In this post I’ll briefly review some personal finance and investment blogs that have recently caught my attention. Some are still fairly young (less than 3 months old), others are older but notable for their special angle, quality or focus. After each blog name I’ll post their date of inception as best that I can tell (in parentheses), followed by a brief description of the blog. Here they are, in no particular order:

Some Newly Established Blogs

Pushing Thirty (May 2008)- Pushing Thirty is from Alberta (Canada), the work of “a twenty-something single female seeking financial independence in this credit abundant world.” Topics covered include budgeting; Air Miles and coupons; credit; shopping savings; and debt reduction. You can also track her progress on eliminating student debt, credit lines, and building up her emergency fund. Overall, Pushing30 has got off to a great start.
MillionaireWithAdSense (June 2008) -This blog is a blatantly bald “diary of an attempt to get one million dollars per year using a single blog.” Jason’s plan is to do this using AdSense alone. Multiple daily posts and great tips on improving your traffic; other sources of promotion. Start watching now! He’s already making $2.16/day (he started the blog on June 1).
Financial Jesus (May 2008) - Financial Jesus – who can forget a name like that? Great choice for a blog and domain name. From Financial Jesus himself, “this site is about how to make money online, how to reach your wildest goals and dreams and how to succeed in online marketing.” He explores some scientific research, including money psychology and behavioural economics. Great photos; updated frequently. The blog is from Estonia – a nice addition to the dominance of Canadian and American pf blogs.
Fresh Prince of Investing (May 2008) - A blog by Jay Zalowitz (Seton Hall University) that focuses (so far) on hot stocks and the usual giants like Apple, RIM. This blog is stil very new, but one is always intrigued to see if it lives up to its byline: “I may not be the king, but I’m next in line.” Features: shows stocks in his portfolio; has translations for each page. So far has 10 subscribers.
Engineer A Debt Free Life (April 2008) - As the author (from Canada, moved to the U.S.) explains it: “As an engineer, I think my way out of problems for a living, so I applied my methods to debt elimination.” Topics covered include savings, discounts, shopping deals, lots of links to free stuff, surveys that pay, etc. Madsow isn’t quite 30 but he’s done alot and draws on his experience in this blog.

Blogs that Might Be of Interest

Bloggers that have been around might already know some of these. If so, hopefully this can just be a little reminder of some blogs out there and will show you that they still exist and are still up and running. Again, these are in no particular order:

The Art of Growing Money (March 2005) - This is a fairly slick looking blog run by a young trader (Decipher Labs) in Singapore, but it is still subscriber-young (at 8 readers on feedburner). But the blog is in the top ratings on Yahoo and has had half a million visitors. The author’s goal is passive income for financial freedom. Decipher Labs also runs several other, related blogs on blogger.
The Happy Rock (April 2007) -I can’t believe I didn’t come across this blog sooner. It’s slogan is “Change Yourself, Change Your Wealth.” I like it! A very nice, smooth look. 334 feedburner readers. This blog appears to be quite professional, serious and ambitious. They’re also hiring a writer! They have money! For inquiries, talk to Frank (Rock), a software engineer working in South Jersey.
Earn on the Side (February 2008) - “Earn On The Side is a place you can come to get ideas for how to make money at home, in your spare time, or on the go.” I hadn’t come across this one yet, either, but it looks quite valuable. There are tons of ways to make extra cash on this site - and it’s NOT about blogging for money. There are some seriously creative ideas in here. Mystery shopping, freebies, paid surveys, sweepstakes, and more.
Investment Guru (May 2005) - If you want to tap into Indian markets, this is a great place to start. Rajesh - a chartered accountant from Jaipur - is linked up here with a number of other Indian financial blogs as well. The site largely covers stock picks and analysis. I’ll be going back here for sure.
Indian Stock Markets Revealed (December 2007 - possibly earlier) - This is another angle on the Indian markets - not the best blog title, but the site is very informative. Includes real-time ticker from the Bombay Stock exchange. Warning, though: some of these pages take a while to load, with all the plugins and widgets (I’m not even sure what else) taking up a lot of the bandwidth, possibly interfering with your current browser if you have more than one window open. For that reason I can’t feasibly scroll back to get to his earliest posts.

