For many, many years, Sports Illustrated was the home of the best in sports essays. For many years, I was a faithful subscriber, and when an issue would arrive in the mailbox, I’d quickly turn to the long article (usually the last one in the issue) and get absorbed into a great story that, at the same time, usually taught me lessons about humanity as well. (Nowadays, I usually read essays online and check out the annual Best American Sports Writing paperback).

A few years ago, a family member gave me a copy of Sports Illustrated’s Fifty Years of Great Writing. Simply put, it was a collection of some of the best essays ever published in Sports Illustrated.

Needless to say, I devoured it. Multiple times, actually.

Recently, I came across this volume while cleaning and found myself engrossed in these essays once again. I read several, then decided to do a bit of research into something I read in one of them. I fired up Google, did a search, and discovered something interesting: the essay’s text was available for free online!

So I spent some time locating all of the essays included in the book and saving them for future reference on my computer. Then, I realized that there are a lot of Simple Dollar readers who might enjoy the same thing.

Thus, here are the fifty two essays included in Sports Illustrated’s Fifty Years of Great Writing, free for your own enjoyment. You might be surprised at some of the literary heavy hitters here – Steinbeck, Faulkner, DeLillo. Many of these are among the very best sportswriting I’ve ever read. I hope you get as much enjoyment out of these as I have.

The Players
The Boxer and the Blonde by Frank Deford
Yogi by Roy Blount Jr.
The Last Angry Men by Rick Telander
The Year, The Moment and Johnny Podres by Robert Creamer
Gifts That God Didn’t Give by John Papanek
All the Rage by Richard Hoffer
The Ring Leader by Frank Deford

Main Events
“Lawdy, Lawdy, He’s Great” by Mark Kram
There’s Never Been An Open Like It by Dan Jenkins
The Day Bobby Hit the Home Run by Roger Kahn
A Pay Night for Old Archie by Budd Schulberg

Sweet Spots
Finally, We Were Left Alone, Just Me And My Bike by Thomas McGuane
A Personalized History Of Scottish Golf Or You’ll Not Do That Here, Laddie by Dan Jenkins
The Univesrity of Eighth Avenue and Part II by A. J. Liebling
Sons of the Wind by Kenny Moore
Road Swing by Steve Rushin

Wild Kingdom
Mirror of My Mood by Bil Gilbert
Snakes Alive! by Jeff MacGregor
Pure Heart by William Nack
Grim Reapers of the Land’s Bounty by Jim Harrison
We Are Destroying Our National Parks by Wallace Stegner

Supporting Players
“There Ain’t No Others Like Me” by Mark Kram
Master of the Joyful Illusion by William Barry Furlong
The Coach and His Champion by Alexander Wolff
“I Managed Good, But Boy Did They Play Bad” by Gilbert Rogin
Baseball’s Babbling Brook by Huston Horn

Playing for Laughs
Hype (Absolutely, Positively the Greatest Article Ever Written!) by Bruce Newman
‘Ring Tossed by Steve Rushin
We All Had a Ball by Roy Blount Jr.
The Curious Case of Sidd Finch by George Plimpton
Lake Wobegon Games by Garrison Keillor
Worst Baseball Team Ever by Jimmy Breslin
On the Winter Tour by Herbert Warren Wind

Personal Fouls
The Case Against Brian Spencer by Pete Dexter
Total Loss Weekend by Don DeLillo
This Is the Game of the Name by Franz Lidz
Crime and Punishment by Gary Smith
Broken Promise by S.L. Price
O Unlucky Man by William Nack

Music to the Ear
King of the Sports Page by Rick Reilly
Then My Arm Glassed Up by John Steinbeck
Heavyweight Championship Of The Word by Jeff MacGregor
Would You Let This Man Interview You? by Myron Cope
The Big Wind in Chicago by Ron Fimrite
Kentucky: May: Saturday by William Faulkner

Examined Lives
Farewell, Teddy Ballgame by Leigh Montville
The Ripples From Little Lake Nellie by Gary Smith
The Best Years of His Life by John Ed Bradley
He’s Burning to Be a Success by John Underwood
Laughing on the Outside by John Schulian
The Best There Ever Was by Frank Deford

The post Sports Illustrated’s Fifty Years of Great Writing – Free! appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Obviously, Dunleavey’s situation made me think about my own. I often relate details of my own personal financial situation on here and I know that if I were to suddenly go buy a McMansion, a lot of readers would be really confused because it doesn’t match up well with what I’ve been talking about for a long time.

