Our Fourpence Worth participated in the Festival of Frugality #140: The Frugal Quotes Edition hosted at the beautifully designed FIRE Finance with our post Save by Not Saving on These Things by Madoline Hatter.

My favorite frugal quote from this edition was:
“The best way to save money is not to lose it.” - Les Williams

One of the posts I found useful was How To Change Your Car’s Engine Oil by Clever Dude. This was something I had briefly contemplated doing ourselves in the past, but after reading this article, I am thinking twice about it. But it gives good step by step instructions as well as tells you what equipment you need in order to change your own oil. Note that you need to change your own oil about 12-15 times before the oil and equipment purchases start paying you back, so if this is something you don’t think you can stick with long term, save by not saving on your own oil changes!

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Yes, I know I’m a little late in the game. Having seen references to Twitter all over the web in recent months, I finally decided to check it out and signed up this past Sunday. Twitter is a great, easy and fun way to interact with people - specifically for me, personal finance bloggers and blog readers.

What is Twitter

Basically, Twitter is a social networking website, but much simpler than Facebook or MySpace. You simply log-in to your account and type in your 140 character (or less) update to tell your friends and family what you are up to, what’s going on in your life, what you are thinking/doing/reading/watching/etc.

You begin by “following” other people - friends, family, classmates, etc. - subscribing to their updates. You interact by typing updates of yourself, and reading and replying to your friends’ updates. Eventually people will start following you. (Read to the end for a list of useful Twitter Tools and Tips.)

How Twitter Relates to Our Fourpence Worth

There is a great network of personal finance bloggers on Twitter. By following them, I can:

• Get to know my fellow personal finance and frugal living bloggers
• Know when new blog posts are published
• Discover new blogs
• Keep up with what other personal finance bloggers are writing about
• Keep abreast of personal finance blogosphere happenings - blog carnivals, group writing projects, blog networks, etc.
• Find interesting things to share with my readers [you]

Follow Me on Twitter!

I’d like to invite you to follow me on Twitter. It’s an easy way for me to get to know you, my readers, find out what’s on your mind, and hopefully be able to make this blog more useful to you by writing about topics that interest you.

My Twitter Page:
http://twitter.com/PenelopePince

Twitter Tools and Tips

Since I”m new at Twittering and these following resources have been useful to me, if you’re new - or even if you’re not new - maybe they’ll be useful to you too.

For Personal Finance Bloggers and Blog Readers

• A list of 118 Twitter Users Who Blog About Money (plus more under Comments)

Graphics

• Cute “Follow me on Twitter” graphics for your site, email signature, online profiles, etc.
• More cute Twitter Graphics and Icons (like the one above)

• Follow me on Twitter badges / logos / buttons (very artsy graphics)

For Bloggers

• Twitterfeed tells your followers about new blog posts using your RSS feed (requires OpenID)
• How to Use Twitter - Tips for Bloggers
• 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers
• 7 Ways to Use Twitter to Promote Your Blog and Build Traffic
  
• The networking benefits of using Twitter
• 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners
• 7 Ways to Use Microblogging Services for Traffic and Brand Exposure

URL Shorteners

Because each Twitter update is limited to 140 characters, you’ll want to use an URL shortener to save space.

• Tweeter Burner ties into your account and allows you to track how the links you share are doing (how many clicks)
• TinyURL seems to be the most commonly used URL shortener

More Twitter Tools & Apps

• Official Twitter Application Downloads Site
  
• Twitter Apps (Official Twitter Blog)
• Twitter Forge - Twittown
• Twitter Tool Box: 60+ Twitter Tools
• Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools!

• Top 21 Twitter Tools and Help Websites

• Twitter Tools 2nd Edition

• Twitter Fan Wiki Apps
• Firefox add-ons for Twitter

Cool Stuff

• Twittervision - Shows you tweets being sent all over the world in real-time (ok, with a slight delay - less than a minute). I like the 3-D globe one that spins. It’s really fun to read all these tweets being sent all over the world in various languages.

Interesting Stuff

• Twitter as News-Wire

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We would like to thank the following Blog Carnivals for featuring our posts.

(This list will be updated to include future inclusions for the month of July 2008.)

Descending chronologically by inclusion date

• July 30, 2008
  Money Hacks Carnival #23 — It’s Gotta Be The Shoes!
  Article: How to Save Gas and Time With Google Maps
• July 28, 2008
  Carnival of Debt Reduction 150: College Tuition Bills
  Article: Resisting the urge to splurge
• July 28, 2008
  Carnival of Personal Finance #163 - “Quotable Quotes”
  Article: How to Save Gas and Time with Google Maps
• July 21, 2008
  The 162nd Carnival of Personal Finance: Baseball edition
  Article: California Fires: Should We Have to Pay for the Choices of Others?
• July 15, 2008
  Festival of Frugality 134
  Article: Booking Flights Early Could End Up Costing More
• July 10, 2008
  Finance Fiesta: No Debt Plan Edition
  Article: Monopoly Game Expansion #4: Personal Credit Card Account
• July 7, 2008
  Festival of Frugality: Bare Necessities Edition
  Article: Economical Pet and Child Safe Ways to Repel and Kill Ants, Spiders and Other Insects
• July 2, 2008
  Money Hacks Carnival #19: The Independence Edition (Editor’s Pick - double thanks!)
  Article: Monopoly Game Expansion #3: Certificate of Deposit

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Happy 5th of July, everyone! I hope you had a nice 4th. We just relaxed at home and ate yummy food (pizza with garlic, olives & feta cheese and Taiwanese style fried chicken, the recipe of which I plan to post here some time soon) and watched the Lost Episodes of the Lucy Show on DVD with our cousin who has never seen the show before. (Mr. Mooney is my favorite.)

