My favorite personal finance and business sites that I found through stumbleupon last week are included below. These sites either had useful information, were informative, or simply entertaining.

For those unfamiliar with stumbleupon, it sends you to a random website that matches your interests. You can then give that site a thumbs up or down, to influence future suggestions, before moving on to the next site.

If you currently use stumbleupon, or once you give it a try, I’d appreciate a thumbs up if you like this blog.

On to the list:

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All too often we look at things from their monthly cost instead of the larger, more important picture, of total cost. There were times when these were the same thing. Stores once offered payment plans on purchases that effectively amounted to the 0% interest offers of today, without the associated catches. Offers to accept $5 a month until you had paid the full cost of some mail order item graced page after page of newspapers and catalogs in the early 1900s. Once interest, or the potential for retroactive interest (as is often the case in today’s 0% offers), comes into play, the difference between monthly payment and total cost can be quite large.

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My post discussing whether the penny should be eliminated reminded me of the other redheaded stepchild of US currency: The $2 Bill. You may not realize that $2 bills are still in circulation, but I have a friend on a mission to change that perception.

Every time his supply of $2 bills is depleted he goes to the bank and withdraws $100 worth. I didn’t realize that you could do this, but as I said $2 bills are still legal tender so it should be no surprise that banks still have them. My friend doesn’t waste his bills, he just uses them in place of other cash. Using them as a tip is ideal because then he doesn’t have to explain his rationale each time he uses them. He effectively places them blindly into circulation.

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I finally got around to creating my blogroll, which is located on the sidebar below my category list. Rather than just add the blogroll, I thought I’d share my rationale behind adding each of these sites. There are a lot of other good sites out there, many of which I read. I’ll probably add more of them to my blogroll as time goes by, but the ones below mostly have specific reasons for being included.

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In the past, I have advocated building a cash emergency fund. By “cash” I mean a liquid form of money which could be actual currency, but preferably would be savings in a high yield direct bank account. There has been some insightful commentary recently that has caused me to re-evaluate my position and add some justification to it. Of the many posts on the subject, two were my inspiration for this post. In the first one, Mike from four pillars discussed why a HELOC can be used instead of an emergency fund. In the second one, the money gardener explains why he doesn’t need an emergency fund.

In most cases, an emergency fund is really just a method to avoid debt. If a true emergency arose, which exhausted our cash reserves, most of us would just use credit cards, a home equity loan, or a P2P loan. All of those methods are nearly as liquid as cash and easily obtained, with a cost association in the form of interest.

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The Carnival of Everything Finance 15 was released today. My post, Financial Rules of Thumb Stink, was included in this event.

My favorites from the other entries were as follows:

Is “cheap” the new “green”? posted at Early Retirement Extreme
Living frugally doesn’t mean we should buy junk. I’ve noticed a lot of good material coming out of Early Retirement Extreme. The site is definitely worth a look.

6 Reasons to Live and Work in Rural America posted at Cubicle Dropout
I was glad to see telecommuting on this list

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A recent statement by US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has renewed the debate about the existence of the penny. In an interview, he said that the penny is worth less than any other currency and that he’d like to get rid of it. So today I’ll discuss the pros and cons of keeping the penny.

Supporters of the penny suggest that getting rid of it would mean higher prices, as retailers round up to the nearest nickel. Since it’s common for items to be sold for prices ending in .99, rounding to the nearest nickel would cause prices to go up (to the nearest dollar). This argument is countered with arguments that sales tax and multiple item purchases would reduce this effect. This only holds true if totals are rounded, not individual prices. The reason why retailers use .99 pricing is

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As part of his Motivation Monday series, David at MoneyNing spoke out against consistently taking sick days on Mondays and Fridays. His point was that using sick time to create an extended weekend won’t fool anyone, is irresponsible, and may even lead to losing your job.

I usually agree with a lot of the commentary at MoneyNing, but this is one area where we totally disagree. Taking full advantage of all of your time off is a subject that I’ve covered in the past. I wrote a 2 post series on this subject for the Lending Club blog. Here are those posts: Raising Your Hourly Wage and Lack of Vacation

As I said in my Raising Your Hourly Wage post, “I’m not suggesting that you exploit your sick and personal time but rather take full advantage of it when the need arises.” Being sick (or even just tired) is highly subjective. If the weekends wear you out and you need time on Monday to recover or if you

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