For all you personal finance bloggers out there, it looks like Zopa’s opened up their blog to guest writers. Items must be Zopa-related or on P2P finance. Any takers?

Just a quick post as I get back into the groove of writing now that guests have departed and the long weekend is almost over. Via Fatwallet, Etrade customers can get 52 weeks of the print version of Barron’s for free. Nice deal!

I’m not a fan of being taxed on my earnings, taxed on my capital gains, and then taxed again on my estate, assuming there’s anything left by then. So you’d think that the richest people in the US would also be die hard advocates of repealing the estate tax, right?

Not necessarily. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and even Andrew Carnegie all support(ed) the estate tax. In fact, Gates’ father William H. Gates even wrote a book arguing why taxing estates is a good idea. If I may summarize so bluntly, their argument is essentially that if you’re fortunate as to be so wealthy, you have a duty to helping your community by giving back the extra wealth, either by way of this tax, or by giving away your estate through charitable donations and foundations, before you’re no longer around (in which case the estate tax serves as an incentive to do so). They point out that the Founding Fathers wanted to prevent aristocracies from being created and to always ensure a level playing field when they created this country.

Of course, not everyone is so altruistic. 18 of the country’s wealthiest families are also lobbying to repeal the estate tax, as might be expected.

From the frugality-be-damned part of the world and the WSJ comes news that fancy and unique business cards — we’re talking silk and wood materials — are the new fad in executive life. Their purpose appears to be mainly for paper companies to continue to compete in a world of electronic address books and high-tech PDAs. Having never owned a business card in my life, even a plain and basic one issued by the corporation, and even as a professional, I can’t say I’ll be buying. But I know of many who’ll gladly plop down money to use it as a way to define their uniqueness. What do you think?

Scott Travers, a famous numismatist, has put 3 rare pennies into public circulation in the hopes of rekindling the public’s interest in coin collecting. The coins in question are worth between $200 and $1000, though none have yet been found, or so says the Dallas Morning News, who published a story on Travers’ exploits earlier this week. I doubt his coins will get from NYC to the West coast anytime soon, but who knows? I once got a $5 bill in change back from Bartell Drugs in Seattle with a “Where’s George? www.wheresgeorge.com” stamp on it, which turned out to be a pretty nifty site that tracked US dollar bills as they made their way around the nation. Anyway, why not check your coins the next time before dumping them into a Coinstar machine? You never know what you might have.