10. The New Frugality posted at Reasonably Rich: Lauren writes about why being frugal is not the same as being a Scrooge.

9. Five Steps Toward Automating Your Way to Wealth posted at Personal Finance By The Book: Joe explains how to put the power of automated savings to work.

8. 5 Reasons to Keep Emergency Funds in an Online Savings Account posted at Money Help For Christians: Craig offers solid reasons why to look online when deciding where to keep your rainy day fund.

7. Final Piece of Credit CARD Act of 2009 Starts and How it Affects You posted at Free From Broke: Craig provides a helpful summary of some of the new rules credit card issuers have to follow and what they mean for you and me.

6. How a Second Income Stream Can Give You Some Financial Security posted at The Digerati Life: Guest author Kevin of 20sMoney.com writes of the benefits of a second stream of income and offers up some good ideas for getting that second stream flowing.

5. Coupons for Lottery Tickets – Seriously? posted at Provident Planning: Paul uses the Pennsylvania Lottery’s whacky idea of providing “big savings” coupons for discounted purchases of lottery tickets as the basis for an informative post on the slim chances of winning the jackpot.

4. Martin Luther King, Jr Had a Dream – Do You? posted at Enemy of Debt: Brad uses the anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to talk about the importance of having a financial dream and what it takes to make challenging, worthy dreams come true.

3. Big Difference Between Average and Median Net Worths posted at Free Money Finance: FMF looks at the true financial state of American households and comes to a frequently stated but important conclusion.

2. What Is #1 Problem Amongst Gen Y? posted at Gen Y Wealth: R.J. offers some great Labor Day advice for people who hate their job that is applicable to the unemployed as well.  There’s some especially good advice about the importance of using your personal network vs. responding to online job postings.

And here’s my pick for this week’s best post.

1. The Power of Progress posted at Canadian Finance Blog: Alan discusses the motivating power of tracking your progress toward the accomplishment of your financial goals.

Thanks to everyone who submitted posts for the Best of Money Carnival. If you’d like to be considered for next week’s carnival at Free Money Finance, simply submit your post to through blog carnival.

Hopefully, this will motive people to break the habit of carrying a balance on their credit cards once and for all.  If you need some help, here are links to a five-part series of articles I wrote detailing a Bible-based, practical approach to getting and staying out of debt (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five).

Key steps for ditching your debt include: stop going any further into debt (if you have credit card debt, stop using your cards); “fix” your payments (note your minimum required payment this month and, at very least, keep paying that amount every month even though your credit card company will likely ask you for a little less each month); and ideally, pay more than the fixed minimum.  You can use this calculator to determine when you’ll be out of debt under various repayment scenarios.

The article’s author advised against the loan.  Many of the people commenting on the article went further, suggesting that the woman’s best move would be to divorce her husband.

While this couple’s story is dramatic, the underlying issues are all too common.  Many couples live separate financial lives.  This can be seen in the results of national surveys finding that 44 percent of married people say it’s okay to keep financial secrets from their spouse, 22 percent say they don’t tell anyone how much they make including their own spouse, and over 60 percent say they do not know when their own spouse plans to retire.

What we have here is not just a failure to communicate, but also a failure among couples to commit to financial oneness.  Married couples are best served by doing the money thing together.  The best way to ensure financial oneness is to use a household budget.  There are two equally important parts to a budget.  The first part is a plan for how household income will be spent, saved, invested, and donated.  The second part is a process for tracking how all household income is actually spent, saved, invested, and donated.

If the couple highlighted in the WalletPop article had a budget in place, they could have kept their separate credit cards while knowing the truth of what was happening with their finances.

What advice would I give the couple?

• Don’t take out the loan.  That will only deal with the symptoms of the problem instead of getting at the cause.
• Stop using credit cards.  They should both do this since the article indicated that the woman also has a propensity to charge up her card.  As I have written before, I believe credit cards can be used responsibly.  But in this case, because of the couple’s age (he’s 59, she’s 62) and amount of debt, they need to be done with credit cards for life.
• Find a great marriage counselor and begin the process of restoring their marriage.
• Seek budget assistance of a trained counselor from Good $ense or Crown, or contact the National Foundation for Credit Counseling and begin a debt management program.
• Create a budget that provides complete financial transparency and helps eliminate all unnecessary spending.
• Sell any unused assets to free up money for debt repayment.
• Seek ways to maximize income for accelerated debt repayment.

It isn’t over for this couple.  With the right attitudes and the right help, this difficult experience could be the catalyst for a forever-improved marriage.

What other advice would you give this couple?

It is commonly thought that, especially when it comes to a card you’ve had for a long time, you should not close the account.  That’s because credit history counts for about 15 percent of your credit score.  Close the account, the thinking goes, and you’ll erase some valuable history.  But not so fast.  According to a helpful story on Money Magazine’s More Money blog, closing an account will not wipe out the account’s history.  A spokesperson for Fair Isaac Corporation, the organization that determines your credit score, explained that after you close an account the credit agencies continue to maintain positive information about the account for about ten years and negative information for about seven years.

However, there is a way that canceling a card may hurt you.  It has to do with what’s known as credit utilization.  That’s the percentage of available credit you are using at any given time.  A lower credit utilization works to your favor.  By closing an account, you will lower your total available credit, which will likely leave you with a higher credit utilization.  If you only use five percent of your available credit at any given time and closing an account will push that to ten percent, you probably don’t have anything to worry about.  Using 10 percent or less of your available credit is ideal; 30 percent is usually seen as okay.

So, when thinking about closing an account, you don’t need to worry about its impact on your credit history.  But you should give some thought to its impact on your credit utilization.