Do you subscribe to any magazines? Why? Do you find enough value in them to be worth the cost?

This was originally a question in Thursday’s reader mailbag, but the answer became long enough that I felt it deserved a post of its own.

Sarah and I get several different magazines in the mail. Most of these magazines come about from buying magazine subscriptions from the children of neighbors who are trying to raise funds for their activities, which we try to support. It’s not an overwhelming cost for us and it facilitates good relationships with the neighbors while also supporting youth activities.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t try to maximize our value from these orders. Over time, we’ve come up with something of a philosophy for deciding what magazines to order when those neighbor kids come around. The reason? It’s just another opportunity to maximize the value of each dollar we spend.

So, here’s how we decide which magazines to order when this situation comes up.

Magazines of direct professional use Sarah teaches science classes, so if she’s ordering, she’ll tend to choose magazines like Discover or Scientific American. For my own writing, I used to look at personal finance magazines like Money, but now I find more value in things like Businessweek and The Economist.

Why? We love our jobs, simply put. We enjoy reading about things related to our chosen careers. Doing so makes us better at those things, too.

Magazines covering activities we enjoy engaging in This mostly applies to cooking magazines, which is what we typically order if we don’t have any career-oriented options. Magazines like Bon Appetit and Vegetarian Times fill in the gap here.

Why? With a family of five, food is a major part of our monthly finances and a significant part of our time, too. Food preparation is also something Sarah and I both enjoy doing. We love experimenting, and having children on hand to try out our experiments makes it even more of an interesting challenge.

Challenging general interest magazines By these, we mean things like The New Yorker and The Atlantic – magazines with long, in-depth articles that strive to actually teach something to the reader on a variety of topics.

Why? Neither Sarah nor I like to read if it doesn’t challenge us in some way. Articles in magazines like these consistently do that.

Virtually always, we can find a magazine that fits into one of these three groups.

Do we renew? Once we’ve subscribed, we keep a careful eye on how much we read that particular magazine. Are there issues left unread? Do we get something valuable out of the issues that we do read? Do we take action or rethink our viewpoints because of something we read in those magazines?

Generally, when we do renew, we wait until there’s another child at our doorstep asking us to buy a magazine subscription. That way, we get both the value of the magazine and the social value of supporting neighbors and community.

The post Some Thoughts on Magazine Subscriptions appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

What I’ve found is that these magazines (aside from a couple of freebies that we won’t pay to renew) fall into one of two categories. Our magazines either are a source of long-form essays that are hard to read in an online context (like The New Yorker or The Atlantic) or they’re what I like to call “project” magazines.

Simply put, “project” magazines are publications that directly instruct you or encourage you to do something in your own life. Cooking magazines fall directly into this category, as does any sort of do-it-yourself home improvement magazines. Ones we subscribe to include Make, Cooks Illustrated, and Bon Appetit.

For our dollar, these magazines have made a tremendous positive impact in our lives. They’ve encouraged us to cook at home instead of going out (saving us money and also increasing our kitchen skills), take on home improvement projects, and experiment with countless other little things, too.

Along the way, though, we’ve learned a few things about how to really put such “project” magazines to good use.

Use them as a resource, not as an archive. It isn’t long before a new issue of a cooking magazine is splotched with stains from our kitchen. Rather than worrying about perfect archival condition, we often take them right out in the kitchen with us to use them for ideas while cooking.

Be willing to not follow the instructions to the letter. Most of the time, the ideas and projects in such magazines don’t perfectly match what we’re doing at home. A home improvement project doesn’t quite match up with what’s in our home. A recipe doesn’t line up well with our tastes or with what assets we have in our pantry. Use such ideas as a starting point and a reference and do your own thing – it’s incredibly rewarding and builds up your ability to improvise.

Save what has value – toss the rest. We don’t keep archives of most of these magazines. Instead, when a new issue comes in, I go through the previous issue, pull out ideas I might actually use in the future, and toss the rest. I often scan these pages and keep them electronically for future use, but you can just as easily keep them in a folder or two. It’s a lot easier to browse through 50 intriguing recipes than a thousand uninteresting ones with a few needles in the haystack.