It’s been a somewhat hectic and busy month what with 100+ degree weather just about everyday since the beginning of June, car trouble and my messed up sleep schedule. I know my posting has been rather irregular, and I apologize to my regular readers. Our cousins’ 3-month visit is winding to an end - she’ll be leaving on Tuesday July 7th - so we’ll be trying to spend as much time together as possible in the next few days. After that I hope to be able to get back to posting a little more regularly.

That said, the past month has gone quite well for Our Fourpence Worth. Our Money Management Monopoly Game Expansion series has met with pretty good reception in the financial blogosphere, 2 of them having been chosen as Editor’s Picks in recent blog carnivals and quite a few mentions at other blogs. This also means we’ve had to do a lot of test-playing of our expansions, which hasn’t exactly been torturous labor.

I’m also really excited to be slated to host the Festival of Frugality on August 19, 2008 and the Money Hacks Carnival on August 20, 2008. We’ve also received the honor of being included in the Personal Finance category at alltop.com.

OK, now on to our round-up for this month.

PF Bloggers

First of all, I would like to announce that the PF Bloggers network is starting a monthly group writing project wherein each member of our network will be writing about a pre-selected topic on the 15th of each month. Our first topic will be our personal/family financial history and basically what influenced or inspired us to live frugally and/or aspire to financial freedom.

• No Debt Plan gives us 2 reasons we should care about his toothpaste savings.
• Master Your Card posted some amusing things children said about credit cards.
• Future Millionaire shares her reasons for tipping generously.
• Wide Open Wallet tells us why she likes high gas prices.
• Pinching Copper contemplates whether a Costco or Sam’s Club membership is worth the money.

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Hey everyone, sorry for the recent inconsistent posting. The past month as been really busy for me what with having a house guest (a cousin visiting us from Taiwan for 3 months), a trip to Disneyland (with 2 feisty dogs) the week before last and a trip to Las Vegas last week (with one feisty dog), but I am back and ready to get back to some serious blogging and carnival submissions.

Anyways, here are some great posts by fellow financial bloggers from recent weeks:

PF Bloggers

• Living Almost Large gives us an amusing list of ways in which people justify purchases.
• Seb at Pinching Copper gives his opinion that the penny is worthless. Would you pick up a penny from the sidewalk?
• Kevin from No Debt Plan achieved his goal of going the entire month of May without the air conditioner. Good for you guys!
• Jonathan at Master Your Card gives us 7 Zany Ways to Stop Overspending.
• Ginger from Girls Just Wanna Have Funds gave us Things That Piss Me Off: Food stamp recipients pinched by high food prices that has stirred up a bit of controversy.
• And for a bit of fun, check out Future Millionaire’s (Start of Work Week) Money Funny - Cost of Pop Culture Icons Today about the Brady Bunch, which I am only a little embarrassed to admit was one of my favorite shows at one time.

Elesewhere in the Financial Blogosphere

• I really appreciated Get Rich Slowly’s Closing the Gap Between Dreams and Reality. It has inspired me to get proactive about my financial goals.
• Find out how No Credit Needed will save/make $20,000 by giving up his soda habit!
• Something that goes nicely in hand with my recent Vacation Preparation Checklist is a post from Gather Little By Little about Low Cost Summer Family Vacation ideas with money saving tips.
• Frugal Dad gives a nice Used Car Buying Guide for Teenagers for parents, but it has some useful tips for us grown-ups too.
• We’ve recently begun thinking about starting some investments, so I was really glad to come across The Simple Dollar’s warning about how The Methods You Use to Deal with Ordinary Life Will Fail You As an Investor.
• I was amused by Spam Sales on the Rise, Common Sense at an All-Time Low. I thought it was funny because I recently bought a can of Spam, not as a substitute for real, nutritious food (well, OK it did end up substituting for real food for a couple of meals), but for my cousin to try because they don’t have Spam in Taiwan. It was probably the first can of Spam I have ever purchased. (I grew up in Hawaii where they have something called a “Spam Musubi” which is a slice of pan-fried spam layered over a block of rice and all wrapped in seaweed. YUMMY!)

New Carnival in Town

Oh, and one last bit of news. Jonathan from Master Your Card has started a new blog carnival called the Finance Fiesta which runs weekly on Thursday starting June 5, 2008. If you have a personal finance related blog, be sure to submit your best article!

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