It’s reasonable to believe that a personal finance writer would likely be able to make a good personal finance decision for themselves. If I were to buy a major house upgrade right now, it would be because I had the money available to buy it. I would not enter into a financial situation on the spur of the moment.

On the other hand, my exact reasons for making such a move – and the exact mechanisms for doing it – might not be something I’d want to discuss. Let’s say, for example, I received a financial settlement of some sort that I didn’t feel was appropriate to discuss on The Simple Dollar – or that I was legally barred from discussing. I would likely mention the purchase of the house, but I wouldn’t be able to really mention how I paid for it.

Of course, the other option is to simply not mention financial situations that don’t match up with what I’m talking about – in other words, selective editing. With the exception of personal issues, I don’t really do this – it’s basically too difficult to engage in an “alternate reality” when talking about one’s personal finances. I occasionally blur some things to protect privacy, but that’s about all – it’s much easier (and more honest) to speak the truth and come from the heart than to exclude or alter big swaths of the story.

It all comes down to establishing trust. I think that the real issue here is that some of Dunleavey’s readers don’t trust her, for whatever reason. No writer is trusted absolutely, of course, but honesty generally comes through in writing and is clear to readers over time.

Regular readers here know that I usually speak my mind and admit my faults, but that I’m also willing to argue if I feel strongly about something. That’s honest and real, and I think that a big reason why I’ve found so many readers is because of that honesty and reality. There is a level of trust there, and it’s because of that trust that I’ve done things like dropping most of my ads – I value the trust more than I value some short term income. What are my rewards for that? A loyal readership, one that will stick with the site for the long haul and are more likely to trust me if I make a recommendation or a suggestion.

That’s not a conclusion that some writers come to, but that’s not a reason to mistrust them. The reason that it’s worthwhile to read different views on things like personal finance is that you get different perspectives. Some writers focus on the prose – others focus on researching their topics quite well – still others focus on humanizing the topic. There are, of course, some who focus on maximizing the immediate dollar, too, and will write whatever will put a dollar in their pocket the fastest.

The value comes in reading lots of ideas and figuring out which ones are right for you. You may come to trust some writers more than others – that’s completely normal. But that doesn’t mean that the writers who are less forward about their own personal finances don’t have anything valuable to say, and it doesn’t mean that the people who gaze at their own navels a lot are wasting time, either. They’re both valuable.

I think the biggest problem that readers had with Dunleavey’s house purchase is that it seemed very rushed and sudden. After spending a lot of time talking about personal finances and using some personal examples that indicated that they were in “debt repayment” mode, the house purchase was abruptly put out there without any clear explanation about it, and in the way she wrote about it, I think Dunleavey overestimated the trust she had built with her readership.

So what would I have done in Dunleavey’s shoes? First of all, I would have been absolutely sure that I could afford the house according to my own definition of “affording the house.” By some definitions, anyone who uses a mortgage can’t really afford a house, for example, but I’m not that hardcore. On the other hand, taking out a mortgage for five times your annual salary without any money in the bank is pretty clearly a sign you can’t afford it. The actual line is somewhere in the middle.

Assuming that I could afford it, I would probably lay out the whole decision in writing and turn it into a post on here before pulling the trigger. More than once over the last year, readers have been invaluable at seeing flaws in my own thinking and also encouraging me to think about things differently. That’s another aspect of the “trust” relationship – it’s sometimes a two way street.

At that point, if everything seemed appropriate, I would have moved forward with the buy.

If I was forced into a situation where I had to make a move quickly, I would probably say “no” unless I was absolutely sure of the move, and if I said “yes,” I probably wouldn’t abruptly write about it here and just state that I could somehow magically afford it when there’s a clear history that I couldn’t. Instead, I would probably carefully analyze the decision over time on The Simple Dollar, looking at the factors that made me say “yes” quickly, and try to really piece together why I did it rather than just stating that it was the right thing to do.

Writing about personal finance sometimes turns out to be harder than you might think.

The post Practicing What You Preach: Should A Personal Financial Writer Be Expected To Follow Their Own Message? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

One of the biggest parts of being a knowledge worker is knowing how to communicate that knowledge well to others. This is true for everyone from the CEO down to the low-level office staff, from programmers to marketers – in other words, for a large portion of the people in the first world today.

I confess that a sizeable chunk of any basic nonfiction writing talent I have came from reading and re-reading and practicing the stuff found in On Writing Well. I had a stained used-book-store copy of this in high school, where I used the ideas inside and practiced them in my journals (I’ve kept a daily journal since January 1, 1991 – at the age of twelve – and there’s some seriously crazy stuff in there). Another copy got me through college, and yet another one has since fallen into my hands. The little techniques I use to crank out so much writing (and the stuff here is far from the total amount of writing I do) largely came from this book.