Don’t just read – do. I wrote about mirror neurons a while back, but the basic principle holds here, too. Just reading about something can often feel a bit fulfilling and subtly convince you to not do it. Don’t fall into that. When you see something intriguing, do it.

Pick “project” magazines that align with things you do already. We like to cook, so we subscribe to a few cooking magazines. I like to tinker with electronics, so I subscribe to Make. There are lots of hobbies that we don’t engage in (even if they seem interesting), so we don’t waste our money subscribing to “project” magazines in those areas.

Don’t believe that magazines will change your behavior – they won’t. Carrying on with that previous thought, simply subscribing to a hobby magazine won’t convince you to start actually doing it. The desire to actually start doing something comes from within – external motivators and ideas only channel it in an interesting way. If you’re not already doing something, a magazine won’t help you start.

The post The Value of “Project” Magazines appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

The New Yorker I’ve repeatedly been inspired by The New Yorker to think about my situation in a different way, from how to thrift shop for clothes to the power of checklists in managing your life. In fact, there’s usually at least one article a week that inspires me in some way to think differently about money, time, and how I write about it.

Classic literature I enjoy classic literature quite a lot, as it explores the lives and thoughts of people who live in a different world than mine. It encourages me to see things through a different set of eyes, different experiences, different everything. Such a paradigm shift often reveals many interesting ideas and truths. For example, lately I’ve been rereading the novels of John Steinbeck – Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row – and I’ve been thinking in detail about the lessons of disasters and extreme poverty.

Writer’s Digest I started reading this magazine hoping to learn how to polish my writing skills for publication, but the most useful parts are the ones on how to creatively assemble ideas and how to structure them in a usable way. Naturally, I apply these techniques directly to personal finance materials, and they often end up revealing new ideas and angles that I hadn’t considered before.

The local newspaper The weekly newspaper in my local town is free – entirely advertising supported. I pick it up faithfully at the local gas station because it lists all of the activities going on in the town, most of which are free and are also great places to meet people and expand my social connections. Plus, there is a general utility in being aware of the latest happenings in my local town.

BusinessWeek I’m able to read BusinessWeek thanks to a subscription at work. What I learn about most from BusinessWeek is efficiency, because in the end that’s what this magazine is really about. In my mind, efficiency is a key part of personal finance, because if you are inefficient with your money or your time, you wind up in debt – or at least with diminished amounts of money in your life.

Personal productivity books There’s a reason I review a personal productivity or personal development book each week. Time is money, and having a poor concept of how you spend your time or wasting a lot of time is basically a waste of money as well. I strive to constantly improve on my time management and my sense that I’m covering all of the important areas in my life and devoting appropriate time to each of them – without it, my life would feel empty in some way and I would also not earn nearly as much money as I did before.

Vogue I often see this on the table at various office visits (dental, doctor, hair, etc.) and I always pick it up because it reminds me on every single page of the absurdity of rampant consumer culture. $1,500 for a pair of sandals that I could assemble a reasonable facsimile of at home for about $10? In my eyes, this type of thing is the enemy, because it devalues our work and our time.

The post Seven Unexpected Things I Read For Personal Finance Inspiration and Motivation appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Do I actually read the magazine?
Would I buy the magazine on the newsstand if I didn’t subscribe?
Does the information in the magazine directly affect my bottom line?
Could I just read it at the library?
Would it make a good gift instead of paying for it?

These questions are quite useful in filtering out potential magazines you might subscribe to, but I currently face a different conundrum. Since many of my subscriptions were given to me as Christmas gifts, I’m facing a pile of renewal notices. This means I have to evaluate my subscriptions to see if I wish to renew them or let them expire, a rather different situation than trying to decide if I want to subscribe. Here are my four signs that I should let a magazine subscription cancel itself.

For starters, I currently subscribe to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Mother Jones, Wired, Consumer Reports, Money, and Make.

I have multiple unread issues of the magazine and have made no effort to read them. This is a sure death knell. If I’m letting them build up significantly, that means I’m not really bothering to read them after all, which means that my subscription is money blowing in the wind. This eliminates Harper’s – I have several issues of this backed up while I devour the current issue of other magazines.

The magazine’s content is largely available for free online. Wired has had a few of the best articles I’ve ever read anywhere (Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us by Bill Joy comes to mind), but if I’m willing to stay an issue or two behind, I can read most of the worthwhile stuff online. I don’t really need the technolust in my house, anyway.

