Weekly Update 49

February 10th, 2013 | 4 Comments

Busy busy week for both of us again – that will be the story through the beginning of March for me (for my preliminary exam) and until Kyle gets a job for him. This week I got the first draft of my preliminary exam document to my advisor for comment and Kyle inquired about his first postdoctoral position. We also attended an alumni networking event on Saturday but didn’t meet anyone who would be immediately useful for making connections as we aren’t going into industry in the next year or so.

In awesome news this week, my advisor was elected to the National Academy of Engineering! That is an enormous honor befitting his long career and many contributions to his field. Another professor told me about it in the hallway on Thursday morning, and within 2 hours a few other lab members and I had obtained a cake and surprised our advisor with a little celebration with the whole lab! He opened up to us a bit about his early research career and his plans for the future, which was very nice.

We also hosted a viewing party for a basketball game this week, which thankfully went our way. There are still three games I’m really looking forward to this season before the ACC tournament and hopefully we’ll be able to watch over the air or get invites to view all of them.

Posts I Liked

Mike from Personal Finance Beat compared at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff his attitude toward credit cards to that of Dave Ramsey.

Ross from Cash Rebel shares what he learned about his priorities from working on his fraternity’s budget.

Retire By 40 answers the question should you invest in target date funds? We invest in a target date fund and I was encouraged by his answer.

Jake from iHeartBudgets implores us not to say we saved money when all we did was spend less.

Catherine from Plunged in Debt reveals her intention to inflate her lifestyle. Gasp!

David from Money Under 30 explains why he thinks a 50/50 balance between retirement and other savings goals is ideal.

L Bee from L Bee and the Money Tree ponders if an expensive wedding dress is worthwhile.

Mentions

Jake from iHeartBudgets labeled Why We Don’t Do No-Spend Challenges an “awesome” post.

Pauline from Reach Financial Independence listed Why We Don’t Do No-Spend Challenges in her Friday recap.

Christopher from Stumble Forward included Irregular Income: Gravy Edition in his top 10 list.

Carnivals

The Marriage Penalty and Itemizing Taxes was included in The Money Mail Carnival 12th Edition, the Carnival of Taxes, the Wealth Builder Carnival, and the Financial Carnival for Young Adults.

January 2013 Month in Review: Money was included in the Yakezie Carnival and the Festival of Frugality.

Don’t Call Them the Top 20% was featured in the Carnival of Money Pros.

Top Comment

S.B. from Save Invest Give takes an even harder-line stance against no-spend challenges than I did: “From what I’ve seen, most (but perhaps not all) of these no-spending days or weeks are basically smoke and mirrors in my opinion. They always seem like an attempt to feel good about things by moving the purchase days around a little and then focusing on the good days. If your long-term consumption rate doesn’t change, then nothing really happened… Maybe there are some realistic efforts that I haven’t seen.”

If you haven’t checked out my old post on grad students and earned income recently, you really should. It’s my one post that continues to generate comments. The one I received this week from Brad on child tax credits was particularly disheartening.

Most Frequent Commenters