But just like some of my other favorite personal development books (Getting Things Done and Never Eat Alone immediately spring to mind), On Writing Well seems pretty useless unless you actually sit down and apply this stuff to your life over and over again. Only after repeated uses do you begin to see the little pieces begin to crank together like an engine of sorts, a mental driver that takes the ideas in your head and commits them to paper.

Let’s dig in, shall we?

A Look At On Writing Well

Part I – Principles

1. The Transaction
Most people view writing as a task or as merely a presentation of ideas. The truth is that writing actually goes much deeper than that, and it’s why I’ll often read articles in The New Yorker about subjects I’d never seek out. Great writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, is an expression of the author, and an author’s passion and excitement and connection to the subject comes through in the writing. The transaction between writer and reader is the sharing of this passion, and it is that passion that will keep a reader reading.

2. Simplicity
If you take nothing else from this book, take this: most writing is full of unnecessary words and those extra words make it harder and less enjoyable to read. I often fall victim to this, especially when writing for The Simple Dollar – I’ll write a phrase with too many words in it and the idea I’m trying to present becomes less clear.

3. Clutter
If you read through something for someone else and are getting bored and bogged down in the writing, try noting in some fashion (I often use the color tool in Word) as many words and phrases as possible while letting the basic idea shine through. You can also apply this to your own writing, but I find that doing it immediately after writing something is hard to do. The key is to get rid of clutter and unnecessary words that do nothing but distract the reader.

4. Style
“But if I eliminate so many words, how will I have any style?” The author uses the analogy of writing as woodworking – if you make all sorts of fanciful designs in the board but fail to nail it together well or cut the boards to the right shape, you wind up with pretty junk. The goal of stripping the writing down to the bare essentials is to make sure that what you’re saying actually gets across – in other words, ensuring that you’ve cut the boards right and are nailing it together well. A few elements of style can serve as elegant finishing to the piece, but the structure needs to be firmly built before you even start with stylistic elements.

5. The Audience
Another crucial basic factor is who you are writing for. Over and over again, I’ve found it useful for me to actually spend some time thinking about who my audience is with a particular piece of writing and describing that audience in detail. How old are they? What are their interests? Once I have that, what pieces of the item I’m writing about can I focus on to keep this piece interesting to them? Doing this can often take an average piece and really make it zing.

6. Words
One sure way to ensure that your writing is boring is to use the same words everyone else uses. This chapter uses a brilliant example from a newspaper to show how even the most exciting event can be made boring by using boring words. How can you avoid this? Try expanding your vocabulary regularly and using these words in conversation – if you see it in print more than once, you should learn it and be willing to use it. Use a dictionary and a thesaurus as well to play with word choices in sentences.

7. Usage
This chapter is essentially a very, very tight compression of the book Words That Work – word choice makes all the difference. Some words make you look cheap, while others make you look educated. Some words come off as friendly, others aggressive. What tone do you want to set? I felt this topic was covered too briefly here, so if you find On Writing Well a useful tool (and I do), I’d really recommend Words That Work as a supplement.

Part II – Methods

8. Unity
Unity is an area of writing where a single-author blog can really excel – I think it’s the one area where blog writing can blow away most things in the traditional publishing world. Unity refers to a consistency in the writing – a consistent voice, a consistent use of language, and so on. Such consistency means that your reader is in tune with you. For example, the perspective of The Simple Dollar is pretty clear to anyone who digs around in the archives for a while – personal finance and development talk from a twentysomething who has recently escaped debt. The entire blog is united behind this simple topic. Because it’s written by a single writer (and I use the same conversational tone all the time), it also has a great deal of unity of language. Thus, there’s a sense of familiarity for regular readers. Zinsser says this very thing in this chapter, but actually just applies it to a newspaper writer who is responsible for two or three pieces a day.

9. The Lead and the Ending
One of the most personally influential books I’ve ever read in my life was Ogilvy on Advertising, which says that there’s one key point anyone who writes to attract an audience needs to remember: each sentence sells the reader on continuing on to the next one. Ogilvy was talking about ad copy, but that idea is true for any kind of writing. What does that mean, though? The first sentence in anything you write is the most important one, because it gets the reader to read the next one. And the more the person reads, the more of your idea that the reader gets. The ending mostly just serves to leave the reader with your biggest point in their back pocket.