The aspects of the magazine that interested you at first aren’t representative of an average issue. Here, Mother Jones comes to mind. I read an issue with two brilliant articles in it and I thought it was a well-written magazine portraying a sensible liberal perspective. As I got several issues in the mail, though, it became clear that the magazine had a very strong leftist bent, to the point of often seeming irrational to me. I’ll read one article that seems sensible, then I’ll read something that just comes off as foundationally wrong. In the current issue, a great article outlining treatments given to autistic children is immediately followed by a piece of rubbish about Hillary Clinton’s faith and a few snide taunts about the Senate’s Prayer Breakfast that people from both parties attend. You know, you can write intelligent and well-written articles with both a leftist and a rightist perspective without resorting to base immaturity and taunting. Mother Jones is going in my trash can.

My interests have moved on. Although this doesn’t really apply to the magazines here, this has resulted in a lot of subscription cancellations in my past. Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest both bit the dust for this reason – I kept finding less and less that piqued my interest, even though their content wasn’t really changing. If you find that you’re now reading maybe one article per issue of a magazine you used to devour, ask yourself if your interests are changing. If they are, cut the cord and save your money.

The magazine is overpriced. Make could potentially be in this category as it’s the most expensive one I subscribe to by far, but so far I’ve burnt many hours on each issue and have every one of them stored in the closet so I can do some of the projects with my son and daughter when they grow older. I generally look at it this way – if a subscription to a magazine is costing you more than $1/hour of your enjoyment of it, you’re likely overpaying for it – just look at it at the library or newsstand.

This leaves me with The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Make. I am on the border with Consumer Reports and Money – the fact that I review them here means I’ll likely continue getting them, but without that impetus I would likely move to an online subscription of CR and just read Money at the library once every few months like I do with Kiplinger’s and SmartMoney.

Being realistic about my magazines will save me about $50 in the coming year without any significant loss to my reading diet.

The post Evaluating My Magazine Subscriptions: Which Ones Are Worth It And Which Ones Aren’t? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

#1. Saving with the right hand and spending with the left
#2. Playing it too safe
#3. Looking into a cloudy crystal ball
#4. Living in the moment
#5. Throwing good money after bad
#6. Letting your ego get in the way
#7. Following the crowd

The article was quite interesting and applicable to investors and non-investors alike, though the points themselves weren’t concisely written. Here’s how I would summarize their seven mistakes:

#1. Get a grip on your spending before you invest
Pay off all of your credit card debt before you even think about investing. If you get any sort of boon, don’t think of it as party time – use it to pay down debt or actually invest for the future. Learn how to be a little bit frugal, and cut out some of the big unnecessary purchases – you don’t need a new BMW.

#2. If you’re going to invest, invest
Once you have your financial house in order and plenty of money in a cash emergency fund, invest that money. Put your cash in investments that you can be confident in for a while – then let it sit there for a while. Don’t sell quickly to grab short term gains and don’t sell to avoid potential big losses, either. Wait until there’s truly a good reason to make a portfolio change.

#3. Don’t forget risk
Don’t put all of your money in one place – make sure that you’re invested in at least a few different things. Especially don’t put all of your cash in risky investments like lots of small-cap stocks.

#4. Get started ASAP
If you haven’t started your 401(k), do it now. Don’t hesitate another second, even if you don’t know what you’re doing. Just tell the person to put your money in the most conservative investment and worry about it later if you’re caught up in investment paralysis.

#5. Be sensible with your portfolio
If both the numbers and your gut are truly telling you something is a bad investment, stop putting new money in it for a while. If your gut still keeps telling you it’s bad even a long time after you stopped putting in new money, then move that chunk to something else. Don’t just keep tossing in money when it doesn’t work for you.

#6. Check your ego at the door
Don’t ever think you’re a killer investor – the second you believe that, the second your portfolio will fall apart. Don’t make frequent trades or else the fees will eat you alive.

#7. If everyone else is doing it, don’t do it
If you see the same talking point over and over, that means it’s time to avoid that investment. For example, only a fool would invest in ethanol stocks right now.

