This email is making the rounds. I’m breaking one of my arbitrary rules here, but it’s too good to pass up. And yes, there is a personal finance angle in it.

EDIT: Thanks to an anonymous commenter, the veracity has been proved at Snopes.com. But what does that say about us for wanting to believe it?

NBA OR NFL?

36 have been accused of spousal abuse

7 have been arrested for fraud

19 have been accused of writing bad checks

117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses

3 have done time for assault

71, repeat, 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit

14 have been arrested on drug-related charges

8 have been arrested for shoplifting

21 currently are defendants in lawsuits, and

84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year

Can you guess which organization this is?

NBA or NFL ?

Give up yet? . . .

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JD weighs in on index funds. Read the Dowie article link. It’s absolutely incredible reading. I used to work at the place that brought MPT research to many a CFA at these institutions charging high fees. I think that’s part of the reason why I’m not really crazy about most mutual funds. It’s all the same research. Eventually it’s just one guy picking one investment over another. Might as well be Malkiel’s monkey.

Insureblog on healthcare. Couple that with Kay at Don’t Mess with Taxes with the new Bush healthcare insurance proposal.

English Major does the smackdown on David Bach. For what it’s worth, here’s my old book review in two parts.

Donna Jean is my girl. She also puts the smackdown on multiple carnival submitters.

Bauhaus_sea at Financial Fitness on deciding between a 401K and a Roth. Clearly I should be putting some of my money into a Roth! Right now I put it all into the 401k because it’s too easy to do that. Sounds like I should liquidate a portion of my Save-O-Meter to make a contribution to a Roth.

NPR has two stories this morning about credit card rates and new legislation. Yes, I think there is too easy credit available. But I’m a less is more person and on this one, I am not sure that a new law is needed, more than greater consumer education.

Recently, Madame X shared a story about a high school trip to Greece she sacrificed because she didn’t think her parents could afford it.

Coincidentally, I also had the opportunity to travel to Greece in high school. And this is the story about how I found a way to pay for most of it. This story is super secret. I know of of my high school classmates reads this blog. He will be able to figure out which teacher I wrote about and I ask that he does not comment here about it. No one knows this story. I never tell it, but I think it’s worth telling now since it’s too much of a coincidence what Madame X wrote. Strikes a nerve.

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Jim is letting me guest blog for him today. Check it out!

Welcome readers of Blueprint for Prosperity! Thanks for stopping by!

While you slackers were on your precious little holidays last month, I was working hard, coding some cool stuff for work and reading a lot of blogs.

For you, I present some of the articles I liked best, because I forgot to publish it sooner.

Weight of Money on intentional living. I think this applies to human kindness as well as frugality. Now if I could only stop cussing all the time…

The Simple Dollar outlines the Alexander Hamilton Plan. I tried the Abraham Lincoln Plan for fun, and I couldn’t quite make my numbers work out. For some reason, my version of the Hamilton plan makes me more money at a lower interest rate. Must be something with the compounding.

Get Rich Slowly’s debt payment vs emergency fund debate. The comments and logic are pretty interesting. Where do you weigh in?

Tired but Happy on creating a giving plan with you and your spouse. Probably a wee late for 2006, but something to think about for 2007.

Goals! Goals! Goals! Flexo has good goal setting post if you don’t know how or even why you are making them. He also has a running list of other bloggers and their 2007 goals. Email him with yours.
BostonGal with houseplants that clean your home’s air.

Queercents, with an excellent reprint about money and self-esteem written by one of my first blogroll friends, Nina of Sitting Pretty. I don’t know how they do it, but they have a lot of really interesting interviews with LGBT minor celebrities on personal finance.

Technorati tells me that 50 blogs are linked to me with 99 links. This week will be a very good week for me because I also have a guest blogger post going up soon with a well-known high traffic PF blog.

I don’t have many blog-oriented goals, unlike FMF. But I do like to hit certain milestones. [Hey FMF! Are you going to post 2007 goals?] My goals are fairly casual. I like to keep my traffic growing monthly. I like to get over 150 visitors per day. I like to publish only during the week, etc. Nothing too crazy.

Do you have blog goals?

I got a very interesting email from the CEO of my company this week. No, it wasn’t to congratulate me on a job well done. It was to tell me of a change in policy for 401k matching. They’re calling it the 401k True-Up.

Basically, if you are a front-loader on your 401k plan, i.e. you make contributions to your 401k, and you max out mid-year, you are actually losing some corporate matching funds during the last few months of the year. Your company matches say 50% of the first 5% you contribute, i.e. another 2.5%, but if you front-load your contributions, you will actually lose out on 2.5% on paychecks at the end of the year when you stop contributing. (A saw a comment about this somewhere, but I can’t find it.) EDIT: It was here at IRA!

