I read a lot of material on personal finance for this blog, from at least one personal finance book a week to issues of Money, The Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, and so on. What might surprise you, though, is that most of my reading that really inspires me to write about money issues comes

A while back, I discussed five principles of deciding whether or not to subscribe to a magazine. Here they are, in nutshell form: 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

Recently, I downloaded the Consumer Action Handbook, an interesting 178 page document produced by the U.S. government’s General Services Administration. It’s an excellent free resource for basic consumer information of all kinds, including a huge collection of contact information for consumer advocates and customer service departments. I thought I’d give this free document a walk-through

I currently subscribe to seven magazines: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Mother Jones, Wired, Consumer Reports, and Money. That seems like a lot, but it’s actually down from the ten magazines I subscribed to before my son was born. Why so many magazine subscriptions? There are two reasons, really: one, I ask for them

This post isn’t strictly about personal finance; instead, it serves to answer a question that a lot of readers have asked me over the past few months. What do I read? How do I read? Why do I read? Instead of having a “Simple Dollar reading week,” I tried to compress all of this information

In the May 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine (which should be on newsstands shortly – I am a subscriber), a fascinating cover article appears entitled “Manufacturing Depression: A Journey into the Economy of Melancholy.” Written by Gary Greenberg, a psychotherapist, the article’s main idea is that true depression is actually an extremely rare event and

Over at Dethroner, Joel is going off on some of the content of Details magazine. Here’s the offending quote in question (from this Details article): Clinging to tradition is your prerogative. Go ahead and refuse to trade in your “perfectly good” 2001 Lexus; shampoo with Pert Plus even though something in a better-looking bottle might

Today, my wife and I spent an hour at a bookstore waiting to meet some acquaintances. As I usually do, I browsed the magazine rack looking for current personal finance magazines when my eyes stumbled upon Make. For those unfamiliar, Make is a relatively new magazine that focuses exclusively on do-it-yourself technology projects, something that

I was recently complaining loudly in the comments section of a political blog about the contradictory information one will find in different segments of the mainstream media when I began to consider what information sources that I actually trust. For example, the only news source that I generally trust is National Public Radio and even

In my area, there are three weekly “alternative” newspapers, supported by advertisements, that can be picked up for free in the entrance to the local grocery stores. I used to be (at best) peripherally aware of the existence of these newspapers; I’d just stroll right by them on my way in to do my shopping.