These are pretty good rules to live by, but aside from the first one, they don’t really cover the basics that allow you to actually invest your money. So, to complement these seven mistakes, I wrote my own set of seven mistakes people make when they are investing. Let’s take a look:

The Simple Dollar’s 7 Money Mistakes To Avoid
… before you even worry about SmartMoney’s mistakes

#1. Ignoring frugality
If you can trim $200 a month from your monthly budget, that’s the same as a $200 a month investment gain. Look for ways to trim your own spending, and the best place to look is your daily routine. When you flip on the light switch, are those bulbs energy efficient? Do you stop for a bagel and coffee each morning? Do you eat an expensive lunch with coworkers every day? Do you drink or smoke habitually? Do you subscribe to magazines or cable channels that you don’t utilize? Is your bank constantly dinging you with stupid fees? All of these changes can recoup huge money, but many investors forget about them and instead spend their time sweating over how to eke out an extra 1% from their portfolio.

#2. Paying any high interest debt
By high interest, I mean an interest rate higher than the 5.05% you could earn in a high-yield savings account. If you’re paying more than that in interest, you’re basically tossing money down the tubes. Eliminate all high interest debt before you even think about investing – don’t justify a little bit of it. High interest debt is like an investment with a large negative return – the longer you refuse to pay it, the bigger your losses are.

#3. Financing any purchases, from furniture to automobiles
Often, people wake up to the fact that credit card debt is bad, but then they still go put all sorts of things on purchase plans, paying high interest rates to have it now. Another mistake. If you’re going to buy a car in two or three years, start making the payments now into a high yield savings account, then use that to pay for most of – if not all of – the car. This way, interest works for you rather than against you.

#4. Not having an emergency fund
What happens if you lose your job and another one isn’t immediately forthcoming? If you don’t have an immediate answer that doesn’t involve panic, then you’re not prepared to be investing. Keep at least a few month’s worth of salary in cash in a savings account for such an emergency, money you can just grab and run with if need be.

#5. Believing that your “future self” will take care of it
This is one of my favorite things to hear because I used to tell myself the very same thing. “I’ll take care of it in the future,” I would say as I whipped out my credit card for some stupid expense and decided to go to Europe instead of getting started with investing. Guess what? Your future self might not have a job or might be sick or might have just had their car break down. Will you want thousands in credit card debt if these things happen?

#6. Spending money as soon as you get it
I know one person who doesn’t have any debt of any kind. Of course, he doesn’t have much of anything else, either. Instead, he lives his life completely by the seat of his pants, spending cash as soon as he gets it having fun. He has a lot of fun, but now he’s starting to realize that when you’re forty five years old and have no assets built up, the world doesn’t seem as much fun as it used to be. Start getting used to putting a little bit away to help “future self” out.

#7. Having big dreams but not making them concrete
You dream of big things, but then keep going through the same routines. What keeps you from having that amazing house or that nice car? A lack of a plan, that’s what. Start looking at what it would really cost, then break it down into small pieces that you can wrap your hands around. Piece by piece, you can have your dreams if you start looking at how to make them happen instead of just wandering along through life.

Once you solve these seven money mistakes, you’ll be on a path where SmartMoney’s mistakes might mean more to you.

The post SmartMoney Magazine’s “7 Money Mistakes” – And The Simple Dollar’s “7 More Money Mistakes” appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

The absolutely overwhelming amount of advertisements. I picked up the June 2007 issue of SmartMoney and began to leaf through it until I realized I was mostly leafing through ads. In fact, at one point in the middle of the issue, there were twenty one straight pages of nothing but advertisements. Sure, there’s some good content in there, but this is ridiculous. If you want to see how a mainstream, ad-supported magazine can have a tasteful number of advertisements, look no further than The New Yorker; I had to open the magazine three times before I even saw an ad at all, and even then it was tastefully placed in only a single column. I had to actually browse the whole magazine to find a full page ad.

The incessant shilling for bad mutual funds. I’m not talking about the ads, I’m talking about the articles. Take a look at the June 2007 issue of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and their list of the 25 “best funds.” Not a single index fund to be found; they’re all managed funds with relatively high fees compared to index funds. You’re trying to tell me that among the 25 “best funds,” there’s not a single low-cost index fund? Even better, most of the fund profiles were actually puff pieces about the greatness of the fund manager. Please. Show me a fund manager who doesn’t gouge the fund with a huge fee and matches or beats the market year in and year out and then I’ll pay attention.