10. Bits and Pieces
This chapter is basically just a long selection of very short bits on various aspects of writing. The most important one? Write what you love. I mean this dead seriously – write about the things that you enjoy the most and the passion will come right out. My advice to anyone out there who wants to improve their writing is to start a blog on that topic and commit to writing something daily. If you’re really passionate, you’ll find no end to things to write about, and it will be a constant way to improve your writing. Don’t know how to get started? I wrote a guide to help out.

Part III – Forms

11. Nonfiction as Literature
Many people think of writing as composing some great work of fictional literature, like writing the Great American Novel. Don’t. Nonfiction has just as much power to provoke thought and move the human spirit as fiction does. I’ve found that among the books that have profoundly shaken my life, there’s a roughly equal mix of fiction and nonfiction (of the ten books I named that changed my life, just three were fiction, but if I expanded that list to fifty or so, the split would be pretty close to even).

12. Writing About People: The Interview
The rest of this third part of On Writing Well focuses on techniques for specific types of writing, starting off with the art of writing about people and how to interview them. The advice includes not using a tape recorder (unless you’re doing a transcript), instead focusing on jotting down general things and only getting specific quotes exactly right. Another tip: after you’ve finished the interview and have pages full of scribbled notes, type them up immediately into some sort of neat form. I found that this was incredibly useful for me to do when I was in college, especially in humanities courses.

13. Writing About Places: The Travel Article
The real magic in writing about places is to find details that illustrate the bigger picture – and use only as many details as you need. The chapter gives a lot of little examples of this, where five or six details strung together paint a bigger picture and somehow your mind just fills in the other details, even though they’re not explicitly described. Great travel writing enables you to visualize a place in rich detail – boring travel writing just lists the things you can do there.

14. Writing About Yourself: The Memoir
Interestingly, the tips for writing a memoir are much the same as writing about travel: focus on the details that together spell out a bigger picture. Focus on specific scenes and describe them in detail, scenes that as they’re played out illustrate some truth about your life. Don’t focus on dry listings of facts – instead, focus on painting in details on those things of greatest importance, as those are the ones that will be remembered. Spend ten pages on a life-changing conversation, but don’t worry about listing a big pile of relatives.

15. Science and Technology
Many writers balk at writing about science and technology out of fear and a lack of understanding of the topic, but science for a general audience is actually easy. Just isolate one central fact (probably the most interesting one), explain how it’s new and set it apart from what’s already known, and relate that fact to everyday life – or at least to things that an average reader might care about.

16. Business Writing: Writing in Your Job
When you’re writing for work, keep one thing in mind: how does this piece of writing improve the bottom line of the company? Every sentence you write should follow this narrative. This is true for any business that you might be a part of – how does this piece of writing improve my bottom line?

17. Sports
Zinsser argues here that many sportswriters are lazy, using a large pile of tried-and-true cliches to make their writing seem vibrant, but in actuality it’s dry and boring. The best sports writing kicks all the walls down and goes back to that basic framework, telling exactly what happened in clear terms, and combines elements of the interview and the travelogue to create a clear picture of both the place and the people involved.

18. Writing About The Arts: Critics and Columnists
I have to agree with Zinsser’s perspective here as well: the best writing about the arts is one that forms a clear opinion and doesn’t water it down with evasion and escape. If you finish up (or even include) phrases like “time will tell” or “it remains to be seen” or “on the other hand” when discussing a work of art, you’re essentially destroying your own piece. Art is about emotion and being wishy-washy isn’t an emotion at all.

19. Humor
The best humor is usually just a heightening of the truth. In fact, if you want to be a humor writer, Zinsser basically recommends taking a piece of real writing that you consider indicative of a social trend and just amplify it to comic proportions. This is actually the source of much humorous writing – at its core, it’s merely a retelling of something that is true with a few of the elements thrown out of proportion.

Part IV – Attitudes

20. The Sound of Your Voice
Perhaps the best single piece of advice in the entire book appears in this chapter: if you want to know if the way you’re writing sounds any good, read the entire thing aloud and see if it sounds right to you. If it doesn’t, something is off – good text should flow well when read aloud. Try reading a paragraph aloud of anything you’ve written, then use that as the basis for self-editing. You’ll often find that it improves the writing.

21. Enjoyment, Fear and Confidence
Most writers of nonfiction fear their topics, at least to some degree. They’re afraid of getting an assignment on a subject they don’t understand or – even worse – selecting a topic themselves and butchering it. Ditch that fear. Instead, know what specific things you’re good at (which of your articles have been proclaimed to be the best? Why is that?) and focus on things that maximize your strengths, even if you don’t necessarily know the topic. The best situation, actually, is a topic that excites you but that you don’t know a lot about – you can enjoy yourself along the way. The only way to build confidence in writing about many topics is… to write about many topics.

