A Fine Friday on Vacation

I have been enjoying a vacation this week, where I didn’t relax, I took care of many things, but I also took a planned week off writing for this site, just to see how I felt about not writing. Every once in a while I feel a little run down and feel I am putting out even lower quality drivel than I usually do, but I am happy to say, I did miss writing, so I should be back to a more regular writing routine in the next couple of weeks. The site will be changing a bit as well, as I am getting bored with its current layout, and I don’t feel like I am maximizing my ability to get my messages out (or getting excellent exposure to the over 2600 articles I have already written).

If you have any suggestions for the site, please feel free to drop me a line at ‘bigcajunman @ canajunfinances.com’ (I may not reply right away. That account is inundated with get rick quick and boner pill e-mails). You can also send me tweets at @bigcajunman. I am all over the Social Media thingy.

I did read some of my favourite writers this week, but I won’t point directly to their writing, I’ll be a little more direct with my statements about each site, and why I find the essays interesting to me. I read a veritable cornucopia of sites during my day, as I am a little scatterbrained (i.e. I can’t concentrate on a single subject at a time).

Who am I reading now? It’s easy enough if you look in the right column; you’ll see most of these names, but I’ll elaborate a bit more.

• Michael James is a good friend who I talk with regularly and has given me great advice along the way. If you are not reading his site, and at least using his writings as a baseline to work from, you need to do that, now.
• Preet Banerjee is also a good guy, who I view as a friend, who has forgotten more about investing than I will ever figure out, listen closely to what he is saying on TV and on Radio.
• Larry MacDonald is writing here and there these days, but he may start his own site sometime very soon, and if he does, you should read that as well. Larry is an economist and a writer, who is on the ball.
• Mark Seed from My Own Advisor is a relative newcomer, but from what I can tell a great deal of you have figured out that he is worth reading (and I am green with envy for his readership). Mark brings the Dividend Investing world to light for me, so I find his writings helpful in understanding an area I don’t discuss much.
• Mark Goodfield from the Blunt Bean Counter is another good guy, he has given me personal advice which has helped me out with my dealings with the CRA (about medical expenses and such for my son who is on the Autism Spectrum). I don’t usually have much good to say about accountants, but Mark is the exception to that rule.
• Robb Engen and his Mum (Marie) write a very good set of articles over at Boomer and Echo, which I don’t always mention, but again, you should be reading these articles, and they are now in the business of Financial Advice as well.
• Barry Choi over at Money We Have is still a newbie in the Financial Writing world, but his interesting article about his Financial Advisor here certainly still gets a lot of interesting comments.
• Kerry at Squawkfox is another one who is not writing as much, but that is mostly because she is on many other main stream medias, and she is a busy mom too. Her writings are very eclectic, but still mostly on the money side of things.

These are only a few of the places I wander whilst cruising the Information Superhighway, other less money-related sites also include:

• Popular Science is always interesting for odd scientific information that I wouldn’t realize, had I not checked out their fine site (with no comments).
• I like Lifehacker mostly because it usually has an article a week on something that I go, “I NEED TO KNOW THAT!!”, or a Eureka article, as I call them.
• I have been reading Postsecret for a while, it is an entertaining, interesting, sometimes troubling but never dull set of Secrets published on line.

Reading all of this can be time-consuming, but can be helpful, and maybe save you some money, so have a look at them and maybe subscribe to their mailing lists, RSS feed or one of the other social media presences that most of these folks publish.

My Twitter feed is where I re-tweet many great articles by some of my featured writers (and make the occasional odd or off colour commentary on life (in 140 characters or less)). I am also on reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest and other Social Media sites (look for the BigCajunMan userid) .

This site is iPhone Friendly (and Android , iPod Touch and iPad Friendly), enjoy it on the go, in a readable format for the device. If you are reading with an iPhone or Android device, drop me a comment and tell me if this needs any improvements.