It’s always good to sit back and reflect on life and think about what’s really important. Of course today is Mother’s Day. Thanks to all the moms out there, especially mine! This has been a challenging week for some home owners in the Midwest. We came out okay but others encountered nasty flooding. Tough times like this usually help put things in perspective. As Trent mentions, the best thing we can do is learn from unfortunate events. Here are some of the highlights of the week in personal finance:

In my midweek review I covered some very useful personal finance tips from Generation X Finance, Blueprint, Free Money Finance, the Sun and several others.

Silicon Valley Blogger gives us 5 tips on evaluating investment portfolio performance. Check out The Digerati Life this week for upcoming coverage of portfolio evaluation and rebalancing.

Five Cent Nickel writes about how he benefits from credit cards.

Binary Dollar offers a tip on how you can lower auto insurance.

Lazy Man ran an interesting weeklong series on interest rates.

I’m on a search for ways to make extra money so the article on earning extra cash in your spare time at Get Rich Slowly was of interest to me. Now if I could just find more spare time!

Money Matter warns us that bulk buying doesn’t always mean low prices.

Mighty Bargain Hunter tells us top 5 ways to kill our retirement dreams

The S&P 500 is on a tear, Fat Pitch Financials wonders what the high valuations in the S&P 500 mean for finding value opportunities.

Last weeks Carnival of Personal Finance had some good articles and money quotes. My favorite was from Mark Twain:

October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.

Although the official “tax season” has ended, we are paying taxes every day of the year. I ask “Did You Know 2007 Tax Season Starts Today” over at the Carnival of Taxes.

That’s all for this week. Happy Mothers Day!