If you’ve read my last post, you’d realize that I’m halfway to Europe by now. I won’t have Internet access while I’m attending my grandmother’s funeral. To make up for the lack of updates, I’ll be reposting some of my more popular articles for my new readers to enjoy. Think of it like your favorite TV show going into reruns, and then it won’t seem so bad.

I’ll be back next Tuesday, so things should be back to normal in about a week. Thanks for your understanding!

My grandmother passed away this Sunday, and for the past few days I’ve been scrambling to get to where she lived so my wife, sister and I can attend her funeral. So, on Monday morning, my wife and I each went our bosses to request time off for bereavement so that we could book our flights to get make the wake on Thursday and funeral on Saturday. “Flights to where?”, you might ask. Amsterdam. My mother’s family is from Holland, and we were forced to buy last minute airfare to Europe.

But that’s not the half of it. My sister is a Peace Corps volunteer in Uganda. If you thought booking last minute flights from the U.S. to Europe might be difficult, don’t even bother booking tickets leaving from Africa. It’s a nightmare.

Sorry everyone for the server downtime. Pinching Copper has been pretty much unreachable for the past two days. Hopefully (fingers crossed), the worst is over. I got a lot of traffic from social networking sites and MSN Smart Spending over the past few days, and my budget hosting account couldn’t handle the load. Not having your site accessible for two days is a huge deal for any website, even if it’s a tiny blog like mine. I guess it might be time to start shopping for a better host, huh?

Thanks everyone for sticking around!

It’s been another great week here at Pinching Copper. I again participated in a some blog carnivals over the the course of the past week:

• No Debt Plan hosted the Carnival of Debt Reduction. No Debt Plan is a great site, and has some terrific articles that are worth checking out!
• The Happy Rock hosted the Carnival of Personal Finance and featured my article Being poor is a state of mind.
• On Financial Success hosted the Festival of Frugality and featured my article Stop buying overpriced cables.

And here are some great reads I came across this past week:

• Master Your Card discovered the 15 traits of the perennially in debt.
• The Social Marginal wrote that you should treat your job like an investment.
• Living Almost Large pondered whether you should downsize.
• Wide Open Wallet wrote a great post on how a person’s sense of entitlement can wreck their finances.

And finally, on a personal note, my grandmother passed away this weekend. We’re still not sure about the funeral arrangements, but I’ll be posting erratically this week since I’ll have to travel to Europe.

I was browsing Yahoo today, and I was appalled at the article that came across their front page. Their featured article was a story on how home sales have slowed to their slowest pace in sixteen years. But that’s not what’s important. Listed below their featured article was an accommpanying article that tried to break down the costs of renting versus buying. At face value, it seemed like good advice. But then I started to look into it, and I realized Yahoo’s advice wasn’t only wrong, but it was financially dangerous.

I know a lot of times when I’m shopping I see a price tag and think to myself “That’s not bad”. If it’s over $100 I’ll probably stop and think about it for a minute and then go ahead and purchase it. In my my mind, $100 dollars isn’t the end of the world. But then I got to thinking, how many hours did I work so I could buy this thing?