As usual, I present a summary of the best posts from the carnivals I participated in this week.

First off, this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance illustrates exactly why it pays to read different opinions. I submitted a post about how we’d decided to pay off a private student loan due to rising interest rates (to a tune of 7% from Citibank), but another submission illustrates a concrete example of why you might not want to if you’ve got federal loans at less than 3%. I think we’re saying the same thing; unfortunately, federal loans just weren’t available to us in our case.

The Carnival of the Capitalists is rapidly becoming my favorite carnival for both reading and submissions, and worth considering especially if you’re into business and entrepreneurship just as much as finance. My favorite post is also the host’s, which asks the ethical question, should you help or hinder parting an apparent “fool” with his money?

At this week’s Festival of Frugality, you’ll find many links this week to lists on how to save on prescriptions, cleaning, eating, mortgages…quite the smorgasbord. In an unusual limerick format, Money and Values has summarized what each submission is about in a fun format.

I’m not big into business or finance books. In my opinion, you can learn more about human nature, leadership, and management through reading time-proven literary classics than whatever’s currently on the non-fiction best sellers list. If I find a book worth reading, chances are it teaches a specific skill (like how to prepare for the GMAT) or it’s a book I’ve kept on my shelf because it’s worth multiple re-reads.

The book I’m recommending today does both of the above. I first purchased it as part of a class on negotiation while at Michigan in bschool, a class that turned out to be one of my favorites. (Note to anyone who might be contemplating business school: your best classes often turn out to be taught by real-world practitioners, not the ones with PhDs from elite schools!)

Before I ever took a class, I’d always envisioned negotiation the way Hollywood has taught us it works: two powerful guys or groups, all dressed in suits, sitting across the long table from each other playing hardball and sniffing out weaknesses in the other party. If this was what it took to succeed, I decided I might as well forget it. Neither my personality nor the way I was raised easily lent itself to this sort of fight.

The reason I liked Bargaining for Advantage is that it taught me that successful negotiation didn’t have to resort to such tactics. Sure, some people do, but if they succeed, it’s because that’s their strength. Besides, such a tactic doesn’t always work.

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There’s a group writing project over at Problogger asking what people would do if they had to start their blog all over again. And recently, there’s been a lot of activity and the usual frustration in trying to figure out how to work with a new blogging platform in the personal finance blogging world, thanks to a very generous offer from an established author to move blogs over from Blogspot to WordPress.

I’m here to give a little perspective. Like my previous post about not having goals per se on this site, I wouldn’t change anything I’ve done with my blog. Here’s why:

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At the last two companies we’ve worked for, my husband and I have had the opportunity to participate in employee stock purchase plans. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, in essence, the company allows employees to set aside some portion of their compensation toward the purchase of company stock at a discounted price.

Here’s a simplified description of how these plans have worked in our experience: you elect to set aside, say, up to 10% of your after-tax salary, and every six months, you get to use that money to purchase the company’s stock. At the beginning and end of the six-month period, the closing price of the stock is recorded. (Some companies, like Microsoft, have changed their policies and record the stock price only at either the beginning or ending date, but not both.)

The company takes the lower of the two prices and discounts it by an additional 15%, and that constitutes your strike (buy) price. You then have the option of immediately turning around and selling the stock (thereby usually, but not necessarily, guaranteeing at least a 15% return) or keeping the stock and selling it later at your own volition.

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Unless you live in a new mansion or upscale apartment, housing in the Bay Area doesn’t normally come with air conditioning. You don’t need it. Or that’s what we’ve been told. That is, until a heat wave hit this weekend. It hit 90 degrees F inside the house yesterday on the Peninsula, so we headed to the mall to cool down.

We drove to Stanford Shopping Center because they allow dogs in their stores; we couldn’t have left Lola at home. (French bulldogs, being a brachycephalic breed, don’t tolerate heat at all.) It was an ok solution, but since the thermometer in the car registered 104 degrees by the time we parked, walking between the stores in the outdoor mall wasn’t fun. Last night, even with all the windows open, the house didn’t cool down like it usually does.

Today, we broke down and decided to get an air conditioner. We headed to Home Depot as soon as it opened, only to discover that they’re all out of air conditioners all across the Bay Area! In fact, their next shipment was coming in on the 30th, for the smallest unit they had. A little more checking around and we found that Lowe’s still had 4 wall-unit A/Cs left in their San Bruno store. $189 for a 10K BTU unit which we’ve stuck in the second (guest) bedroom. We consider it money well spent for a small area of haven. Thank goodness our house is less than 1000 sq. ft., though I’ll be interested to see how much higher our electricity bill goes up this month. This way, when we leave the house, neither Lola nor the puppy we’re getting next month will suffer in the heat.

Still, I can’t help feeling like a wimp. People not so long ago had no such thing as air conditioning, and they survived. If we didn’t have to worry about our dogs’ health, I’d probably have foregone the purchase. How did they manage in the past?