Welcome to the 17th installment of the Carnival of Debt Reduction. For more information about this carnival, you can go to Mighty Bargain Hunter to see the complete schedule with Frugal For Life (who always does an excellent job!) hosting the carnival next week. And onto this week’s carnival:

One of the best ways to help reduce debt is to Lower Your Credit Card Interest Rates as A Momma on a Budget shows with detailed instructions on how to accomplish it.

Early Riser gives a practical assessment of Risk Assumption & Insurance and concludes that “You should only buy insurance for potential losses you cannot afford or don’t want to afford.”

Sometimes the best inspiration we can find for reducing debt comes from others that are going through the process themselves as Free Money Finance found from Comments: Yes, You Can Erase 15 Years of Debt in 14 Months; I’m Doing It

No matter what your financial situation, the money that you keep you want to earn as high an interest rate as possible. Jonathan at My Money Blog has put together a comparison of Four Online Banks: ING Direct, VirtualBank, Emigrant Direct, and HSBC Direct. Online banks will allow you to start a regular saving routine with no fees to worry about, and competitive interest rates.

Mighty Bargain Hunter passes along some quality information in Freedom!! Freedom!! pointing out a number of important steps to take to take to slay your debt dragons.

Here are a number of other recent posts that are worth a read on the subject of debt reduction:

If you’re looking for quality ideas on how to save more money to reduce debt, No Credit Needed has an excellent post on how to create a basic Grocery Price Book which can save you hundreds of dollars and follows it up with a couple of more posts giving more detail.

In part 2 of his 4 part Budget Made Easy Series, Retire at 30 argues that purchasing personal finance software “…will help you cut frivolous spending…”

Million Dollar Goal reviews some of the changes in personal finance that occurred over the last year that can influence your debt: new bankruptcy rules, free credit reports, minimum credit card payment increases and savings rates falling below zero.

There is a good post over at Stop Buying Crap entitled What’s Your Nail Polish? which takes a look at the importance of actually taking steps to change your bad habits - including those that hurt your financial health.

While this post isn’t directly related to debt reduction, it’s a nice humorous note from How To Be Poor on why Procrastination = Embarrassment - procrastination is also one of debt’s best friends.

Finally, my post this week takes a look at Being A Lazy Borrower and how this can be devastating to your finances.

Enjoy the reading!