Friday, February 1, 2008

Friday Roundup: Stickk, Grinnell, and Credit Card Denial

Sorry for the lack of a posting yesterday. I thought I would do a Friday round up of some updates to previous stories.

The website Stickk.com is now functional (see previous post). The premise of the website is you put up some amount of money, which you lose if you do not complete your goal (losing weight, quit smoking, or grow a pony tail) So perhaps to make sure I do not miss another day of posting I should take a contract out on myself to post on my blog.

I have also been writing a lot about Grinnell College's endowment. This has lead to being interviewed by the Des Moines Register and a nice e-mail from Mickey Munley, Grinnell’s VP of College and Alumni Relations. Mickey Munley wanted me and my blog readers to know that Grinnell and other Posse host institution fund the full tuition scholarship for the Posse Program. Currently, Grinnell hosts about 80 Posse students from two different cities. I applaud Grinnell’s efforts and will try to applaud them more with my check book.

Finally, I have been trying to think of ways I can tie this blog into the personal finance blogosphere. Its hard linking personal finance decisions and economics, because people make personal finance decisions with incomplete information and sometimes non-rationally. This was driven home, when I read a recent article in Salon about a woman who did not even know what her credit card debt was until her card was maxed out. Her story is all too common, how do we as economist take that into account is a difficult question.

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