linklings: hunk of burning blogging edition

If it got any hotter around here we’d be cooking Brip Blap au jus every time I started sweating outside. Here are a few great links to tide you over during the dog days of summer:

Show Them You Care With a Spousal IRA Contribution over at Money Smart Life:  an excellent reminder that your stay-at-home spouse doesn’t have to stop contributing to an IRA.

7 mistakes I made when I went to college at Moolanomy:  I made a few of these although I wouldn’t say I completely botched all of them.  I had a really good college experience by and large, but this would be a good list for someone starting out.  My main regret was that I spent a lot of time with my fraternity that I could have better spent on other social activities.

MSN has a couple of good articles on the recent market meltdown here and here.  I can’t say that much of this surprises me.  I’m a bit of a contrarian regarding the market.  I am sticking with my 30/30/30/10 allocation of domestic index funds/foreign index funds/bond funds/miscellaneous (REIT funds, etc.).  I’ve lost more than I would anticipate due to the foreign markets’ reaction to the US meltdown, but in general I’m not going to invest more or less.  I’m going to hope that the dividend reinvestment clips along on a regular basis and balances everything out over time.

Problogger has a good post about reviewing site statistics.  It seems to me that my personal-finance-related posts do fairly well in terms of stats (such as this one and this one), and some of the more “personal” posts such as this one and this one aren’t searched for or read or commented nearly as much.  I’ll think about where I’m going with that.  I think a lot about narrowing the focus, but I enjoy writing on multiple topics, too.  I’m also considering launching a tea blog – is that a good idea?  It’s been interesting to me to see how the narrowing of focus over at Four Pillars this week onto baby-related finance questions seems to have really driven some good conversation.