I am a relatively new blogger, and have been too busy blogging. The past two weeks I decided that I want to pay some tributes to all of my fellow personal finance bloggers, all of them are both my dear fellows and my fierce competitors. In fact, I really wish that I had more time to visit as many sites as I could, and read as many articles as I could. Unfortunately, time is the only one thing that you just can’t buy more. I have been really staying up late until 2am, and getting up really early in the morning, sometimes 5am for either my 9-month old baby or for my blog. My wife said that this will be one of the most stupid and/or the least profitable venture that I undertake in my life. I kind of agree, but still hope to prove her wrong. Yeah, so far, after 49 posts almost daily in about a month and half, I have finally earned some $5 from AdSense. I don’t even want to calculate my hourly rate on that. However, I’m pretty proud of myself of what I have achieved so far on my blog.
Actually, I must confess here that I should have visited all of my fellows’ sites long time ago, and more often too. But I rushed my website out before April 17 tax deadline, because I had been working day & night for almost two months on perfecting my java codes to get the tax, housing, and retirement calculators to work. I simply don’t want them to “miss” the tax deadline, and be left in oblivion. Well, you know what happened. Limbo is where they belong, as least right now. Once my PF site was up and running. It’s like there was no turning back. It’s post after post after post, and daily scratching of my head and hoping that another great white rabbit will jump out. Is this the blogger’s life or rather no-life? Well, as you can see from my website, that there hasn’t been much time spent on graphics or aethestic appeals and very few ads. But since this is a blog, I am determined to be disciplined, and stick to roughly one post per day no matter what. I will fix up my website as time goes on. Okay, enough of my confession, I want to share my random personal finance web surfing with you:
- On Free Money Finance: I asked the FMF on how to evaluate management of public companies.
- On Consumerism Commentary: I fully agreed with Flexo’s keen observation on China’s bad loan.
- On City Girl’s Financial Blog: I concur with Cecilia’s observation that INGDirect is falling behind on the interest rate competition.
- On The Dividend Guy: The Dividend Guy’s anecdote of some telecom guy investing 25% of his portfolio into junior oils really made me rethink about the commodity market investing.
- On Blogging Away Debt: I noticed her credit interest rate seems to be some 16% APR! I was glad to hear that she will be doing balance transfer to lower it.
- On MyMoneyForest: I thoroughly enjoyed his outdoor pictures, and left a note on his cell phone plan for my cheap, or too cheap $3.21/mo pre-paid plan.
- On Financial Train Wreck: I ranted about the million dollar housing price in California, and envied their $400K house completely.
- On Financial Relfections: I warned him about an ethanol stock pick PEIX by Dilbert’s, which was recently sold out by a source that I know.
- On 2million: I gave him a late happy birthday, and a potential tax tip for his temporary assignment to Poughkeepsie, NY.
- On Blueprint for Financial Prosperity: I studied his list of 10 Fastest Growing Jobs and was pretty sure that none of them can be out-sourced.
- On 2 Retire at 50: He signed up a program called Ether. You got to visit his blog to find out more. It sounded like a pretty good money-making opportunity for many kinds of expertise.
- On 2 Cents Worth: I commented on his “work more…” article on retirement about the financial benefit of working longer.
- On My Personal Finance Blog: I asked him about whether he has received his $50 gift card on the effective 7.5% APY Netbank CD because I haven’t.
- On American Dollar: Congratulate on his new job with double the salary.
- On FiveCentNickel: After checking out his experience of shady jewelry sale, I shared my experience of shopping at going-out-of-business stores without being able to find any deals.
- On Experiments in Finance: I finally find someone who is not so enchanted by diamonds. Yeah, “when did diamond engagement rings become standard?”
- On Investing the Middle Way: If you invest in the commodity stocks, it is a must read. ML is such a keener trader compared to me.
- On Moomin Valley: You get to read from the latest analysis from a real economic professor, instead of reading from a boring textbook.
- On Get Rich Slowly: If you want to sell on Ebay, this is it: 13 steps to profitable auctions.
- On Investorial: You can find out how Einstein thinks about interest compounding.
- On It’s Just Money: The Investor Mistake series is definitely worth a read.
- On Money Dummy Getting Smarter: There is a $100 reward for opening a credit card.
- On Kirby On Finance: You can read his comments on Monster.com for fresh graduates.
- At last, on the new MillionDollarGoal: I didn’t leave any comments. Initially, I was really happy to see Clint back to the PF circle. But after spending almost an hour studying the writing style, site, and advertisement designs, I became convinced that this new MillionDollarGoal is not from Clint, who hosted the Carnival of Personal Finance #45. I must say that the owner of the new milliondollargoal.blogspot.com is quite business-savvy by inheriting a previously well-recognized web address. He even inherited all the old feeds in pfblogs.org. I don’t know if that is possible, but I think at least he should get a different feed at pfblogs.org. It is just tremendous amount of work to write every PF article. Building up all the web traffics is another gigantic task. Forgive me, the new MillionDollarGoal, that this week only, I can’t make myself to recognize your achievement as a PF blogger. In all fairness, I am not much better than you. And I do sincerely hope that your blog will be a good blog on its own.
Hey, Clint, if you’re still out there, my sharing proposal to you still stands. I haven’t deleted the account that I created for you, and you know the password. Send me an email if you lost it and need it.
I admire every site that I have visited or will be visiting. All the PF bloggers out there are the most hard-working people that I’ve ever encountered. Having coming so far as to have a PF website, already puts the owners of the blogs as one of the rarest breed among the general population. I will collect the best articles on various PF sites, and put out a link post as time goes on. But if you are in the list of pfblogs.org, you can surely count on my visit. Big or small, new or old, I admire you all. (On my last count, I still yet to visit 59 PF sites that have pfblog star attached to it. And I haven’t counted several hundred others that don’t have stars.)
P.S. By the way, I sincerely apologize to anyone who is offended by the name of my website. I never intended to piss off any of my dear fellows. It was simply a marketing whiz based on a true story. And for the lack of a better name, I picked it. As you are aware of, there are so just certain financial words and permutations. And so many creative names are already picked and assembled. Mine probably ranked quite low for the creativity.
