Apologies for not having this up first thing in the morning. There were a lot more submissions to go through than I expected…

Anyway, without further ado, I present the 80th installment of the Carnival of Personal Finance! I’ll be reading through the submissions I haven’t already today and moving the catagories or deleting irrelevant posts. If you find any problems, please contact me.

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JLP over at AllFinancialMatters made an interesting post regarding Monte Carlo simulators and their use in retirement planning. I’ve been looking for some more tools like this (I have a couple of Excel spreadheets but they are hard to use…)  Broadly speaking, Montey Carlo methods are useful for modeling systems with many variables (like retirement planning). It is a bit more realistic way of looking at retirement planning than your standard 8% average return per year method. Check out JLP’s post for more links and info.

Per JLP’s suggestion I downloaded the retirement calculator from Pivot Point Advisors and spent some time with it tonight. It belongs in my Financial Information Resources category so here goes…
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Building wealth is more about the money you keep than the income you generate. Even those with modest incomes can build enormous fortunes as demonstrated by many blog posts, books and articles. A key component to this in most, if not all of these cases is regular investing over time. You don’t need to invent the next great thing since sliced bread or invest in penny stocks with 1,000% returns to get there. Invest regularly and conservatively and put away as much as you can as early as you can. Given enough time and a surprisingly small investment you can generate millions of dollars. It goes without saying that the less money you spend on your every day expenses the more you will have available to invest. (of course you also need the discipline to actually invest - but that is for another post…)

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This is the first post of a series I’ll be doing on government and other public sources of solid financial information. I’ve added a category called Financial Information Resources which will contain all of the posts in the series. I’ll be characterizing and rating the sites based on the type of information they have as well as how valuable I found it to be. So without further delay, my guide to Financial Information Resources:

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