Some people are born with an amazing set of pearly whites. No matter how much care, or how little care, they put in… they just have a great smile! I have to say I was not so lucky. I had a lot of dental work done as a young child and into my teens, and am starting to get some work done now as an adult.

Last week I got two of my wisdom teeth taken out and in three weeks I am getting the other two taken out. I knew this was coming up so I made sure to sign up for dental coverage during open enrollment. I had actually elected to not have dental benefits for the two years prior. Now that I look back, I actually regret that decision because I was skipping on some necessary preventive care. Live and learn, right?

After reading through my benefits and going through the process of using my insurance, I thought it would be a good idea to go over the what’s and why’s of dental insurance. I realized health insurance gets a lot of “play” and dental insurance is like the red-headed step child, so here we go!

For those of you that are visiting after reading my post @ Free Money Finance, thanks for stopping by, I appreciate it!

If you were to read through my archives you would find that this is a personal finance blog, obviously. However, I like to consider it “sensible” personal finance. What do I mean by sensible PF? I won’t write about extreme frugality because a lot of those ideas are just too much work for me! Whereas I love reading about extreme frugality it just isn’t my cup of tea. But, I will certainly write about how to get rid of your cable bill or repair your own bicycle since the cost savings could be huge. Those are the kinds of things that interest me. I also post a lot about how to improve the quality of your life. And another thing you will find here that you won’t find on other PF blogs? Every Friday I post an original comic that is created by my girlfriend and relate it to a financial, educational, or career issue.

What is a credit report and what does it contain?

Back in the day, when you applied for credit you would list all of your creditors on the application. The bank or whomever was deciding whether or not to extend you a line of credit would then call all your creditors to verify that you were good for your money. For obvious reasons that was not the most efficient and effective means to verify someone’s credit worthiness. In the 21st century creditors will look at your credit report in order to decide whether or not to extend credit.

A credit report is an “official” record of your credit activities. I say “official” because they are widely accepted as testaments to people’s credit activity but can often times contain mistakes. What do I mean by credit activities? Credit card accounts you hold and any loans you may have as well as the balances and your payment history on all of them. If you are habitually late that obviously looks bad. If you are habitually late and a creditor has had to take action against you that looks horrible!

This is another post from HLR! I said you would be seeing more posts from me, but maybe you didn’t realize you would be seeing them so soon!

After reading MLR’s recent guest post at Frugal Dad “The Three Most Influential Lessons My Parents Taught Me,” I thought about the way my parents viewed responsible finance. For better or worse, I think it’s safe to say that the way that parents teach their kids about money can have a huge impact on their kids’ futures.

Save the Bats

My brother Jon was about seven years old, and he had been learning about bats in his second grade class. He took an extreme liking to the nocturnal creature, and grew increasingly concerned about the fact that six out of forty-five species were labeled as “endangered species.”

This week you can find me in 3 different carnivals:

• Mighty Bargain Hunter hosted the Carnival of Personal Finance and included my article on What to do with all of your extra money?.
• I hosted the Festival of Frugality. I didn’t realize I was going to at first, so I had submitted an article. I decided to go ahead and include it.  The article was: Street Graffiti or Advertisements?.
• Personal Finance Playbook hosted the Money Hacks Carnival and included my article Warning Sign: Are You In Too Much Debt?.

Other articles I enjoyed: