Personal Finance Advice

“Only sick music makes money today.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

After posting that it’s important to teach your children about finances, I thought I would write an article about how to go about it - and since I don’t have kids of my own, I went to visit a friend who has a teenage boy who is excellent in this area. I figured that he [...]

If you want to give your children a wonderful holiday gift this year, make a plan to teach them about personal finance - it will be a gift that they will appreciate for the rest of their lives. If not, they will likely end up like most kids these days that have to try and [...]

“Money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.” - Thornton Wilder

It was suggested in an email that following the percentage change in the net worth of the personal finance writers would be a good way to compare how they did against each other during the month. While it isn’t a perfect comparison, it is a slightly better comparison than the net worth ranking on how [...]

Here is the November 2005 net worth ranking: Most of the changes occured at the top of the order. Chrees’ World comes onto the scene in the #2 position. pfblog remained at #3 overtaking Boston Gal’s Open Wallet which fell to the #4 position. 2 million moved into the $200,000+ club, but still fell a [...]

The number of personal finance writers tracking their net worth for the world to see continues to grow by the month. There were 2 removed from the list because the monthly financial numbers had not been updated for two months: Debt Free (who has retired) and Capital Ideas. While we lost two, we did [...]

Many financial experts say that you should set financial goals by following these basic four steps:
1. Identify and write down your financial goals.
2. Sort your financial goal down into time periods: short-term (less than 1 year), medium-term (1 to 3 years) and long-term (5 years or more).
3. Educate yourself on how to reach the goals.
4. [...]

ING raised it’s interest rates to 3.75% today. While this still lags the 4.0% that Emigrant Direct is offering, it’s always a good sign when ING raises rates since it usually foretells other banks raising their interest rates.
ING still offers a $25 sign-up bonus (minimum $250 deposit, no fees, no minimums after initial deposit) [...]

“There is a certain Buddhistic calm that comes from having…money in the bank.” - Tom Robbins

I have the 4th of the 15 sites I want to get up about 80% done which is I-BondRate.com. This will be an interesting site since it’s in an area that definitely is not “niche”
First, I don’t like domain names that use hyphens in the domain, so I wasn’t sure whether to get this one [...]

While the number of personal finance journals continues to grow, it’s still a small enough group that you know most of those doing it. After several months Debt Free is calling it quits. Always sorry to see one go…

We now have the wordpress plugin available to add to your site if you’d like to encourage your visitors to leave comments to your posts: Show top Commentators WordPress Plugin. The plugin places a list of the people who leave the most comments on your website into your sidebar. Some of the features:
Reset Period: [...]

“It isn’t necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It’s only necessary be rich.” - Alan Alda

A look at the new $10 bill that will begin being distributed in March 2006:

I think I’ve been driving Nate nuts lately - trying to come up with good themes for the satellite sites means that we have to get creative to come up with names that will work and are still available. Of course this gets me wandering in all kinds of directions off the main path with [...]

With the first of the month I received my first payment from Chitika eMiniMalls and went through their audit for the first time. Here’s the experience from my perspective:
The audit disallowed approximately 33% of the clicks which added up to about a 25% reduction in revenue from the unaudited reports I’d been receiving. That’s a [...]

In my attempt to turn websites into my full time business, I’m finding that the “satellite sites” we’re building are becoming a more important factor into the equation that will ultimately determine whether we can make the jump. I mentioned in an earlier post that the 10 sites that we had up were bringing in [...]

“Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?” - Ralph Waldo Emerson