22. The Tyranny of the Final Product
If you’re sitting there visualizing your final article in the pages of Sports Illustrated or The New Yorker and it’s so clear that you can almost smell the ink and see the typeface, then the article is likely going to be terrible. Instead, start from the opposite end, with just the vague germ of an idea, and build it from there. It’s that central idea that readers are after, not this grand vision of a layout in The Atlantic.

23. A Writer’s Decisions
This is basically a workshop chapter where Zinsser moves through the writing process with a small piece of his own. It basically highlights some of the lessons from earlier chapters and provides some insight into how they’re used in actually molding a piece from a basic idea into a finished article.

24. Write as Well as You Can
The book closes with this truism, one that very few people actually follow. When you turn in a piece of written work, make sure it is the best possible piece of writing that you can turn out. Your writing, when in print, will represent you to others and anything less than your best effort paints a worse picture of you. Give a piece of writing your love and time and it will always reward you.

Buy or Don’t Buy?

I spend a good portion of my “professional” time – at work and on the internet – writing. The tips in this book, almost without exception, are home runs, and if you really take them to heart and practice them, they’ll pay off for you over and over again. The key is to practice them, though – just reading this book won’t really help much at all.

If you write – at all – read this book and apply some of the wonderful material inside. It’s excellent from beginning to end, and your writing (a representation of you) will benefit greatly in the long run.

The post Review: On Writing Well appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

And that’s fine. I’m completely okay with disagreement – if I were not, I would tightly moderate comments and delete everything that wasn’t in 100% agreement with me. Visiting those links will make it very clear that I do no such thing.

However, it does bring up a very valuable point about blindly following the advice of any financial guru (myself included): don’t do it. By all means, use advice as a starting point, but never, ever fall into the trap of believing that what I say, or what Dave Ramsey says, or what Robert Kiyosaki says, or anyone else says, is the absolute final word and truth when it comes to a financial situation. The only person I might possibly attribute that level of trust to is Warren Buffett (for obvious reasons; read his Wikipedia entry), and I still think he overvalues Costco (their P/E ratio seems really high for their growth rate to me).

Here’s why (along with some tips on how to get more out of any piece of financial information).

No answers are absolute. There’s no financial issue that doesn’t have multiple facets. I try very hard to dig through many of them, but there are ones that I overlook – as do all other financial gurus. I’m no expert on the New York housing market, for example – and I don’t claim to be – but I’m still willing to offer my perspective on what I would do if I lived there. Is it the absolute correct path? Probably not. Is it one based on the principles that I’m constantly espousing? Yes, it is. In a nutshell, when you take someone’s advice, make sure you know the principles that the advice is based on. If you don’t know, ask. If you can’t ask or don’t get a good answer, don’t trust the advice.

You might not agree with the philosophy. I’m rather risk averse and I think frugality is a huge component of personal finance – I can be almost obsessive about it. On the other hand, Robert Kiyosaki is very, very far from risk averse, enough so that I consider his advice reckless (and I’m not afraid to criticize him for it). Perhaps you don’t agree with my underlying philosophy – again, that’s completely fine – but you should at least try to understand it. I read and wrote a lengthy review of Rich Dad, Poor Dad so that I could at least understand the philosophy. If something strikes you as wrong, try to figure out exactly why you find it to be wrong – usually, it’s a difference in fundamental philosophy and it’s worthwhile to at least understand other philosophies.

Do your own research. I do some posts on basic personal finance analysis and link to other tools here and there – those are so you can look at a piece of advice yourself if you want to and decide whether it’s right and you agree with it. If you don’t understand how something works, ask – if you don’t think a number comes out right in an article, try to figure it yourself. You’ll do nothing but improve your own understanding.

Recognize that no one is absolutely right. Absolute correctness doesn’t exist in this world. If you find yourself completely disavowing someone because you disagree on a point or two with that person, you’re going to have a hard time finding someone who you can talk to, listen to, and exchange ideas with. Accept that no one is absolutely right – including yourself – and be open to new ideas.

Personal finance is a beautiful topic laden with a lot of ideas, many of which contradict each other. The best I can do is try to overview everything I learn about and then apply those principles that work well for me – anything else would be fraud.

The post What To Do If You Disagree With The Simple Dollar – Or Any Other Financial Guru appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Now, given that this site focuses on personal finance issues, why do I feel the need to write about myself so much? It’s a question that some of my readers have hinted at in the past and also one that troubled me when I first started the site. I posted my Road to Financial Armageddon series very early on, but I considered it to be a pretty major act of hubris, so early on I didn’t post much else about my goals or values.

