Weekend Link Love And This Week’s Carnival - 4.26.08

Carnival of Personal Finance

My post Invest In The Long Tail: An Amazon.com Case Study was featured in this weeks Carnival of Personal Finance #149 hosted by The Happy Rock.  Here are a few of my favorite posts from this week’s carnival.

Hannah at The Penny Mine writes On Intermediate Goals And Their Importance.  Hannah correctly notes that most people focus on long-term goals to the detriment of intermediate-term goals, such as buying a car in five years or next year’s European vacation.  As it happens, I will be writing about how to go about investing for intermediate-term goals later this week.  Stay tuned.

The Digerati writes about how your appearance can affect your income.  It’s unfair, but true.  Sexy people (like me, of course!  yum) make more money.  I had no idea pec implant surgery cost $7,000.  Wouldn’t it be easier to just do some push-ups?

Feminist Finance blogs about equal pay for women.  What it comes down to is that everybody, men and women alike, need to be more open about discussing pay with each other.  If you have no idea what the average salary for your position actually is, how are you going to know if you’re getting paid what you’re worth?  Employers, of course, are going to try to pay you as little as they can possibly get away with.  It’s your job to be informed and stand up for yourself.  If you don’t push back, you aren’t likely to live up to your full earning potential.  Deliberately keeping yourself in the dark and blindly accepting whatever salary you’re offered gives all the negotiating power to the employer.  This hurts us all, so please, do your part.