Welcome to the Halloween edition of the MomVesting links round-up. Here are some of our favorite finance stories of the last week as well as a recap of the subjects we discussed and some blog carnivals in which we participated. We also wanted to take this time to thank all the bloggers in the personal finance blog-o-sphere for the warm welcome.

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I have a very vivid memory of my twin girls' last birthday party.  You gotta picture it: our modest ranch home packed with close friends and family, balloons galore, pizza, wings, a Caillou cake (which is a story in and of itself!), and about a gazillion presents.  When it came time to open all of those glorious, glittery, girly packages, my gals could hardly contain their joy.  Gleefully, they tore into the presents, tissue and ribbons flying.

In fourth grade, a banker came to my classroom to teach my class about compound interest. I was fascinated. First, I was shocked that a bank would pay me money to keep it safe, and second, I loved learning how I could make more money if my interest was compounded.  I memorized every single thing that would be on our compound interest test, and I did really well.  My mom even hung my A+ test on the refrigerator for a few days. 

The second part in our series on The Right Questions to Ask About Stocks takes a look at the price to earnings ratio, or P/E ratio. As you might expect the P/E ratio helps us determine the relationship between a company's price and its earnings. In a very real sense it tells us how much we're paying per dollar of earnings the company makes. This can help give us a base line to start researching a stock.

When it comes to investing, we're all a little like Adam Sandler's character in "The Wedding Singer," who said, "I'm a big fan of money. ...I have a little. I keep it in a jar on top of my refrigerator. I'd like to put more in that jar."

If you're ready to put a bit more in that "jar," here are four things for you to think about that will help you to plan how to take the plunge into investing. (Believe it or not, it's easier than you think!)

We instinctively know what assets and liabilities are, but defining them precisely can help us make better financial decisions. We've looked at assets already, so let's take a look at liabilities.

A liability is a financial term for an obligation to pay something in the future, which typically takes the all-too-familiar form of debt. Anything that you are required to repay at some point becomes a financial liability, including these examples:

Welcome to the first MomVesting Round-Up! We'll be looking at some articles about personal finance and investing that caught our eye this week.

Most of us have probably heard about diversification and always assumed it was a good thing. We’ve always been more worried about how to achieve diversification rather than whether to do so. Let’s go ahead and upset the apple cart here and investigate a basic question: Is diversification good?

What Is Diversification?

So we all have a rough idea of what earnings are, but what exactly do they mean in the corporate world? Ultimately, earnings are how much money a company made after all its expenses were deducted. The way we arrive at the number is pretty complex, but it at least gives us an answer to a simple question: Is the company making money?

In light of the recent housing market crash, the early 2000’s "dot com" crash, and each of the stock market crashes that followed, we should learn to be cautious of asset bubbles.  These bubbles become dangerous to investors because the larger the asset price increase, the larger the bursting bubble and the larger the losses. What do we need to know to protect ourselves from asset bubbles?