Worth Mentioning #3 – Hurricane Edition

We’re in Hurricane Isaac’s cone, so this is officially the first big test of self-insuring our pool and cage. Let’s hope we don’t have a direct hit and that Isaac stays a nice CAT 1 or even smaller as it passes us in the Gulf of Mexico.

People get so weird about hurricanes… Because there’s so much time to prepare for them there ends up being a mixture of enjoying the excitement and the possibility of having the office closed for a day, mixed with the dread of knowing that there is a real possibility that we can have power outages for extended periods of time, or that a direct hit by a powerful storm can be extremely destructive and deadly. Isaac is mild enough so far that there are no calls to evacuate around here yet, however this storm seems particularly timely because South Florida residents are also acutely aware that this week was the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew, a category 5 storm which devastated the city of Homestead, Florida in 1992. Almost 250,000 (that’s a quarter million people!) were left homeless after Andrew. Take a listen to this piece I heard on NPR this morning to get some idea of what these MASSIVE storms can do.

Moving on from that positive note…

Love From Others

We did get some fabulous love from others around the interwebs this week.

• TB at Blue Collar Workman included our post Red On Yellow, Kill A Fellow in the Yakezie Lifestyle Carnival.
• The Wealth Artisan included Being A Landlord in the Wealth Artisan Carnival.
• When It Makes Cents to Pay More was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance by Eric at NarrowBridge Finance, and by Bog of Debt in Friday Link Loving!
• Funny About Money thought we started an interesting conversation on Opposing Approaches to Budgeting, and continued the discussion about Staying on Budget
• 6400 Personal Finance included us in the Carnival of Financial Discipline… I’m a pretty literal person, so don’t always pick up on sarcasm over the internet, but our post on Why Zillow Sucks might have been the only real estate post he didn’t make fun of… Thanks… I think?
• And finally JB at Young And Thrifty included Meeting Our Personal Banker in this Weekend’s Ramblings.

 

Love For Others

It was hard not to notice the Life Insurance Movement initiated by Jeff Rose at Good Financial Cents this week. Apparently over 140 bloggers took part and posted about life insurance to create awareness on the topic. While we didn’t read all 140+ posts, here are two of my favorites.

• Greg at Club Thrifty wrote The Necessity of Life Insurance: A Mortician’s View, where he described how his job as a funeral director gives him a unique perspective on the passage from life to death and how he’s prepared for the eventuality with his family.
• iHeartBudgets got a bit more personal and told us of the untimely death of his father when he was just 5 years old and how grateful he was that his father had the forethought to purchase life insurance to help support his family in case of such a tragedy. Also – a side note from Mrs. PoP – yet another example that skin cancer is no joke. Wear sunscreen, stay out of the sun in peak hours, and get moles checked. Skin cancer should be one of the easiest cancers to prevent.

 

That’s all we’ve got for now – gotta finish getting ready for this storm!