Today Seth Godin had an interesting post about the benefit of compact fluorescent light bulbs and why they haven’t caught on given the benefits.

So, why have only 6% of all US households installed even one CF lightbulb?

It can’t be the economics. After all, a typical CF bulb saves the user more than $66 over its lifetime. Count the bulbs in your house, multiply by 66…

It can’t be the environmental impact. CF bulbs actually reduce the amount of mercury in the environment, because even though there’s a tiny amount of mercury vapor in each bulb, the amount of coal production they cut down more than makes up for it. Add to that the hundreds of pounds of greenhouse gases they reduce… (if you had to buy and bring home the gases with each purchase, I think it would make a difference in the the relative sales).

And it’s not the geopolitical impact either. If we switched all our bulbs, we could stop importing oil altogether. Without giving up one Hummer.

So, why are people apparently immune to the benefits. I mean, why won’t we even try one of the bulbs?

I’m afraid I don’t have the answer. In addition to the above reasons, one thing people often overlook is that often utilities will PAY for you to use compact flourescent bulbs. Last year I looked into replacing all of the bulbs in my apartment with flourescent bulbs. When I found out that my power company would reimburse me for it, it was a no brainer.

They save money, they’re good for the environment, and they last long so you don’t have to mess around with changing bulbs as often. What’s not to like?

Yeah, I know I’ve been MIA for a while. Get off my back! I do hope to get back in the swing of things in the coming weeks. For now, however, I’d like to talk about a few Internet financial resources that I really like but don’t see mentioned when making my rounds in the personal finance world, at least not enough.

The first is the Vanguard Diehards forum over at Morningstar.com. I read a lot of personal finance sites and while sites such as CNNMoney or Yahoo! Finance are useful, perhaps the best information on investing can be found on the Diehard forum.

Now, as with any Internet message board, you should always take things with a boulder of salt, but after reading a while you should start to get a sense of who is worth listening to and who isn’t. Take the one month challenge - read the forum for one month and you’ll be amazed how much you learned.

The next two resources I’ll group together since they are somewhat similar. Financial-planning.com and FA-mag.com are both industry print magazines for financial planners that also have an online presence. The articles from each issue are posted online and can be read by anyone. Because of the intended audience, there are a few things you should know. First, some of the articles may not be of interest, such as articles related to practice management, but there are many articles worth checking out. Second, some of the material may be beyond the “range” of people just looking for personal finance tips. Still, I’d encourage you not to be intimidated and check it out.

For my last pick, another forum. Most people are familiar with Kiplinger magazine and Kiplinger.com. The latter has a pretty active community of posters on the Kiplinger forums that I’ve found to be pretty useful. All of the previous disclaimers regarding the Diehard forums apply here as well.

So those are my picks. Do you have a favorite financial resource that you don’t think gets enough love?