As time went on, though, I began to reconsider this stance for several reasons:

Goals and values are foundation pieces of personal finance. Decisions like what house to buy, when to retire, and so on are all choices deeply rooted in individual beliefs and desires. What do you want out of life? Would you prefer to live in a less expensive house and retire a few years earlier? Do you consider it worthwhile to buy a highly reliable but expensive car, or do you look solely for the bang for the buck? Is going into business yourself the best way to go, or is there too much risk for you? All of these questions have different valid answers – it depends on the values and goals of the person answering them.

My specific goals and values often shade my perspectives on the site. I’m not a financial planner – I’m a person figuring out my own financial path and sharing what I’ve learned that might be relevant to your life. Because of that, I recognize that my own goals and values shade the advice I give here on a regular basis. For example, I don’t look deeply into some small business opportunities because I find them to be overly risky, so my suggestions focus on small business with minimal risk and low capital investment (like blogging or home computer consulting). I also focus a lot on mutual fund investing because I’d rather spend the time needed to chase individual stock investments with my family – I know I’m passing up potential amazing gains here, but I’d rather spend that time with my wife and son, so I don’t follow individual stock picks much. Those are just two examples – there are lots of smaller examples of such shading around here.

That means in order to make my advice as clear as possible to everyone, I’m open about my values and goals and I try to connect them to my conclusions when I can. I could just toss up my financial opinions without such a framework, but I would be criticized for it and rightly so – the advice wouldn’t have a whole lot of value for many readers. Instead, by connecting what I’m saying to my own values and goals – and clearly wearing those values and goals on my sleeve – I create a situation where most readers (not all, unfortunately) can see the connection and apply it to their own life even if they don’t have the same values and goals.

This is why I mention defining your own values and goals so often: they strongly influence every financial decision that you make in your life whether it’s obvious or not. For instance, if early retirement is not important to you, then you are much less likely to build towards it.

A recent commenter on the site summed it up very well when he said the following:

Even though some of your priorities are different than mine, your clarity about your priorities and what it means to really *live* them in the choices you make, is really helping me see *my* priorities more clearly.

And that’s how it should be – that’s why I write The Simple Dollar.

The post Why Talking About Myself Is Important When Writing About Personal Finance appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

SEVEN FUNDS YOU MUST BUY NOW OR ELSE YOUR WALLET WILL DISINTEGRATE!
Warning Sign #1: Irrational promotion of specific financial products

Individual tips are great when they’re backed up by solid research and thorough investigations, but articles that trumpet specific tips above all are usually barely more than paid placements or writers hoping to drive up the value of their own funds. Back away slowly unless you see a lot of research and comparisons as to why you should buy these funds.

GET 350% RETURNS WITH ONLY 5 MINUTES WORK A WEEK!
Warning Sign #2: Little or no homework needed

If there was an easy way to get rich, everyone would do it. The truth is that people who beat markets do a ton of research and really understand the market inside and out. So why should you believe some joker who promises that you can get rich with only a tiny amount of research?

I, JEB WATKINS, MADE BILLIONS IN THE STOCK MARKET – AND YOU CAN, TOO!
Warning Sign #3: Bragging about record with no evidence

Some people will claim incredible returns and then believe that just because of the claim, you should listen to what they say, yet there is no data backing up these claims. If a great fund manager with results that can be proven makes big claims, I’ll listen; otherwise, why should I lend an ear to someone who expects me to believe in them because of their record – but can’t prove it?

BECOME A BILLIONAIRE GUARANTEED WITH THESE FIVE STEPS!
Warning Sign #4: Promises and guarantees that are beyond rationality

When someone makes a guarantee that can’t feasibly be kept (usually tied to incredible returns or a large amount of wealth), then that article is usually full of nonsense. There is no guarantee above the return of a treasury note, so to claim guaranteed wealth from investments is just bogus.

SAVE BIG MONEY BY BUYING AN LCD TV INSTEAD OF A PLASMA!
Warning Sign #5: Saving money by buying one version of a consumer good instead of another

When you go to a store and plunk down your credit card on anything outside of essentials, you’re doing the opposite of saving money. Buying a $3,000 television instead of a $4,000 one isn’t saving $1,000, it’s blowing $3,000 on something you don’t need.

MY SYSTEM BEAT THE S&P 500 BY 20% EACH OF THE LAST FIVE YEARS!
Warning Sign #6: Promises of a “system” that beats the market

If your “system” could beat the market time and time again, then why aren’t you working at Goldman Sachs instead of shilling your system in a print publication?

