First, Wise Bread has been keeping an updated list of Top 100+ Personal Financial Blogs. It’s now up to 241 and growing, and yours truly is currently number 71, sorted by Alexa Rank. One feauture I really like is the built-in list of last post for each blogger, so if I have a few minutes, I can find a quick interesting post without scanning a full RSS reader.
Time to offer a congrats to Mrs Micah who celebrated her second blogiversary this week. (Coincidently mine was Aug 4, but I’m not so blog sentimental. I had to look it up.) If you take a visit, check out the Archives, she’s done a great job of varying topics sometimes a bit more personal, sometimes on life matters that are about the heart, not money. I may be twice her age, but I still find I can both learn and be inspired when I read her posts.
Saving For Serenity guest hosted It’s Magic! Why Index Funds Come Out Above Average Every Time. Quite true. I learned this from a pamphlet written by Jack Bogle in the 80’s. It’s great to see new investors discover this fact and learn to beat the averages.
Written last month but I just discovered – Pay off Credit Cards VS Build Emergency Fund Savings – Me VS Suze Orman by Matt Jabs. It’s great to see that Suze took enough interst to reply to Matt and clarify what his wife heard regarding this decision. An interesting read.
On My Life ROI is a post To Prepay Your Mortgage or Not? I don’t want to ruin the punchline, but let me just say, I agree with the author’s conclusion.
I am still offering answers to your questions at Moolanomy answers, stop by, have a beer, and ask. A number of financially savy people are ready to answer the tough ones. Please, no homework assignments, ok?
Thanks and thanks for the recommendation! 🙂 Happy blogiversary to you as well! Certainly an interesting 2 years to write about personal finance, eh?
Pretty cool that Suze took the time. I think she wanted to make sure people knew her stance and had not covered it on Twitter yet.
All I know is it’s hard to go wrong by getting out of debt or saving money! 🙂
Joe,
I’ll repost my criticism to the arguments by “My Life ROI” on paying off the mortgage here:
CD’s could have yielded 5% in the 90’s, but the 30yr-fixed mortgage rate then ranged between 7 and 10%. Nowadays, CD’s yield some 2% and the mortgage rate, some 5%. It seems to me that, after running the numbers, paying off one’s mortgage today is as good as in the 90’s. What one cannot do is to compare CD’s rates in the 90’s with mortgage rates in the naught’s.
I’d appreciate your feedback.
TIA
I think there’s risk to consider. The risk free approach is to get a fixed 5%, no doubt. 5% after tax is 3.6% (in 28% bracket). One can pay the mortgage for no risk, or invest, hoping that long term the average will come back to an after tax rate of over 3.6%. I’d like to think neither method is wrong, it’s a choice.
For sure, I’d put matched 401(k) into that account. But the next dollars depend on the client’s risk tolerance.
Nice site! I stumbled your blog on entrecard. Good thing to see a fellow personal finance blogger like you. I hope you can also visit mine and probably could link in one of your PF blog reads. 🙂
Love your blog! Keep them coming.