On the Moneyed Midways - March 6, 2009

Welcome to the Friday, March 6, 2009 edition of On the Moneyed Midways, the best place to catch up with the best posts we found in the best of the past week's money and business-related blog carnivals!

One of our favorite carnivals is the Carnival of HR, as it frequently presents very interesting career-oriented posts and because it's typically well done each week. Unfortunately, we're not featuring it this week because it's a total mess. Here, in a nutshell, is what went wrong. This week's host opted to organize the carnival around the theme of March Madness, the annual NCAA college basketball tournament, complete with elimination brackets for readers to select their favorite posts for the week in the matchups selected by the host.

Now, we're not huge fans of themed carnivals, but in good hands, they can work. This week's Carnival of HR doesn't. Why not, you ask? Because readers have absolutely no incentive to click through and read any of the posts contributed by carnival participants for the week. All we're given is the name of their blog. That's it, just the name of their blog. We have absolutely no clue what they might have written about, and because we don't, we don't care. Honestly, why should we bother clicking through?

So we didn't. It's just not worth the time and trouble. And we had the more pressing matter of finding the best posts that the carnival hosts who assembled their week's carnivals thought enough of to provide a description of why we might consider reading them. The best posts we found in the week that was await you below!...

On the Moneyed Midways for March 6, 2009
Carnival	Post	Blog	Comments
Carnival of Debt Reduction	What to Do If You Can't Make Your Car Payments	Car Commentary	If you can't make your car payments, Junior lays out the options for you to consider: Restructure your loan, sell your car (even below its market price), or let it be repossessed.
Carnival of Personal Finance	How We Cut Our Car Insurance Bill in Half	Green Panda Treehouse	The Green Panda describes the steps they took to negotiate better insurance coverage for less than half what they were previously paying.
Carnival of Real Estate	Confusing Past Performance and the Present Situation with Future Planning	Searchlight Crusade	Dan Melson confronts the number one error homebuyers (and investors) make in their judgment and describes what they can do to combat it.
Carnival of Taxes	Tax Credits Sound Good, But…	The Iconoclast Investor	Mike Cintolo likes the idea of tax credits, but really dislikes the income level phaseouts that widen the gap between risk-taking and reward for the highest economic growth generating people.
Carnival of the Capitalists	All Customers Are Liars	IttyBiz	Naomi Dunford has had it up to *here* with anti-marketing hypocrisy, and delivers a rant that's Absolutely essential reading!
Carnival of Trust	Are "Trustworthiness" and "Integrity" Bogus Concepts?	Romance & Love	The Best Post of the Week, Anywhere! John Alanis wonders if predictability is something that matters more than trust and integrity in relationships.
Festival of Frugality	Should We Downsize?	My Dollar Plan	Madison DuPaix and her husband have scaled back and find that they just aren't missing the trappings that they used to be willing to chase so hard to catch.
Money Hacks Carnival	A Small But Significant Shift in the Housing Market	Really Better Real Estate	Joe Manausa tracks the Sales Success Trend (the ratio of New Sales to New Listings) and notices that his distressed home market of Tallahassee, Florida seems to be showing signs of life.

Previous Editions

• OMM's Running Index for 2008
  
• OMM's Running Index for 2007
  
• The Best Blogs Found in 2006 (and our full 2006 index)!