The “guilt” factor The final straw for me is that neither of these magazines are really written with me in their audience. Most of the articles focus on personal financial issues for the upper middle class, particularly those in middle age. In terms of income, I’d probably not put myself in upper middle class (our household income is well above the median, but not incredibly high) and I’m definitely still a twentysomething, so many of the articles simply don’t match my reality. That’s a big reason why I started this site – I know a lot of people are much closer to my reality than the ones portrayed in those magazines.

I’m not saying that the content in these magazines is terrible; there’s a lot of good stuff in both publications. But when you get rid of the advertisements and the advertising copy for mutual funds that passes for some of the articles, what’s really left? Is it worth $5 to you? It’s not to me, especially when I can get similar material from reading personal finance blogs – they’re free and, if I want to, I can support those writers directly by giving them a donation or a micropayment for their efforts. To me, that’s a lot healthier writer-reader relationship.

If you dislike personal finance magazines so much, why do you review each Money issue? For the most part, Money avoids most of the traps I outlined above, though not always and not entirely. I compared my latest issue of Money with the two magazines above and I found that Money had a lower ratio of ads to content (though still too high for me) and when mutual funds were mentioned, they were all from a predefined set that they’d been following for years (the Money 70), which does include a number of low cost index funds. Plus, the magazine often has an article or two directly targeting twentysomethings in similar situations as mine, and also In short, I feel that they’re the best one on the market, so that’s the magazine I give my attention to; picking up the most recent issue of their competitors did little more than reaffirm that feeling.

The post Why I Can’t Stand Most Personal Finance Magazines appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Why so many magazine subscriptions? There are two reasons, really: one, I ask for them as gifts a lot, and two, I actually read them. I leave the newest issues out on the table for guests to flip through (my father-in-law basically reads The New Yorker and The Atlantic cover to cover when he visits) and for me to read in my spare time; when it’s time to rotate them, I read anything I may have missed, save the New Yorker covers for art projects, and then toss them.

On the other hand, for many people magazine subscriptions are a great waste of money. They sit around gathering dust and end up being lost money for the people who subscribe.

In my opinion, when you’re looking for fat to trim from your budget, magazines should be one of the first places to look. Ask yourself these questions:

Do I actually read the magazine? Don’t idealize the question by saying, “Well, I would if I had time…” If you say that, then you don’t read the magazine and it’s probably a pretty good clue that you shouldn’t be subscribing. Note that this doesn’t mean you have to read every issue, just a large portion of them.

Would I buy the magazine on the newsstand if I didn’t subscribe? This is what actually got me to subscribe to at least three of the magazines above – I kept reading it on the newsstand and often buying an issue. If you find yourself buying even a quarter of the issues of a magazine on the newsstand, it’s more cost-effective just to subscribe to the magazine.

Does the information in the magazine directly affect my bottom line? This is a big reason why I subscribe to Consumer Reports. Prior to writing the issue reviews on The Simple Dollar, I used to primarily subscribe so I could use their online service as a reference to aid in product purchases. Thus, I will likely subscribe to Consumer Reports for the indefinite future, especially since there are several purchases coming up that I will consult Consumer Reports on.

Could I just read it at the library? This is why I stopped subscribing to Science and The Economist – I could easily read them both at the library during my weekly visit (I spend a couple of hours there each week, usually on Thursday evenings, reading periodicals and exchanging books).

Would it make a good gift instead of paying for it? I traditionally receive a few of my magazine subscriptions as gifts from relatives, because it is a great gift that I appreciate throughout the whole year. Would I subscribe on my own? I’m not entirely sure, but I am sure that I do really appreciate receiving a renewal as a gift.

Addressing each of these questions made it clear that if I were completely subscribing on my own, including no gifts or anything else, I would only subscribe to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Consumer Reports, and I am very strongly considering subscribing to Make. This would easily trim more than 50% from my magazine spending in a year.

Take a look at what you’re doing with your magazines – you might be surprised to find the fat that you can excise from your spending.

