Recommended Blogs About Money

There is no way to read every blog about money. In fact, I doubt there is any way even to count them all. The best one can do is sample them. As part of my non-comprehensive random-walk survey of money blogs online, may I present a small selection of the results for your delectation. I have avoided the obvious mega-blogs powered by media and other vested interests - who wants to read more of that rubbish? Read them at your peril. But apart from that, this selection ranges from the tiny and specific to the eclectic and very amusing. Enjoy.

I have been reading a fairly comprehensive blog about how to save money, ways to earn extra money, how to reduce debt, how to reduce mortgage payments, ways to reduce credit card debt, and how to become debt-free. The general level of intelligence in the posts is a notch above the average internet page. One of the problems with the internet is that any fool can write and publish any article on any topic, and Google’s quality checking alogrithm doesn’t measure the intelligence of the content, just its relevance and uniqueness.

This blog has some good thoughts, reasonably well expressed, and that sets it head and shoulders about the average Adsense-financed “wall of words’ junk content that is proliferating around the internet on a daily basis.

Here’s a neat little blog covering a range of financial topics including financial advice, personal finances, mortgage advice, financial news, credit cards, debt consolidation, refinancing advice, investment and wealth building. It’s pretty new, so we shall see how it develops, but the start is promising. There is some original thought going in here - I know! Remarkable, isn’t it?

The advice is good, solid, reliable advice based on financial fundamentals, not the fad of the day or the latest get-rich-quick scheme. You can bookmark and return to posts and find them just as valuable weeks, months, or years later. This is education rather than entertainment or space-filling, and all too rare in the online mental junk food industry.

This is a variation in strategy, a blog about saving money, reducing debt, creative refinancing ideas, interest rates predictions, refinancing for debt consolidation, mortgage refinancing, reducing expenses, reducing monthly payments, and vehicle refinancing. Normally, I prefer blogs about a variety of financial topics, because financial independence requires a strategy across all aspects of one’s financial life, so a blog about saving money, investing, reducing debt, paying off credit cards, and creative refinancing ideas is more likely to add value than a blog about one specific aspect of finances.

I am making an exception in this case, because the mortgage is usually the largest financial commitment a person makes, and managing a mortgage well can make the difference between financial independence and a lifetime of indentured slavery. Many of these posts are very educational, well-written, and easy to understand, and mortgage finance is one area where the average consumer could do with being much better educated - just look at the foreclosure rates!

In general, I would recommend keeping an eye on the blog at moneytalksabout.com/blog. This blog pulls together RSS feeds from several other good quality money blogs, which saves time and effort in surfing around the internet to each blog, and the posts which are made directly to the Money Talks blog itself, in between the syndicated posts, are always good value.

I think that most consumers could benefit from reading about saving money, investing, reducing debt, paying off credit cards, and creative refinancing ideas on a regular basis. Money blogs are not the only way to gain this information, but they are convenient, provide bite-sized chunks of information, and if you choose well, provide reasonable quality information.

Of course, this handful of recommendations is hardly the be-all and end-all of money blogs. New money blogs come into existence every day, and there will be hundreds of undiscovered gems available elsewhere. Feel free to add a comment with the URL of your favorites, and why you like them. We can all help one another to sort the wheat from the chaff, and together we can pinpoint the best money blogs to be reading today.