So there you have it - these are some of the blogs that I’ll be returning to in the future for one reason or another. This is a small sample and was certainly not meant to be a comprehensive survey of all new blogs (who could do that?). If you have a new blog you’d like me to take a look at, just send me the link or post below. These blogs are just some that I have recently come across and decided to mention here. Let me know what you think! Besides, in the spirit of improving everyone’s traffic it’s also nice to get a mention here and there. Maybe someday I’ll have thousands of extra dollars that I can use for dolling out awards of my choice!:)

Can’t remember now how I ended up thinking about this, it was in a comment I made on someone’s blog - or it might have been while reading about the audaciously ambitious adventure of Jason Coulls over at MillionaireWithAdSense (a fellow Canadian; [oops; he's actually British] there’s something about Canadians and crazy online money-making adventures, maybe? Remember Kyle MacDonald and “One Red Paperclip“? :)).

The Oldest Personal Finance Blog

This should get some of you scratching your head. Think you know which it is? The Simple Dollar? Get Rich Slowly? Blueprint for Financial Prosperity? And how old do you think the blog is? Two years? Three years? Well, here’s what I found. Do contact me if you learn/know differently: comment on it down below. A very interesting fact is that the longer you’re in the blog business does not necessarily translate into how many subscribers you have. More recent blogs can easily have more subscribers than the oldest ones.

Consumerism Commentary: one of the biggest PF blogs out there, this was begun quite early. July 2003! And it’s still on its own site. 5466 subscribers.
Blueprint for Financial Prosperity: this site was originally Ease of Travel; begun in November, 2003. On January 31, 2005, it moved over to where it is now at Bargaineering.com. It’s interesting because although it has been around longer (much longer, in blog terms) than Get Rich Slowly, you can see how fewer subscribers it has.
Free Money Finance: since April 2005. Subscribers: ?
Get Rich Slowly: on its own website since April 9, 2006 (looks like previous posts may have been deleted. J.D., when did you start your blog?). ***** Subscribers: 57,066.*****
Lazy Man and Money: begun May 2006. Currently has 2534 subscribers.
The Digerati Life: begun two years ago in July 2006, but doesn’t have the same subscriber count as The Simple Dollar and other giants. 3123 subscribers.
Generation X Finance: since at least October 2006. Has 2588 subscribers.
The Simple Dollar: on its own website since October 30, 2006 (I’m not sure about records before that). Has 33,275 subscribers.

Have I missed your blog? Know of an older one, or a personal finance blog with more subscribers?
I should also emphasize that just because a blog has more subscribers or has or has not been around as long as another blog - by any of this I don’t mean to judge the quality of the blog itself.

How Long Does a (PF) Blog Live?

What about blogs that have hit the dirt? If you peruse through old links, you’ll see a few that lost their steam or just grew into different projects. From this, can we infer that blogs have a certain lifespan? 4 years? 5 years? After all, it does take a lot of work to keep one up. I can’t tell you how many dead blogs I’ve come across - many of them, of course, admitted that they were not that interested in blogging anymore anyway, or something to that effect. For example, Grad Money Matters took a break for a few months before doing a couple of guest posts recently. She has 509 subscribers. Other blogs like Dividends Matter don’t update very frequently but still seem to rank high - is it because of the lingering effect of the traffic they once brought in? I’d like to hear your stories of other blogs you’ve noticed come and go - that is, blogs that once were really happening. Of course there are hundreds of blogs that get started but nothing happens to them at all.

It would be interesting to know if a similar fractal metric applies to the lifespans of blogs as it does to the lifespans of other new business start-ups. They say 5 years is a critical mark in small business. What about blogging? Is it 5 months? One other blogger said it was five months before she started bringing in income from her site. Of course, the income was not her purpose in the first place.

It will be interesting indeed to see how the future of finance blogs develops. You know, there are people doing their PhDs on this as we speak…

A reader recently brought it to my attention that the site is not displaying properly in his Firefox and Explorer browsers. Does it look ok to you? For him, the far right sidebar was not being displayed properly, but was showing up beneath the posts.

This happens for me if I resize my browser to be smaller…. then the sidebars don’t fit and they try to fit below the posts instead. If this happens for you, try resizing your browser to maximum. If that doesn’t work, are you using a small monitor? I believe my monitor is a 17″ and this shows up fine.

I think I need to know more php code in order to prevent my sidebars from moving down like that. Is this the difference between fluid and fixed sidebars? Or is it just the firefox browser? Because my firefox browser also tries to rearrange content in the window when you make the browser smaller. I’d appreciate anyone’s feedback if you know about php and/or this browser resizing issue.

And please let me know if you are having other browser/viewing problems with my blog. I’d like to know how to fix it if it’s something on my end. Thanks very much for all your feedback!