It’s Financial Planning Week.

Here are 20 ways to celebrate courtesy of the Financial Planning Association.

20 Ways to Celebrate Financial Planning Week

* Balance your checkbook
* Make a monetary contribution to your favorite charity
* Start a savings account for a child, vacation or a gift for yourself
* Help teach your children how to save and spend wisely
* Get your estate in order: Create or revise your will and other estate-planning documents
* Call your financial planner and share your appreciation for their service
* Pay off a credit card
* Get a head start on college — investigate college planning options
* Establish an emergency fund
* Evaluate your employee benefits and begin planning for open enrollment
* Develop your holiday spending budget
* Plan for year-end tax strategies
* Purchase a session with a financial planner for a relative, friend or colleague
* Give a relative, friend or colleague a subscription to a personal finance magazine
* Invite a financial planner to speak at your workplace
* Review your insurance coverage
* Write down your financial goals and revisit them periodically
* Start using personal finance software to help you better understand your money
* Look up three financial terms that have baffled you and resolve to understand them
* Talk to a relative about their plans for long-term care

OK. So not as fun as watching new TV shows or taking a walk on fall leaves that make that wonderful, crunchy sound. But much of it is necessary.

The Minnesota chapter has a belated FP-week event next Tuesday. It’s a Health Care Reform forum being held at the Humphrey Institute from 12:30 to 2pm.

Remember the economic stimulus check you received earlier this year? Barely! It feels like a long time ago since I fretted over whether to buy a flat screen TV or save the money. We bought grocery gift cards with $1200, which we’re still using, and frittered away the other $600, probably spending part of it on the new front door we purchased this summer.
It was nice to get the extra cash, but did the stimulus checks really do the job? Hmmm….

The IRS said today that more than 51,000 Minnesotans haven’t filed for their payment yet and the deadline is Oct. 15th.

Details below: (more…)

So…I’ve been thinking all day about what I wanted to blog about and realized the reason for my writer’s block.

I’ve had enough of the financial markets. I’ve had enough of the economic slowdown, enough of being a tightwad. And enough uncertainty.

What can’t I get enough of?

Mad Men. If you have cable, you have no excuse. The characters have plenty of money. Don Draper and Co’s shortfalls lie in other areas. But boy do they look good. And the 1960’s cultural stuff is fascinating.

Eggs Benedict. Is there a more perfect breakfast food? Who has the best hollandaise sauce?

Fail Blog. Speaking of failures, here’s a site dedicated to them that will make you laugh. Thanks to my husband for introducing me to this hilarious, bizarre photo/video blog documenting failures of all types. This is user-generated content, so if you fail to find sometimes juvenile and crude humor amusing, take a pass.

This weather. Played outside with my kids for hours this morning. Like this market nonsense, this too shall pass. So turn off the TV. Drop the financial statement. Enjoy it while you can.

I’ll be at the Star Tribune’s Minnesota State Fair booth from 10 a.m. to noon on Tuesday. Stop by, say “hi.” Grab a free ice cream scoop and share your column ideas. If you don’t, I’ll spend my time telling people where to find the bathroom.

Just as I’m boarding the bus back to downtown Minneapolis, the second episode of the Dollar Duo will be live on Startribune.com. This is the new StribTV show featuring Dollars and Sense Columnist John Ewoldt and I dishing on everything from credit cards to coupon clipping to deal-spotting and more. Being on camera is all new to me, but we’re having a good time and hope you find some useful, money-saving tips in each few-minute video.

This week John and I head to the fair and interview the State Fair’s official banker, stop in at the Department of Commerce booth to speak with a foreclosure prevention counselor. John also gives his take on whether those knives that supposedly cut through aluminum are a good deal.

Like software, credit score technology changes from time to time and a new version is released. Fair Isaac launched FICO 08 recently and the formula included a change that had some users up in arms. In the earlier versions, authorized users such as teenage kids or spouses with no credit history could build a record of responsible credit use by becoming an authorized user on a parent or partner’s card.

FICO did away with allowing authorized user credit accounts to count towards the calculation in the 08 version, citing the emergence of so-called credit score repair companies that claimed to boost a person’s score by unknowingly “piggybacking” on someone else’s good credit.

Well, today Fair Isaac announced that it figured out a way to include authorized users in the credit score calculation “while materially reducing any potential impact to the score from tampering,” according to the press release.

Who will care about this? The estimated 50 million U.S. consumers who are legitimate authorized users on a person’s credit card.

Fair Isaac didn’t provide details about how this new technology will thwart credit doctors while helping Junior develop a credit footprint.