We’re back, friends! If you’ve been following Earn Give Save for any amount of time, you know that we’ve been on a little bit of a hiatus.  We really don’t want to make any excuses, but we just got a little burned out trying to keep up with posting 3-4 times per week while having both of our full-time jobs.  Don’t worry, we’re not giving up on our little baby here, we just needed some time off!  And what better way to resume than with you guys doing the work for us!  Just kidding — we’re thankful for all of your submissions, and without further ado, here we go with Carnival of Money Stories #51 — enjoy!

What a great weekend for our beloved Hope College!  The Flying Dutch women’s basketball team has advanced to the Division III Final Four, to be hosted at Illinois Wesleyan University next Friday and Saturday.  They made it through with a couple of squeakers, and will face some pretty good competition next weekend.  We’ll be cheering them on remotely, with live streams of the games to be available for the amazing world wide web.

Right now, let’s take a look at some of the personal finance content that caught our eyes this week:

• Joe at Christian PF offers Premarital Financial Counseling: Questions To Ask, one of the most thorough posts we’ve encountered on the subject.
• Jonathan at BillShrink mentions 12 Tax Breaks You Didn’t Take Advantage of in 2009.  As the first commentator mentioned, TurboTax and other software would prompt you on these things, but it’s nice to keep them in mind for next year.
• Robert at Debt Free Adventure suggests the truth about Vacation Planning – Better memories are not bought with more dollars! We’ll keep this in mind as we start to plan for a trip in early 2011.
• Just as warmer weather hit our area this week, Chris at Money Crashers suggested Five Ways To Have Free Fun This Spring.
• April at Get Rich Slowly offers advice on Resisting the Time Suck.  Really important as you evaluate the role that Facebook, Twitter, et al play in your life.
• Finally, and not totally related (or unrelated) to the topic of personal finance, Seth Godin presents his thoughts on The hidden power of a gift.  Cool thoughts on an important topic.

Yesterday we took a day off from posting after a crazy week of activities!

• Monday night was Hope’s annual Musical Showcase at DeVos Performance Hall in Grand Rapids.  It’s become an annual date night for us, with a nice dinner out (using Restaurant.com, of course) and then the concert.  It was great!
• On Wednesday night, Andrew and Hope student bloggers hosted the first ever live video chat for students considering Hope College for this fall.
• Thursday night was the beginning of our major home improvement project for 2010 — more on that to come in a post in the near future.

However, our busy week didn’t keep us from reading!  Here’s what we were taking a look at this week:

This one’s been in our queue for a while now, from daveramsey.com: 10 Things You Wish You Knew in College, great advice that they picked up from asking the question on Facebook and Twitter.

Shannon from Hidden Abundance, guest posting on Christian PF, suggests some Savvy Ways to Save while Shopping.

Sally from Money Crashers has some ideas on How to Go on Dates for Less.  On our first date, we went out lunch — it was fairly inexpensive and Andrew paid the bill.  On our second date, we went out to lunch again — it was even less expensive, and so as not to set a precedent, Andrew suggested that we go Dutch.

Jacques from The Smarter Wallet shares 5 Career Planning Tips For College Graduates.  Our biggest suggestion?  Continually remind yourself that just because your parents have something, doesn’t mean that you are immediately entitled to it as well.  You have your whole life to work toward what they have.

Along somewhat similar lines, The Debt Hawk offers his or her Top 10 Tips for Graduating College With Little Debt.  The main takeaway here is to live simply while in college.

Jason at One Money Design features a review of Mvelopes Personal Budgeting Software.

Stew over at Gather Little By Little asks the question, “Why go to bed early?“.  We also agree with the idea of not having a TV in our bedroom — it’s just another opportunity to stay up late watching TV just for the sake of watching.

Kelly at Consumerism Commentary has some great ideas on Unexpected Income: What Should You Do With a Windfall?.  Sometimes turning it into fun money is a good idea!

And finally, Craig at Money Help for Christians asks, “Short Term Mission Trips: Worth The Cost?“.  We’ll have to share a little bit about our mission trip experiences, some fairly expensive, in a later post.

That’s all for now — have a great weekend!

Wow, February just flew right on by, didn’t it?

Sure did.  And as we look to the outside, we see snow melting on the sidewalk, a sure sign that March has come, and that spring is [supposedly] just several weeks away.  Even so, let us take a look back at the month that was February 2010:

We started the month by taking a look at how Jules and I close our budget at the end of each month, including a new feature whereby we have been planning for major purchases in the future using a savings scoreboard.  Apple had recently announced a new product, and we digressed briefly to share thoughts and reactions to Apple’s iPad.  Soon after that we encountered a situation that, in a sense, forced us to blow our budget in the “dining” category.

