It has been a little while since I have done a regular weekly round-up, and it’s something I’m keen to get back into doing. There is so much good (or fun – it IS the weekend!) information out there on this magical interweb thingy, that finding the gold nuggets can be more time consuming than it is worth. So allow me, dear reader, to begin again and take the hard work out of your knowledge quest!

Other UK Personal Finance Blogs

• Lazy Investing with HSBC’s World Index Portfolio at Monevator
• I’ve Won The Lottery! at Objective Wealth
• Facebook Friends Can Make You Poor at The Psy-Fi Blog
• How Low Can You Go? at H£lp M£ to Sav£
• Why We Should Pay For Water at This Is Money

International Blogs

• Top 10 Tips for Better Deals at Charity Shops at Budgets are Sexy
• Early Retirement and Risk at Financial Samurai
• Don’t be TOO good at your job at Five Cent Nickel
• 80-20 Your Career (at odds with Five Cent Nickel!) at Free Money Finance
• Are You a Workaholic at The Digerati Life

This Week on Five Pence Piece

• Celebrating 100 Posts!
• Reclaiming Mis-Sold PPI 3 Part Series
• What is & Why You Need an Emergency Fund

Have a great weekend!

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Way back in August 2009, I started Five Pence Piece.

I didn’t really know where it would go, but I knew I enjoyed writing and that talking about my debt at the time would help me stay focused on getting rid of it. Stay focused I did, and get rid of it I did. But what Five Pence Piece turned into was more than I could have imagined.

I kept on writing, about topics I found interesting, that some folks struggle to understand, or just simply “don’t get”. In the UK we still have no education at statutory level on personal finance and I think that a crying shame. It is one of the many reasons people in the UK and across the world have difficulty managing their finances.

So I thought I’d dig back into my archives and pull out some of my favourite, or most useful timeless pieces and hope you’ll join me on a trip down memory lane!

2009

• Five Pence Piece is born! (First Post)
• My Financial Meltdown (4-Part Series on how Five Pence Piece came to be)
• The Importance of Redundancy Planning (A quick look at why, and how)
• Chasing Saving Rates (how to get free money!)
• Could You Live on Half Your Income? (right now. Could you do it?)
• My 10 Economic Predictions for 2010/11 (doomsday cometh!)
• The Psychology of Debt (honestly one of my favourite pieces ever written)
• Notices of Disassociation (what they are, how to use them)
• Personal Recessions (it doesn’t have to be country-wide to affect you)
• The SCRAM Plan (for when your finances go nuclear)
• A Guide To: ISAs (cutting through the jargon of ISA accounts)

2010/11

A lot happened in my life in 2010/11, and Five Pence Piece took a temporary back burner. Right at the beginning of that year I became debt free (woo!), and my divorce finally came through (woo!), but I also started working a heck of a lot of additional shifts due to various happenings at work, and in my personal life.

There was one particularly useful post though, and that was where I examined two savings products:

• Cash ISA’s versus Regular Savings Accounts

2012

This year I’ve really started to get back into blogging and found the passion I had in 2009 all over again. It’s a great feeling when totally random people rock up at my virtual front door and share a comment, or ask a question or point me towards an opposing view on something I have written about.

So for my 3.5 month 2012 round up I present:

• 10/10 for my 2010/11 Predictions (reviewing my predictions from 2009!)
• Are YOU Saving Enough? (a look at how much is enough)
• Fighting Benefit Fraudsters (and getting nowhere)
• Reclaim Mis-Sold PPI – Totally Free (3 part series, with interview)
• How to Survive a Petrol Strike (8 tips to make fuel go further)
• Emergency Funds (what they are, why you need one)

Ongoing Series

Some information is so invaluable – based on search terms, content and comments – that it deserves its own landing page. One of those is my Dig Yourself Out of Debt series, a 5-parter that looks at every aspect of identifying your debts, dealing with them, and tidying up afterwards.

Another is the open-ended ‘Frugal Friday!‘ series, where on a Friday I’ll post about frugality and how you can painlessly shave money off your budget. I’m not talking about the ‘making your own laundry soap’ level of money-saving, but practical stuff like cutting your electricity bills,  20 ways to cut your annual vehicle costs and batch cooking.

What was your favourite post? Come share in the comments!

I am currently on leave from work for a few days trying to recover from the immense amount of overtime I have been putting in the last few months. It only worked out 3 days of annual leave and 3 ‘days off’, but the thought of 6 days being able to sit around, chill out, work on the blog and generally recover seemed extremely enticing.

I very rarely get ill. In fact I find myself at the first signs of an illness saying to myself “you don’t have time to be ill. Get to work!”, and it goes away.

I went to bed last night quite early, feeling slightly under the weather and I woke up this ‘morning’ at 2pm with a very thick head, headache, bodily aches and pains and generally, I fear, suffering from man flu!

Our bodies can only handle so much for so long before they demand some tender loving care. I wonder if the Hepatitis B vaccination booster I had yesterday has anything to do with it?

My Favourite Posts This Week

• Tax Avoidance Versus Tax Evasion – Monevator
• Britain Now Less Financially Stable than Nigeria – Money Watch
• Savers v. Spenders: Opposites Attract? – Five Cent Nickel
• Fifteen Things More Important Than Money – The Simple Dollar

The Best Illness Blog Post This Week

• 7 Cheap & Natural Ways to Fight Colds and Flu – Wise Bread

Have a great weekend!