My company will ‘true-up’ your account by making a lump-sum contribution to your account at the end of the year for the ‘lost’ matching funds if you have front-loaded your account. I think that’s rather nice of them. It’s good to contribute early and often, and it’s nice not to be penalized for putting in your $14K+ into your account in the first 10 months of the year.

Yeah, NO, I’m not contributing the max. But it’s very nice to know that my company is unveiling this new benefit. Sure it’s really for people who are socking away a ton of money, but I could see myself putting 20-23% of my check into my plan, then later stopping contributions when I hit the limit and taking all the extra cash as Christmas money!

Will your company true-up? Is this some crazy cool extra special benefit? Or is my company behind the 8-ball? I think it’s cool and I’m happy for it, even if I’m not going to be able to take advantage of it for a little while yet.

CNN/Money with a story that should surprise no one.

Inculcating teens with a Keeping Up with the Joneses mentality is going to drive us into the ground. It’s not a generational gap, now that I’ve joined the ranks of the untrustworthy over-30 crowd. This is purely about debt and economics. Teen overspending is going to translate into bad habits as adults and possibly ruin us as an economy.

I managed to escape this as a teen by knowing that no amount of spending was going to make me cool at prep school, and that my resources were vastly limited compared to those of my peers with doctor-lawyer mommies and daddies. Yes, I did crave trendy Guess jeans, but I also took my style cue from Molly Ringwald and shopped thrift stores during my free periods wandering the ghetto. I miss my old vintage lace sweaters from Gimbels. I bought them for $2!

Tell kids ‘no’. The boundary setting will be good for them.

EDIT: Sorry, the bad link is fixed!

Trent at The Simple Dollar has the new Festival of Frugality #58 available now.

He’s got a great format up, summarizing each post with a pull quotation.

The articles that caught my eye?

Digerati Life, on the wild ways to save money. I’ll pass on the mushroom one though. High risk. But if you ever get the chance to have fresh wild mushrooms, there is nothing like it. I know someone who often cooks a mushroom dish for us while camping, and yes, it is otherwordly good!

Seriously cheap eats at Campus Grotto. While I earn money to eat better than this, sure, every once in a while, I eat like a college student when I’ve got a life going on. PB&J makes a great high energy fingerfood snack before I go ice skating. I hate oatmeal, but I love polenta. Just get some cornmeal, a little milk and some cheese. You can’t get cheaper than that.

WiseBread echoes my Asian grocery store post. Seriously, ethnic food markets are cheap cheap cheap and fun!

Dang. All three of my picks are about food. Guess who hasn’t had breakfast?

This morning, I was cold. So I grabbed my corporate logo fleece jacket from my old company. Right now, I’m drinking hot water and honey from a corporate logo thermal mug my new company gave me for Christmas.

The jacket was a team-builder for morale. We used to wear them as a group to our company-wide meetings. It was de rigeur for our team. The guys never wore them because they weren’t cold, but put them on the pegs at the office so they’d have them for meetings. The girls wore them all the time.

It sounds silly, but I love getting free stuff from work. Normally I eschew labels and logos because I’m anti-advertising and marketing of the gross consumer variety. And just because someone is sporting the logo, it doesn’t mean they work there. (Unless it’s David Bau on an airline flight, but how could I have known that?)

There is one special unofficial Industrial Light and Magic item that I want. I can’t get it and no, offers of sexual favors didn’t even work. It’s a black Team Sebulba long-sleeve shirt my friend’s team had made when Episode I came out. I was crushed that all manner of cuteness couldn’t get me a shirt.

I also love how my friends will outgeek my dates by wearing a simple Mozilla t-shirt under their dress shirts. The old red monster star peeks out like a Superman logo, adding cred to the geekery since the old star isn’t available anymore.

It sounds dumb, but my favorite pen right now is something my co-workers got from a vendor. It’s heavy, rubberized, with shiny silver lettering. It’s refillable and feels great while you’re writing.

Best place for corporate schwag? I think Pixar. I knew someone who worked there and he had great stuff, hats, fleece jackets, chambray shirts, everything. The on-staff masseuse is probably their best perk though. I’m sure Google has better stuff these days, but I don’t see it first-hand anymore.

Want more schwag? Hit a trade show. Schwag galore. Lots of it will be crappy, but I got a cool Deutsche Telekom pin from the Tour de France’s pre-race marketing parade. I wore that on a baseball cap at work and met a standoffish co-worker with an interest in cycling! Sometimes it really is a conversation starter if you have an unusual piece.

What does your corporate schwag say about you? What items have you received that you absolutely love?