An Empowered Roundup

I’d like to start this week’s roundup by welcoming a new financial blogger to the blogosphere. Stephanie Halligan recently launched The Empowered Dollar, “Saving kids from financial disaster, one conversation at a time.” She graduated College with some serious student loan debt and her posts offer advice to those entering college as well as new grads. Finance isn’t one-size-fits-all, and there’s room for a blog that’s targeted to help the audience Stephanie is trying to help. Welcome to the PF blogging world, Steph.

Evan at My Journey To Millions shared June 2012 Net Worth Update My First Negative Month! and a Housing Update.  With the Dow down 6% in May, it’s no surprise Evan saw a drop as well, but with his strong savings, he was only down 1/2%, not bad. I track the S&P and haven’t yet calculated the carnage.

At Girls Just Wanna Have Funds, Ginger explains Soft Credit Pull vs. Hard Credit Pull: How Do They Affect My Credit? I’ve written quite a bit on credit scoring and how I use Credit Karma to track my score, but I’ve not gone into detail on soft vs hard pulls of your report. Great reading, Ginger.

Bible Money Matters hosted David Bakke’s guest post Why You Should Know The Operating Expenses Of Your Employer-Based 401(k) Plan. I could not agree more. Some 401(k) accounts sport fees so high the tax benefit is wiped out over the years by those fees. The new disclosure rules are due to go into effect soon. We’ll see the fallout soon after.

Darrow Kirkpatrick Guest Posted at Lazy Man and Money with The 80/20 Way to Early Retirement. Darrow explains, “The 80/20 rule is about causes and effects: it tells us that just 20 percent of the effort in any endeavor produces 80 percent of the results.” He then goes on to show how this important rule can be applied to how you invest for retirement.

Let’s wrap up this week with the Mighty Bargain Hunter’s A neat way to see the interest you save by paying extra principal. I don’t want to ruin his punchline, let’s just say he gives a great visual way to see how prepaying puts you ahead. A simple idea, but it explains an awful lot about how mortgages and amortization works, nice post.