Blog Focus: I Will Teach You To Be Rich
Last Updated on Monday, 8 February 2010 05:06 Monday, 8 February 2010 05:04
Coverage: personal finance, entrepeneurship, real estate, saving money, taxes
Platform: WordPress?
Reach: Alexa: 27930, feedreaders: 9795
Updates available: RSS, email, twitter
Premium services: workshops, book
Monetization: sales of premium services
With a name like “I Will Teach You To Be Rich,” this blog had better be good. It is. Hands down – I Will Teach You To Be Rich is my favorite personal finance blog.
The reason is simple. While dozens of personal finance blogs deliver money-saving tips, Ramit Sethi’s blog puts these tips in focus. He doesn’t encourage you to spend hours to save a small amount of money. Instead, Sethi begins and ends with the simple premise that your efforts should be centered where their impact is greatest. He does not preach the religion of frugality; instead, he encourages readers to match their expenditures with their priorities. Don’t waste a lot of money on something that means little to you.
The post “Conscious Spending” describes this approach well. In it, Sethi writes:
There are plenty of blogs on frugality. This is not one of them. I think you can have lots of fun ">debating the minutiae about which grain of rice is cheaper, but it doesn’t really get you much further towards your goals. Also, most Americans are not brought up with the idea of frugality. I’ve been in a car with friends who were so hungry that they had to pull over and get food even though we were only 5 minutes from home.
For me, writing a blog on frugality would be like trying to convince an ankylosaurus to dance a god damn jig. As a result, I don’t believe that frugality is very sustainable for a lot of people. Yes, maybe we’ll stop buying those lattes (or whatever), but something else will take its place. In my opinion, unless there’s a fundamental mindset from a young age, it’s hard to change the I-want-it-now habits. Whether you agree with me or not, that’s why I don’t write a blog based on where to find the cheapest laundry detergent.
Finally, and this is the most important, frugality alone doesn’t get you to your goals. It’s a helpful but not sufficient condition. So I take another approach of trying to write about money holistically, while urging you to make your own decisions about what’s important enough to spend a lot on, and what’s not.
Blog focus: Investment Postcards
Last Updated on Sunday, 7 February 2010 03:09 Sunday, 7 February 2010 03:09
Coverage: economics,international investing,commodities,gold
Platform: WordPress?
Reach: Newsflashr #17, Alexa: 191978, feedreaders: 9795
Updates available: RSS, email, twitter
Premium services: none
Monetization: Google AdSense, affiliate marketing including Ino.com and Commission Junction
Prieur du Plessis’ Investment Postcards is usually updated several times per week and includes a weekly link list. A typical post combines both Prieur’s original analysis, and links to interesting content found elsewhere. For example, his recent analysis “US still burdened by financial woes” draws from Bloomberg articles and Youtube videos of Geithner, but du Plessis’ spin is what separates this site from other “linkfests.”
Blog focus: TraderFeed
Last Updated on Sunday, 7 February 2010 02:33 Sunday, 7 February 2010 02:30
Platform: Blogger / blogspot hosted
Reach: Newsflashr #6, Alexa: 63893, feedreaders: unknown
Updates available: RSS, email, twitter
Premium services: author serves as a trading coach but site is not used to sell any premium services
Monetization: none
Brett Steenbarger’s TraderFeed covers the gamut of trading psychology, from mental outlook and preparation of trading to interpreting indicators that reflect crowd psychology. Steenbarger also covers the world of proprietary trading, with insights from his role as a trainer/consultant to the SMB prop firm that publishes the SMB Training Blog.
There’s a lot of blogs that address some of these topics in isolation, but few synthesize them as well as Brett Steenbarger. For example, take a look at his recent post describing the role of relative volume in a trending market.