only heard by bloggers and those in that circle, but it is loud if you are listening. A well-known ranking system has stalled and great blogs are being left behind in the battle for readers and monetization.
I’d like to say that the Google PageRank (PR) system is dying, but I wouldn’t know since I cannot find any official updates. I can say that many of my favorite blogs have been waiting for months for a PR update that does not seem to be coming. It is time to look elsewhere for our coveted ranks – it is time to take a closer look at MozRank (MR).
What is MozRank?
Have you heard of MozRank? According to SEOmoz, “mozRank is SEOmoz’s link popularity metric that shows how popular (in terms of links) a webpage is on the web.” In short, the more links a page gets, especially from bigger sites, the higher its MR will be. I appreciate the simplicity.
Why Use MozRank?
Okay, I’m not going to mince words here. My blogging income is directly determined by my rank and I am supremely frustrated that people are judging me by a system that hasn’t updated in months and months!
As my reader, you may not be as moved as I am when it comes to my blogging income, but please understand that I want to dedicate all of my time to making this site better for you. I can only do that full time if I can grow my blogging income to $30,000 or more a year. PR is hurting my bottom line and that is severely limiting the possibility of blogging full time by 2012!
I want my site judged based on the quality of my writing and how much passion I have for blogging. Since there just isn’t a system in place for that, I want to be judged by an unbiased entity that will accurately state the facts and update frequently. Hello MozRank!
Website Grader
I came across MozRank when I used Websitegrader.com to check on the stats of BFS. Here are the summarized results for Budgeting in the Fun Stuff:
Ranks 48,399 of the 3,046,125 websites that have been ranked so far.
Website Grade: 98
MOZ Rank: 5
Traffic Rank: 49,953
Blog Grade: 97
Google Indexed Pages: 1,380
Readability Level: Secondary/High School
Inbound Links: 30,495
Twitter Grade: 83
Conclusion
I need to work on Twitter, but otherwise I seem to be on track. You can check out the archives for my blog statistics for more info if you’d like some more numbers for BFS.
I want MozRank to be the go-to ranking system from now on! Who’s with me?!
Other Blog Posts that are Calling for More Moz in the Mix:
Invest It Wisely – How Mozrank is Filling in the Gaping Hole Left by the Departure of Pagerank
Everyday Tips and Thoughts - mozRank vs. PageRank- What Is The Better Way To Measure The Value Of A Website?
Buy Like Buffett – Page Rank Schmage Rank
Faithful With A Few – Moz Rank - The Reliable Alternative to Page Rank
Saving Money Today – The Death of Google PageRank
Money Green Life – mozRank is the new PageRank
Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance – Moz Rank, Competition, & Links
Money Cone - Read Me, Link Me, Rank Me!
The College Investor – How Google Violates its Own Corporate Philosophy and How it Hurts the Little Guy
Buck Inspire – MozRank: Drop that Zero and Get With the Hero
Raven - Goodbye PageRank, hello mozRank
Lindsay Blogs – Move Over PageRank, mozRank is Here!
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DISCLAIMER I am not a professional or a financial advisor. BFS posts are informational opinions only. Please make your own financial decisions based on personal research or see a financial advisor.
Also, there are paid links on this site. There is no obligation on your part to purchase any products advertised on this website.
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