THE FUTURE AT OVERSHOE TECHNOLOGIES IS HOTTER THAN MAGMA!
Warning Sign #7: Overly glowing corporate profiles

If an article tells you nothing but the upside in a company, they’re not doing their research. No company lacks competitors or business issues, no matter what they try to claim.

INVESTING IN URANIUM HAS NETTED A 200% RETURN EACH YEAR SINCE 2000 – SO BUY NOW!
Warning Sign #8: Quoting incredible returns without discussing risk

Even if an investment is making incredible legitimate returns, there are reasons why not everyone is in it, and it usually comes down to risk. Why is this investment taking off, and why might it not continue along this path? If you can’t answer those questions, you’re not answering the question.

SAVE MONEY BY EATING 100 GHERKINS A WEEK!
Warning Sign #9: Frugal “tips” you can’t imagine anyone doing

I often read frugal articles that do reduce spending by an incredible amount but lead to a lifestyle that would be unbearable for many people in the West. Just because you can get a ton of turnips for a quarter doesn’t mean I want turnip pancakes for breakfast every day.

WE EVALUATE 9,500 FUNDS – AND TELL YOU THE TEN BEST!
Warning Sign #10: Huge amounts of investments evaluated at once

If one article evaluates a thousand funds, how well is each fund actually being analyzed? Even if a person spent an hour on each fund, that’s twenty five weeks of nothing but research for just one article. In other words, the greater likelihood is that the “evaluation” is just a number crunching and the “best” ones were ones that floated to the top due to a few metrics that the person invented.

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My conclusion? He’s the best overall columnist there by a wide margin. He writes about complex issues for a general audience with a tone that makes them seem incredibly simple, but rich enough to keep an intelligent person engaged. Here are ten reasons why I love Ben Stein:

January 8, 2007: Investing Strategies For The New Year
In just four paragraphs, he elegantly lays out how the weakening dollar affects the global stock market and makes a great, sensible case for investing in international funds, an issue that I’ve seen other writers burn pages on and not explain this clearly.

December 22, 2006: Success Is All In A Day’s Work
As an aspiring writer, this article gave me a lot of inspiration to keep The Simple Dollar going. In fact, I have the article printed out in my “inspiration” folder to read when I’m not feeling very confident as a writer (which actually happened just last weekend).

November 22, 2006: Lessons From An Economic Maestro
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the work of Milton Friedman and I consider myself nearly an expert on the “Chilean Miracle,” so I really enjoyed this application of Friedman’s life and teachings to our individual lives. Yes, market economics have a direct connection to your wallet.

October 13, 2006: The Art of (Killing) the Deal
Rather than listing stuff that you should be doing professionally, Ben makes a list of things that you shouldn’t be doing professionally – and adds a pretty healthy pinch of rationality and of humor to the mix.

June 23, 2006: Wise Words For Getting Ahead In Your Career
A continuation of his previous article (listed right below this one), I had to mention this because of his line about Hollywood execs: “There are a great many sick people here with serious rage problems.” I actually collect sentences I like for my own writing inspiration, and this is one of them.

June 9, 2006: How To Succeed In Hollywood – And Anywhere Else
This is perhaps the best collection of “get ahead” advice I’ve ever read in such a condensed, short package.

March 4, 2006: Standards Of Life In The Future: Think Grim
This is a pretty strong indictment of the lousier standards of customer service that seem to be becoming the norm. That’s actually why I often value customer service so highly on here; when you need some assistance, you should receive some healthy preferential treatment as a paying customer, not ignored by a receptionist or placed into automated phone hell. This is why I do business with Land’s End regularly, often recommend ING Direct, and so forth; their customer service is stellar.

February 17, 2006: Trade with China: More Gain Than Pain for Americans
As a free trade advocate (yes, even knowing it may be detrimental long term to my individual standard of living), I was pretty happy to see that Ben Stein was on the same page – and quite eloquent at laying out the case. I forwarded this article to many of my friends – and wound up in some pretty good discussions with a few of them.

February 3, 2006: Living Hand to Mouth – and Barely Getting By
This is a powerfully strong indictment of living paycheck to paycheck, with a very entertaining anecdote to start things off. I actually read this when I was going through my financial meltdown and it was one of my inspirations for turning things around.

December 12, 2005: Want Big Returns? Think Small
Here, Ben seems to be targeting younger investors who can afford to take some losses early on in order to hit on some big winners. How? By investing in small cap stocks.

