The Simple Dollar - and other personal finance links
Saturday, December 9th, 2006If you’re looking for a simple, easy to follow personal finance blog, check out The Simple Dollar. I get a headache just thinking about personal finance, but I seriously enjoy this site and I’m learning quite a bit as well. It’s not the be-all-and-end-all of finance information, but it is open, personal, easy to read, and full of good advice - especially if you’re looking to lower some of your debt.
I found the site through a link on Digg.com to a post about free alternatives to many Windows software applications. I perused the blog as a whole from there, and found some very helpful tips about debt reduction. I also found that I really enjoyed his writing style and conclusions.
Recently, a friend introduced me to Google Reader—I’ve been looking for a good online RSS reader. Partially as a result of reading the Simple Dollar and partially because of the focus on expenses the end of the year brings, the only set of pre-existing subscriptions that I found vaguely interesting was the Finance set. It included another personal (as opposed to corporate) site that I like, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, which shares a conversational tone, personal touch, and good advice with The Simple Dollar.
Reading from those two blogs got me pumped up enough to go to a couple corporate sites. First stop, CNNMoney.com. Almost immediately I realized that was way too much stocks and market watching to be immediately applicable to me. Good stuff, but I couldn’t use it. Same thing with MarketWatch.com (probably should have predicted that from the name, huh?). Then I hit The Motley Fool. Now I was back on track. I knew about the Fool for years, and had even read their first book, years ago. Good stuff, well written, and down to earth. The same applies to their website. In fact, they had this great self-paced “seminar” that I’m now going through on (I’m sensing a theme here) debt reduction. I’ve looked at similar programs before, but this has the best, and easiest, planning and budgeting approach I’ve seen. It’s not hugely time consuming, it’s easy to understand, and it works. Aside from having it actually reduce your debt for you, I think that’s the best you can ask for.
In that seminar are two more links I wanted to share. CardWeb.com will let you easily find and apply for great low rate credit cards. It also has some good articles and services, but for me its primary benefit is the card search. Similarly, Bankrate.com lets you search for credit card offers. It also looks for just about every other kind of debt related activity (mortgages, home equity, credit, loans, etc.), and has some excellent articles, plus some great calculators (including one that will approximate your FICO score, which I found very helpful). The main problem with that site is that it showed some problems when I browsed through Firefox, and in all browsers it had an extremely annoying habit of throwing up pop-up windows to various other parts of itself on virtually every click, plus it had some confusingly placed ads. The pop-ups are one usability problem that is so disturbing to me, though, that I will only go there now if I have something extremely specific to find so I can get in and get out before I want to throttle someone. Which is a shame, because there is some excellent content there.
Hopefully something in this post helps someone. Not one of my usual topics, but I found myself spending hours reading this stuff without feeling overwhelmed for the most part, so I figured other people might find them equally accessible.
Technorati Tags: personal finance, debt reduction, blogs, money matters, credit score, credit cards, open source, digg, rss readers
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