This week there were some great carnivals as usual. First there is the where my article about was included. Being the nerd I am I really liked

Next there is In this carnival I wrote about . A couple articles I would like to highlight is and I really love Scrabble and I love how Jim put together his experiences in a game into lessons for personal finance. Soup Parrish is a and he is trying an interesting experiment in retiring on $75,000 in San Francisco. I would like to see how he does.  I have told him that realistically he can’t retire on $75,000 here in the Bay Area, but he has a set of rules that lets him generate other income too.  Check out his blog at

Finally, there is the I like Lynnae’s blog a lot and this week my article about   has been included.  I also really liked this story about by Betsy Teutsch.  It’s pretty true that kids don’t like presents like stocks and bonds because they can’t really play with it.

That’s all for this week!

If I had a nickel for everytime I heard the phrase “if we go IPO…”, I could probably buy a nice video game. I have been working in private companies since I graduated college and everywhere I go engineers are dreaming of their companies going IPO and becoming the next Google. I am sorry to be a party pooper but the fact is that very few companies become public, and even if they do it’s very unlikely that rank and file workerbees like me would become fabulously rich. These are the lessons I have learned about stock options and I would like to list the reasons why most people don’t become rich off them.

More than one person has asked me if I have any holiday shopping tips and so I decided to write an article here since a lot of my friends read this blog anyway. Hopefully these tips will help you save money and cut down your stress.

I come from a fairly small family. Each of my parents has one sister and each family has an only child. So basically I have a total of four uncles and aunts and two first cousins and only one aunt’s family is here in the Bay Area. The holidays usually involves a dinner or two with my aunt’s family and a few other family friends. Now that I am married I suddenly gained at least two dozen or so fairly immediate family members here in the Bay Area. It is kind of interesting and fun to me, but I hear from many people with huge families that the holiday season is the most stressful time of the year. I suppose it makes sense because the more people there are in a family there is more likely to be disagreements. Also, having a big family may be a financial burden if you are supposed to throw a feast and bring everyone gifts.

Even though I have never been to Cleveland I feel like I have some kind of strange connection to it through a few friends. One of my super geeky friends likes to say three things to indicate that something is cool. Those three words are “orange, ninja, and Cleveland”. I guess he got it from the opening song of Drew Carey where they yell “CLEVELAND ROCKS! CLEVELAND ROCKS!”. So sometimes he says “I’m in Cleveland” to mean that he’s awesome. Anyway, two of my other friends from high school are also connected to Cleveland. One of them is actually attending Case Western’s medical school, and the other one grew up in Cleveland. The three of us had a sort of “big head club”, because we all have quite large heads. So imagine my surprise when I read that most of the foreclosures in the . The BBC has also provided a lovely graphic to pinpoint all the German-owned properties:

I am at a loss for words. Though one thing that is clear is that the foreclosure situation in America affects financial institutions all around the world. It makes you wonder, how many other cities are getting owned by foreign banks?

P.S. Cleveland still rocks, because . Californian public schools are in desperate need of such courses too.