Worth Mentioning #13 – Election Edition

For those of you that have been living under a rock (or not in a swing state like the PoPs), it might have been easy to forget about the quadrennial ridiculousness that has become the U.S. Presidential election.  Yet, in a swing state like Florida where hundreds of millions of dollars - that’s eight zeros – have been spent in advertising, it’s difficult to miss.

A Duplex Divided 2012

Nowhere is this more evident than at our lovely duplex.  Mr. PoP went to go collect rent this week and found competing lawn signs for the presidential candidates.  For what it’s worth, the Romney tenants had yet to bring their garbage cans in from the morning, but then again the Obama tenants overslept and missed paying their rent on time by a day.  If we’re going to judge presidential candidates by those that advertise on their behalf, looks like both of the main candidates have their flaws in this case.

But I’m pretty sick of it all.  And so are a lot of people in swing states and horrible over-saturated ad markets.  A friend of mine in the DC area (which gets combined with the Virginia swing-state ad market) actually went so far as to say, “You know it’s bad when a catastrophic storm brings you relief, as it shifted the news away from the election.”

I wasn’t grateful for Hurricane Sandy, but I definitely sympathize with little 4-year-old Abby (in the video below) who has been so overwhelmed with listening to NPR coverage of the election that she broke down in tears because she’s just so ”tired of Bronco Bama and Mitt Romney.”  I know, Abby.  Me too.

Hopefully by this time next week it’ll all have faded into a distant memory and we can eagerly await the beginning of the 2016 presidential campaigns – whaddya think, the first 2016 presidential exploratory committees will be announced by January 2013?

But on to the important business of the weekend – PoP expressions of gratitude.

Love From Others

• Elle over at Couple Money included Planting Our Pennies in her PF Blogger Interview Series.  Head over to Planting Our Pennies Interview and check it out!
• Mr CBB from Canadian Budget Binder and Pauline from Reach Financial Independence included our post from last week The Joneses? Never Met Em… in their weekend roundups which you can find at Mr. CBB’s Weekly Blog Picks And RFI’s Friday Recap 6.
• Our post on Income Inequality in Relationships was pretty popular with readers, garnering the most comments of any post on our site so far.  And Kim at Eyes on the Dollar and The Frugal Path showed some love in their posts Can’t Take Eyes Off Of These #12 and Friday’s Fork In the Path.
• Funny About Money likes the bar graphs that we use to break up our Balance Sheet/Net Worth Calculations and was kind enough to point our PoP Balance Sheet October 2012 out to her blog followers in Busy Days Upcoming.
• Dave at 6400 Personal Finance has started a series on how to Learn to Invest Successfully and pointed out that the PoPs do series posts pretty well.  He kindly linked to our series How We Bought A $50K Duplex.
• And Make Love Not Debt included one of our tweets in their weekly Favorite Tweets list.

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to read and link back this week!

Love For Others

On the outgoing side of the love this week, there were quite a few posts that I found insightful in one way or another, but here are just a few.

• Pauline at Reach Financial Independence wrote about Breeding Cattle As An Investment.  Someone she knew in the cattle biz in Central America offered her a hundred or so head of cattle as an investment, and she went for it.  Looks like knowing an insider gave her a big leg up in this operation, but it’s interesting to consider even though I don’t think I could ever raise animals for slaughter.  (There was a reason I did the baking competitions in 4H and not the animal raising ones.)
• Rebecca at Doggone Thrifty reminds us to Appreciate the Simple Life when she gives a quick update on their Hurricane Sandy experience and how you can talk the “simple life” talk, but when it comes right down to it, they like electricity – a lot.  We’re glad their family and their home are all fine and it sounds like they used the forced simplicity of multiple days without electricity to spend quality family time together.  Can’t think of a better way to use those days.
• Ginna at My Pretty Pennies concluded her 31 Days to Financial Freedom Series.  She posted a new tip every day for 31 days and then organized them into one complete resource.  Posting that many days consecutively is an accomplishment.  Well done, Ginna!
• In a guest post at 20s Finances, Dominique Brown of Insider Real Estate Tips writes about 6 Expensive Things Every Homeowner Should Prepare For.  He’s absolutely right on each one of them, though I would even go so far as to say he under-estimated costs on some depending what area of the country you live in.  The increases in RE taxes and insurance that we’ve faced and had to fight against have been bigger than the numbers he’s quoting and we live in a quite modest home in the grand scheme of things.
• And the non-finance related item for the week goes to This American Life.  The episode this week is called Red State Blue State, and has nothing to do with the Dr. Seuss book (Red Fish Blue Fish) – but everything to do with how we talk to people who have different political beliefs than we do.  What I caught in between errands on Saturday intrigued me, made me a little sad, and also a little hopeful about the potential for future civilized discourse in our country.  I’ll be listening to the rest of this while I do my chores on Sunday.  What will you listen to?