The post Magazine Subscriptions: Are They Worth It? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Why do I read?
As a general rule of thumb, I read primarily to inform myself and improve my understanding of the world. With a few exceptions, the books I read are nonfiction and what I would describe as “heavy” literature; the magazines are also weighty, as well.

How much do you read?
In a given week, I read about four books and about four magazines cover to cover. I also browse dozens of blogs of all stripes.

That’s a lot! How do you keep up?
I devote a minimum of an hour each day specifically to reading, and it’s often more than that. Plus, I have taught myself to read quite quickly.

What do you read regularly?
The magazines I am currently subscribed to are The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Consumer Reports, and Money, the latter two primarily for The Simple Dollar. My wife subscribes to Discover. We seem to also get Wired and Mother Jones, both of which are apparently gifts of some sort, though neither of us really recall the gift. We’re also hoping to add a subscription to Make in the future. If I had to keep only one, I’d easily choose The New Yorker, as there’s something I truly enjoy in every single issue and it’s a weekly.

Isn’t that expensive?
Not really. Magazine subscriptions are one of my favorite gifts, and so I often get a couple of renewals for Christmas gifts.

How do you read magazines?
I basically have a “last in, first out” stack of magazines beside my bed, as I do most of my magazine reading in the hour or so before sleep. I usually mark things with a pen that are interesting that I want to look at later on. We don’t save them at all, though we do occasionally save articles in electronic form by scanning them, and we would save each issue of Make if we were to subscribe because we see lots of possibilities for parent-child projects in it.

What about books?
I usually devote about an hour per weekday and two-three hours on a weekend day to reading a book. This timeframe enables me to read about four books a week on average. I usually try to do at least some of this where my son can observe me, so he can see that reading is a thing that people do as part of the normal course of a day.

Wow! Four books a week! Isn’t that expensive?
Not really. I have a lot of tools for getting books on the cheap: PaperBackSwap, the library, and a volunteer book exchange program that I’m involved with. I do occasionally buy new books, but not very often and usually only after some extensive research.

What were the last ten books you read?
This is as of April 25, 2007, and gives a pretty good snapshot of what I’m reading right now (and also a preview of some likely future reviews on The Simple Dollar):
The Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
The Random Walk Guide to Investing by Burton G. Malkiel
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee
The Now Habit by Neil Fiore
The Truth About Money by Ric Edelman
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes
The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath

Again, why read so much?
I’ve read at a similar pace for my entire life (actually at a higher pace during my high school and collegiate years), and as a result I have a pretty firm basic understanding of almost any topic. Because of this, I can now go to a dinner party and be involved in one conversation on the changes in music distribution caused by the 1980′s “do it yourself” methodology, then turn around and talk about Milton Friedman’s Chilean Miracle with someone else, then just as quickly be involved in a chat about … well, pretty much anything. More than once, this has proved very useful to me, and here’s an example.

When I interviewed for a job a few years ago, I was asked to wait in a waiting room until the time of the interview, so I pulled out a copy of a book I was reading at the time, Ron Chernow’s excellent biography of Alexander Hamilton. The person who was to interview me noticed this book and we started to discuss it, and from there the discussion branched out into many different areas. By the end of the interview, I had not been asked a single question that was really related to the job, but I got the job anyway. Later, I found out that the person interviewing me was blown away with how well-read I was and how well I could assemble the ideas, and that was enough.

If you choose stuff that makes your mind work, reading is far from a waste of time.

The post What, Why, and How I Read appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

As usual, I attacked the issue with a highlighter in hand, marking up anything that I want to think about later. Here are the ten most interesting points (from my perspective) that I dug out of the issue:

Health care stocks are potentially undervalued. Two things stuck out here: the S&P Healthcare index is undervalued (in terms of P/E ratio) compared to the average of the last ten years, and health care spending is going to boom in the coming years as the boomers get old.

Installing stone tile in the entryway creates a great first impression for your home – and can thus increase the value. This is a simple enough task that even I can do it, and stone-tiled entryways do look nice. I just didn’t make the connection to an increase in property value.

Exchange rates with South America are much better than with Europe. In other words, if you’re desiring an international trip this year, Buenos Aires is much cheaper than Paris.

