Mighty Bargain Hunter

Carnival of Debt Reduction

September 5th, 2005 | by mbhunter |

Haven’t seen this carnival before?

Well, neither have I. And I haven’t found one, to the best of my knowledge.

That’s why I’d like to start it up!!

It takes a lot of guts to post to the world about digging yourself out of debt. Especially if you are posting the dollar amount of your debt. I don’t know if I personally could go so far as to do that. It’s much easier to blog about your finances when they’re going well.

There is a need for people to blog about their debt. And you’re doing it. (You know who you are!)

Debt is a pernicious drain on people’s livelihoods. Recent credit expansion has made it even easier to get a credit card (or two, or ten) or a home equity line of credit, or a car loan, or any other number of consumer debt instruments.

This isn’t just a matter of a few thousand people overspending at Christmas. This is a matter of many millions of people who have dug themselves a huge hole and are starting to get buried alive just with the minimum interest payments on their debt. And those minimums have started to get bigger.

So, for those of you who have the guts to blog about your struggle to get out of debt, thank you very much! You’re doing a great thing for yourselves and for everyone in the blogosphere. I know it’s encouraging to others in debt.

Some of you probably post to the Carnival of Personal Finance and other carnivals like it. Debt reduction is a big enough subject in itself that it deserves its own carnival. I’m confident that, eventually, the Carnival of Debt Reduction will be more than just a subset of the Carnival of Personal Finance, and I also expect that it won’t detract from the Carnival of Personal Finance, as many blogs are featured in more than one carnival each week.

So, to kick off the Carnival of Debt Reduction, I propose that the first one go up on September 19th, 2005 — two weeks from today — and all following carnivals go up weekly after that on Mondays. The two weeks will give a little extra time to set things up, get an official-looking carnival guideline post up, and get some interesting posts and some new hosts for the carnival! I’ll host the first one, and I hope to get enough interested hosts so that I never host again! (I’d much rather have people blogging mostly on debt reduction host the Carnival in the future.)

So, in the meantime, please:

1. Post about the launch of the Carnival of Debt Reduction to get the word out, if you have a blog or other financial website.
2. E-mail me at info AT mightybargainhunter DOT com if you have a POST that you want to contribute to the first Carnival of Debt Reduction. The posts should be directly related to your personal experiences with reducing debt, or advice on how to reduce debt. (Frugal living tips, though they can help one reduce debt, are better posted in Carnival of Personal Finance. I want the focus of the carnival to be pretty tight on debt reduction experiences and advice.)
3. E-mail me at info AT mightybargainhunter DOT com if you want to host. I’ll accept hosts on a first-come, first-served basis, and only after you’ve submitted an acceptable post for a Carnival of Debt Reduction.

Make sense so far?

More to come! Any questions please comment them or e-mail them.

Questions tagged credit-card at Cash Commons:

• Anybody have sucesss with 0% Balance Transfers on Credit Cards?
• When entering credit card information on a website, does the billing address have to be correct?
• Two of my credit cards got hit with fraudulent charges the same day. What gives?