I opened my first Roth IRA this past month, and Julie shared her latest grocery-buying-power sentiment, “i Heart Aldi’s.”  It was off to the movies for a review of the documentary “Maxed Out”, as we continued to get good use out of our Roku/Netflix setup for replacing cable TV.  We also took a look at the Dave Ramsey approach to purchasing a vehicle, which had been prompted by some nice discussion we had observed on Facebook.

In the final week of February, we examined this year’s process for filing our taxes, and with saving on the brain, we shared some thoughts on replacing the age old garage sale with one hosted by Amazon.  And finally, the shortest month of the year concluded with the shortest purchase of the year, that is, one that never actually happened.

And by far, the most popular post of February 2010 was our review of a great site called Alice, which allows the user to order household and grocery items for home delivery with free shipping.  We just made our second order of the year!

Seems like just yesterday (or about a month ago) that we were getting set for the latest rivalry games between Hope and Calvin.  Today will be a renewal of that rivalry as both the men’s and women’s teams do battle in the MIAA tournament championships.  It should be a great day of Hope basketball, that’s to be sure.  Do you have a similar rivalry in your home area?  Let us know in a comment below!

So that’s coming up later today.  Now, have a look at what we’ve been reading this week in personal finance:

WC, a guest poster on Get Rich Slowly, shares the narrative “What Marriage Has Taught Me About Money.”  We don’t totally agree with WC or JD when it comes to the first point, “There is no I.”  For us, marriage meant that our finances do come together as one, but it’s not a chore as the writer seems to describe it.  We consider ourselves equal partners in the process of being good stewards of resources we’ve been blessed with by God.

Along the same lines, Jason from One Money Design shares 10 Smart Personal Finance Tips Before You Get Married.

PF Journey is a new blog to us this week, and Lakita gives us this great post — Cutting Cable Saved Over $70 per Month.  One of our favorite topics, as you can read here and here.

Flexo at Consumerism Commentary previews the new Quicken Essentials for Mac.  Walt Mossberg’s full review is available from All Things Digital.  Sounds like it just doesn’t get the job done — hopefully, Intuit’s acquisition of Mint means that much of Mint’s goodness will make its way into the desktop software.  For $70, though, we’re not going for the upgrade just yet.

It was hard to decide which Money Crashers posts to include this week, so our advice is to take a look at each of these:

• How to Get Cheaper Entertainment Without a Cable Subscription
• How to Spend Less on Music Downloads
• Set a Budget for “Hobby” Expenses
• 3 Ways To Build Wealth At An Early Age

Mike from Gather Little by Little takes a look at the Pros and Cons of Using Prepaid Debit Cards.  We just got one of these as a perk from upgrading our internet service with AT&T U-verse — interesting concept, and we like the idea of using them for gifts or kids’ commissions for doing chores.

And finally, Jason from Automatic Finances (another new blog to us this week) provides his take on a major debate, “What’s More Important: An Emergency Fund or Being Debt Free?“.  We tend to agree with Ramsey on this one — small emergency fund, pay off debt quickly, build up to a larger emergency fund.

Another weekend is here again, and we had the fortunate opportunity to spend a few days away during the past week!  We headed up to frozen Elk Lake (near Traverse City, Michigan) and spent the week cross-country skiing, drinking tons of coffee, eating much cake, and watching every possible minute of the Winter Olympics   It’s good to be home, though, and we’re excited to bring you our favorite articles from this week in personal finance (and maybe some other stuff, too).  Enjoy!

** Craig at Money Help for Christians includes selected posts from Earn Give Save with Christian Personal Finance Blogs | January Highlights.  Thanks for including us, Craig! **

Amanda at My Dollar Plan shares 9 Tips to Stretch the Life of Common Household Items.  The laptop battery point is particularly important, as they are usually crazy expensive to replace.

Jim over on Bargaineering provides a TurboTax Tax Year 2009 Review.  We find this one pertinent because we’ll be knocking out the ‘ol income taxes this very weekend.  Looks like TurboTax continues to be a reliable product.

Jason at One Money Design asks, Income Tax Refund: Is It Good or Bad?.  Jason is responding here to another post over at Christian PF.  This is a perennial conversation, to be sure.  We’ll add our two cents in a post coming up this week!

Five Cent Nickel provides the encouragement to Re-Evaluate Your Recurring Expenses.  Sounds like a solid monthly plan to us — we find ourselves doing this each month just by virtue of having a meeting about it.

Redeeming Riches shares some good thoughts on Overcoming Anxiety – How Worry Reveals What We Worship.  Always a good reminder about what really matters.

Linda at Christian PF brings us her first review of taking the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University class.  We’re excited to read the week-by-week review of the class, as we’ve thought about taking it at some point.