For exchanging gifts with your significant other, agree on an annual cap so you don’t spend too much money on silly gifts. This would be a great idea – if I could get my wife to agree to it. She’d probably think I was trying to get out of gift-giving occasions.

If you have a Roth 401(k) available to you, take advantage of it when you’re young. When you’re young, you’re in a lower tax bracket, so you can effectively put less pre-tax money into a Roth 401(k) now (because it’s taxed less) than you will be able to later on in life (when you’re being taxed more). If you reach a salary that you think is higher than your retirement salary, put money in a regular pre-tax 401(k) instead.

If I were to invest in a managed mutual fund, the Vanguard Windsor II looks impressive. I had a lot of fun looking through their mutual fund listing and finding some interesting ones, like this one. It has only a 0.35% expense ratio and beats the S&P 500 both over one year and five years. Too bad it costs $10,000 to get in the front door, so I’ll mark it down as a “someday.”

If you get a windfall, don’t invest it all in something risky. View it as a core of a potential nest egg and invest most of it in a similar fashion to your retirement money. That way, when things inevitably happen, you have money stowed away for the long run.

Are material goods really “abundance” or not? There’s a lengthy article that basically revolves around that question. Are we better off than our grandparents were at our age? We have much more impressive goodies and bigger homes, but does this stuff equate to a better life? I’m not convinced of it, considering the increased job riskiness that workers today face.

For my semi-traditional gift of a box of chocolate to my wife on Valentine’s Day, I might want to consider getting the Harry and David Grand Collection instead of the usual Godiva box. It’s a better deal and supposedly has better chocolate – Godiva has been going downhill lately, so I’ve been looking for another option.

Quote of the month, from Acorn Fund’s Ralph Wagner:

Being disciplined, being honest, having a set of rules and following them no matter what, thinking long term, controlling your emotions – these are all useful. But only so useful and only in part of life. You don’t want to treat your wife or your kids like an investment.

The post Money Magazine – February 2007 appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

My simple answer is no, but it comes with some strings attached.

Let’s address personal finance books first. Personal finance books have a huge advantage over blogs: the continued narrative. A book can cover a specific topic with a depth that is far outside the normal realm of a blog. Even books that break things down into a series of tips still benefit from the advantage of having these tips available always in a specific order, with a coherent and cohesive voice and perspective. In short, personal finance books are better than personal finance blogs because they can address specific topics in depth.

Now, what about personal finance magazines? Much like blogs, individual issues of financial magazines cover a variety of personal finance issues, and the individual pieces, though longer than a typical blog (The Simple Dollar is a wordy semi-exception to this “rule”), are relatively short and quickly digestible. There’s only one real advantage that personal finance magazines have over blogs, and that’s the strong editorial staff. Almost every blog you read has a writing and editorial staff of one. Take out an issue of Money Magazine and take a look at the writing and editorial staff there: a lot of people. This means that individual articles (at least, the print ones – I’m not talking about their websites) are pored over carefully. Not only this, a blog writer is stuck with only a single voice: a financial magazine has a wide variety of voices. In short, personal finance magazines are better than personal finance blogs because of the breadth of different voices and perspectives and the editorial quality.

So why bother reading personal finance blogs at all? The core of the matter is that there are several key roles that blogs fulfill that are simply outside of the realm of personal finance books and magazines. Here are a few of them:

Timeliness Blogs can discuss events as they happen. Print media has a much, much longer lead time and thus must rely on more in-depth reporting to have anything worthwhile to say.

Unfettered voices This is my blog. I can say what I want. Print media has to worry about advertisers, public relations, lawyers, and so forth.

Fact-checking No matter how good the fact-checking is, mainstream media messes up sometimes; it’s inevitable. Blogs are more error-prone, but with so many individual interested voices out there, blogs become a very powerful check against statements made against mainstream media. We can be the doubtful Thomases.

In short, personal finance books, magazines, and blogs are all complementary to each other. If you’re learning about personal finance and wish to be fully engaged, you should be utilizing all three resources.

This whole argument holds true when comparing any blog to mainstream media, to be honest. There are roles for both, and anyone who says that one should exist while the other should not is looking at it without a wide perspective.

The post Are Personal Finance Blogs A Suitable Replacement For Financial Books And Magazines? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.