Check out this inspiring new video by our friends at charity: water!

Is Earth Day your favorite day of the year? Do you care more about the sky or the trees, or the people who rely on them? Does it matter? Get out there and do something about it!

p.s. There’s an awesome fundraising contest going on right now – if you can pull together the most money for charity: water, you get to go to Africa with Will Smith and Jada Pinkett.

Bienvenidos a Malawi! (Gettin’ filtered with it? The Fresh Prince of Fresh Water??) The current leader has raised less than $12,000. You can beat that, right?

Bruce Sellery is cleaning up Canada, one bumbling financial amateur after another. He’s a journalist, an author, a public speaker, and a consultant. His “thing” is figuring out what you really need and want in order to set up your financial life in the best way possible. (Sound familiar?)

Please enjoy this Skypetastic interview, beamed to us LIVE from Bruce’s HQ in Canadia:

>> TILE brings you exclusive opinions, explanations, and interviews from experts in every industry. Have a burning question or an expert you’d like to see interviewed? Just Ask TILE!

[annoying voice] Hi, I’m Elmo! I know more about personal finance than most Americans, and I’m a 3-year-old puppet!

At least, that’s the premise. The hope is that this cuddly little red carpet sample will start American kids early on the path to having the first clue about managing their money.

If you consider your financial life to be on par with a 3-year-old’s, or you’re having a really hard time saving up for that stupendous ball, you should definitely watch Elmo’s new spending, saving and sharing video series. But let’s get real: you should also be reading this blog a lot more.

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ELMO’S CELEBRITY SCRAPBOOK

With friends like these, you must have your life in order…

(photo credit: ezioman)

Let’s see if we can explain this one:

- The laws of supply and demand say that when supply of a particular product is low, its price goes up. And when consumer demand for that product is high, prices also go up.

- The opposite is also true: low demand = low prices; high supply = low prices.

- So when the oil minister of Saudi Arabia says that OPEC is cutting down on oil production because there’s too much supply in the market, you would think that oil is pretty cheap right now.

Nope. The price of oil is actually higher than it’s been in two and a half years. But it’s not high because of strong consumer demand (apparently demand is quite low since no one can afford it), and it’s not because of low supply (the minister says the market is actually “oversupplied” with barrels and barrels of black gold).

The price of oil is high because of the investors trading it on commodity markets. Because of all the civil unrest/ revolutions/ humanitarian disasters in North Africa and the Middle East right now, they’re worried about whether oil will become harder to get in the future.

So in this case, the price of oil has nothing to do with present-day supply and demand. It’s about a bunch of analysts who think that if a lot of oil-rich governments collapse, tomorrow’s supply might not meet tomorrow’s demand. (Dun dun dun dunnnnnnnnnn!)

This is a pretty neat Eyebeam/ Google project. They offered money and fame (okay, just money) to the person who could come up with the best way to help you understand where your tax dollars are going, and then had a jury full of design types choose the best.

Click here to play with the “Grand Award Winner” of the interactive visualization competition, and see the rest of the winners and finalists here.

You just enter your approximate yearly income and your filing status, and the site estimates how much federal tax you’ll pay based on what tax bracket you’re in. Then it breaks down where all of that tax money you pay during the course of a year actually goes. For example, do you know how much of your paycheck goes toward funding the Department of Agriculture?

Do you even know what tax bracket you’re in? (If you don’t, you can find out here.)

(photo credit: striatic)

Well, that pesky federal deficit has finally caught up with us. Standard & Poor’s, a credit rating agency that basically judges how risky (or safe) it is to invest in a country, has officially said that the United States’s economic shenanigans may end up costing it its pristine AAA credit rating. (That’s three A’s, so you know it’s extra awesome.) The main reason? Washington’s seeming inability to agree on a plan to reduce the deficit.

S&P didn’t actually downgrade America’s credit rating, but it did change its “outlook” from “stable” to “negative.” This is basically a shot across the bow, or a warning from your mother that if you keep hanging out with those bad boys all you’ll get is a reputation.

This is kind of a big deal. If the U.S. is downgraded (and according to S&P is could be within three years), we’ll be out-credited by France. And foreign investors might be less interested in buying Treasury bonds, which would cut off an important source of income for the government. Which might result in more cuts to services like health care, education, and, you know, repairing roads.

Looks like we’ve got two years to figure it out before our reputation is tarnished just like mom said…

Frank Murtha is a psychologist with MarketPsych who specializes in investor behavior. Or misbehavior. Or misconceptions. Well, all of that. His job is to study how people make decisions with their money, and to help us understand (and avoid) common mistakes.

He stopped by to talk to us about how a crashing stock market changes the way investors invest. (Hello, recession of 2008!) Pretty interesting stuff. Check it out:

If you’ve ever watched the news, you probably know that every problem facing our nation is all one person’s fault: the president.

Well, that’s probably not fair.

This neat-o infographic shows the net worth of every U.S. president and the national debt when they entered and left office. It’s a great perspective during this particular time of budget crisis and finger-pointing.

Do you see any patterns? Is the federal deficit tied to a president’s money-management skills? Wealth? Or something entirely different (like, uh, wars and recessions)?

(via credit sesame)

It’s finally ready! Bring your SPEND.GROW.GIVE. account with you wherever you go with our new members-only app for iPhone and iTouch. Check your balances, keep an eye on your budget, follow your favorite charities, and read the latest TILE content with just a few taps.

It’s free for members – just use your SPEND.GROW.GIVE. login to get started.

Download now from the iTunes app store.

Feedback? Send your reactions to ask@tilefinancial.com!