If you can’t get your fill of financial talk, mosey on over to the Carnival of Investing (Monopoly Edition!), Carnival of Debt Reduction, and the Carnival of Personal Finance. Here are a few that stood out:

Looking to learn from someone who’s had some bumps in the road and still has a great attitude about it? Check out BloggingAwayDebt.

Searchlight Crusade has some tips on how to avoid vampire properties. I wish house inspections were done upfront by a third-party and shown to all interested parties. The fee could just be picked up by the eventual home-buyer.

MyPocketChange tries help figure out how long do you need to leave your money in the market? Don’t miss the graphs, they say it all.

My wife and I are both job-hunting, and I’ve been thinking a lot about careers in general. I also recently watched the movie High Fidelity. If you haven’t seen it, there is a scene where John Cusack has a list of his top 5 dream jobs if “qualifications, history, time, and salary were no object.” After going through them, he realizes that he is already doing one of his dream jobs, owning his own record store. So I wondered, what are/were my dream jobs? Here they are, sorted by era, along with why it didn’t work out.

High School – High School Math Teacher
High school was where I first realized that good teachers can change your life by showing the beauty in a subject. Seriously. I also tutored some math and ACT/SAT students, and it was very rewarding. The problem? I was afraid that I would feel more like parent than a teacher, and I don’t have that kind of patience. Also, let’s face it, the pay is horrible.

College – Professor of Physics [at a small liberal arts college].
I still think about this sometimes. I love physics, also in large part to a great teacher. Besides the difficulty in getting the degree, the number of Physics Ph.Ds churned out every year compared to the number of tenure-track positions available is insane. You need to graduate from a top school to even have a chance. On top of that, you would have no power to choose where you lived. If a position opens up, you had better take it!

Corporate Worker – Optometrist
I have to admit, this was a very selfish choice. I was tired of feeling like an under-appreciated worker bee, and I wanted out. Being an optometrist seemed like the best combination of salary, autonomy, and quality of life. I really have no idea what the true life of an optometrist is like. It also would have required a lot more schooling and tuition.

Currently – Own My Own Educational Software Company
See a theme? I think that educational software is going to be a huge field in the future. We need to improve how our children learn. If the government doesn’t support this, then pro-active parents will buy it themselves as a supplement. You already see this in many areas, such as the SATs. I still have a ton to learn before I can achieve this, and my dream job may change in the meantime, but there you go.

So, what’s your dream job? (Pro athlete or big-inheritance aspirations aside.) It’d be especially awesome to hear from people actually doing their dream jobs.

Most of us have heard of GetHuman.com, which offers people directions on navigating phone trees or direct-access phones numbers in order to reach a live person. Now a new service by NoPhoneTrees.com takes this one (small) step further.

After verifying your phone number, the website will call a service provider and navigate the phone tree for you. All you have to do is pick up when they call and you’re already on hold for the operator. I just tried this with one of my Citibank cards and it worked as advertised, saving me an entire 15 seconds 😉 Unfortunately, it doesn’t wait on hold for you and call you when someone actually picks up – I am guessing the lag time would be too great and the customer service rep would probably just hang up. Bummer – that would be cool.

(This is the second in my series of Model Portfolio Comparisons.)

This next portfolio comes from The Boglehead’s Guide To Investing by Larimore, Lindauer, and LeBoeuf. Taylor Larimore and Mel Lindauer are frequent and respected contributors at the Vanguard Diehards Forum. While obviously they are Bogle fans, they do present their own views on things. Four different model portfolios are given, but I will focus only on two of them.

Young Investor Model Portfolio

Asset Allocation for 80% Stocks/20% Bonds
55% Domestic Large Cap Stocks
25% Domestic Mid/Small Cap Stocks
20% Intermediate-Term Bonds

The domestic stock component of 70% Large and 30% Mid/Small Cap is actually how the entire U.S. stock market is broken down on a cap-weighted basis. Thus, you only need one US Total Market fund to cover both.

Investor in Early Retirement Model Portfolio
30% Diversified Domestic Stocks
10% Diversified International Stocks
30% Intermediate-Term Bonds
30% US Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPs

The other two portfolios are for the Middle Aged Investor (30% US Large-Cap, 15% US Mid/Small-Cap, 10% International, 5% REITs, 20% Intermediate-Term Bonds, and 20% TIPs) and the Late Retirement Investor (20% Diversified Domestic, 40% Short/Intermediate-Term Bonds, 40% TIPs).

Overall, another simple but diversified portfolio – easy to build, easy to maintain. The risk profile is adjusted with age, going from more aggressive to less so with time. There is not very much international exposure.

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Here are some posts from other bloggers that caught my eye:

Guzzo the Contrarian writes about Arizona tax lien certificates. I remember these being vaguely mentioned as superior to bank CDs in the Rich Dad, Poor Dad book series. I’m sure these involve more risk, so while I don’t believe that, it would be interesting to see how much these pay in my area.

Madame X shares how she successfully tracks her spending by using a PDA. I found it amusing that her old unsuccessful method is pretty much my current one – buy everything with a credit card, and count all the ATM withdrawals as either food, coffee, or beer. She lists some useful PDA financial software.

Jane Dough brings up the always-controversial subject of engagement rings and has some wise and practical thoughts. You can read my opinion on diamonds here. In short, like everything else in relationships, it all boils down to communication! There is no right or wrong. Every couple should do what’s right for themselves.

Mighty Bargain Hunter counts out 16 ways being disorganized costs you money. I think the main way disorganization costs you money is because it costs you time. Time that could be spent improving your career, executing money-making ideas, or learning more about investing.

If you haven’t been keeping up, the Carnival of Investing has been chugging along, with #55 at Binary Dollar, and #56 at Sun’s Financial Diary. New hosts are always welcome.

Here are some of the posts that I’ve enjoyed reading through recently:

TiredButHappy is getting flack for her used car. Why must we judge? I secretly like the fact that our cars aren’t worth very much, if only to see if people care. Is that weird? I mean, the IRS doesn’t care whether you take bribes, deal drugs, or steal things, as long as you pay income taxes on it. From AllFinancialMatters.

And while you’re figuring out what to do with all those gift cards, why not consider one of these 25 gadgets that may actually save you money at the Simple Dollar? I want a DDR pad. How much does an old PS1 or PS2 go for these days? Anyone want to trade an iPod nano for a setup with game and 2 pads?

Excel can be a very powerful financial tool, and Experiments in Finance has a great series on Excel function tutorials.

Lazy Man and Money hosted this week’s Carnival of Investing. If you’d like to be a future host, please read about the Carnival here.

I’d like to know what topics that you’d like to learn more about, whether it is something personal related to me, or a financial topic in general. Please go ahead and leave an anonymous comment in this post (type in anything for name and e-mail). I won’t publish them, it’ll just be between you and me. I can’t make any promises, but I will take each suggestion into consideration. Thanks!

Okay, this isn’t financially related so feel free to tune out. I was tagged by Steve at AdventureMoney to reveal five things you might not know about me. In response, I submit to you these five tidbits:
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