Yes, I am a big fan of Ben Stein’s writing. I think he has a gift for making complex issues seem easy to grasp, but yet leaves plenty of meat on the bones to leave you thinking afterwards, and that’s exactly what I want when reading. I don’t want writing so dense that I need reference materials just to parse it, but I want it complex enough that I’ll think about it and my own curiosity will cause me to dig in further. Stein hits that sweet spot almost every time.

If you have any favorite Ben Stein-authored articles that I didn’t list here, please put a link to them in the comments for both me and the other readers to enjoy.

The post Ben Stein Is The Best Yahoo! Finance Columnist, Period: Here Are Ten Reasons Why 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.

The biggest aspect of it is that I never really stop writing, though I only mechanically involve myself in writing for a small period each day. I do this by jotting down my own ideas whenever I think of them throughout the day so that when it comes time for writing (for me, usually after my son is asleep), I already have all my ideas laid out before me.

I also keep the pressure off of myself by staying very far ahead in terms of finished posts. If I were to suddenly fall off the face of the earth, as of this writing, the posting schedule of The Simple Dollar would continue for eighteen days. This enables me to enjoy little pressure to get something done right now; if I get burnt out for a bit, I can take a break for a week without any damage to the site’s momentum.

The big question that many readers would ask at this point is what about writer’s block? It is something that hits almost every blogger at some point or another – what on earth do I write about next?

The first tactic that I use is research, research, research. I read periodicals, visit other websites, and read books on personal finance without any expectation of any writing topics. This works almost every time for me; given some time, I almost always find something that gets my fingers hopping.

If that fails, I actually ask for help, but not in the obvious “ask my readers for help on the ol’ blog” way that many people do. Instead, I visit messageboards and actually ask people what sort of money questions they’re wondering about and make up a few of my own (often, they’re the topics of posts already written but not yet posted). Almost always, I’ll find a list of potential topics and at least one or two of them is enough of a nugget to get me started.

If I’m still stymied, I take a break. I don’t look at The Simple Dollar or think about it for a few days. This is where the “advance posting” really helps me out, as it uses the days where I can’t stop writing to cover the days where I can’t squeak out a word.

These three techniques have always cleared away my writer’s block. The interesting part is that most of these techniques are good ways to help yourself through anything difficult in life, from deciding whether to buy a car or a house to making a change in your own investments. Writer’s block has taught me many lessons in life, often in areas where I would least expect it.

The post Curing Writer’s Block – And Other Mental Blocks appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

I personally use a Moleskine daily planner for my diary-keeping needs. Each page is quite large and lined just about perfectly for my writing style, meaning I have plenty of room on a given page to fill it up with my scattered thoughts and ideas. It also fits nicely inside my jacket and also inside my briefcase, which means I can carry it with me wherever I go with ease. In fact, I often use it as a combination daily planner / diary, which means that I’ll write events in advance on that day, then use that day’s entry page as a place to collect my thoughts.

It turns out that Moleskines are often used for similar purposes, but not necessarily as a personal finance record. In fact, it has much in common with the classic tradition of the commonplace book.

So what do I write about? I simply keep the diary on me during the day and when a thought occurs that I want to remember to look at in more detail later, I jot it down. If it’s an idea that I might be able to write about on The Simple Dollar, I circle it. The thoughts are quite often broken little pieces of information, usually written in a weird shorthand that only makes sense to me, but that’s fine; it’s my diary.

I don’t restrict myself to only financial thoughts; I also use it to record upcoming dates (birthdays, etc.) and thoughts on all sorts of topics – personal issues, politics, entertainment, and so on. I generally don’t write much with each entry, just enough so that I will recall it when I reflect on my entries later.

Quite often, I’ll find later that I don’t even recall coming up with an idea, but I’ve jotted it down and it turned out to be a good one. This happens quite often (multiple times each week), and this phenomenon alone has convinced me that using such a tool is a great benefit to organizing my thoughts.

I also use the diary to record unexpected minor expenses, such as last minute gift items, an unplanned meal out with acquaintances, or a spur-of-the-moment activity. This enables me to keep track of such expenses and match them up with my budget at the end of each month.

Every few days (when I have a bit of free time), I review the last few days’ worth of entries in detail. I read through the points and investigate those points which continue to intrigue me; I also enter those noted expenses in my personal ledger. I often find that the ideas that still intrigue me when reviewing the entries lead me down paths of investigation that I would never have considered without the diary.
In short, I use this Moleskine diary to keep track of my various thoughts and use them as a record for later investigation.
It goes beyond a simple diary for me and becomes something of a memorial to my thoughts, ones that I hope will push me onward to greater things.

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