1. I don’t care about their investing advice, which is about a third of the magazines’ content. In any given personal finance magazine, typically the middle third of the magazine is dedicated to columns on mutual fund and stock picks. I don’t even bother reading these columns, mainly because I am a proponent of index funds as opposed to managed mutual funds. Also, in the digital age if you are getting your stock picks from a print magazine you are probably way too late to the game. Think about how many people know about the virtues of these great stocks by the time it makes it into a printed magazine, and if you are reading it in print how many people read it in an online edition before you and how many other people are reading the exact same article you are.
2. Most personal finance magazine articles are geared towards those with relatively low levels of financial literacy. This may sound very arrogant of me, but one of the things that drives me nuts with a lot of personal finance magazines is that it seems like most of the content is geared towards the Dave Ramsey struggling with the basics crowd with very little geared towards those of us that already have the basics of personal finance down and are looking for ways to reach that next level of financial savvy. This is where I think the personal finance blogosphere is filling a huge gap left by the traditional media. I can learn a lot more from browsing a day’s worth of postings on pfblogs.org than I can from an entire year’s worth of Money magazine in part because…
3. So much of personal finance magazine content is repetitive. How many times do I need to read that rewards credit cards don’t make sense if I have to carry a balance because of higher interest rates, or that energy efficient appliances can save me money in the long run? These are just a few of the topics that seem to get written about over and over in personal finance magazines. Can’t they at some point come up with some original insight?
4. So much of the content is available online for free. I started finding recently that by the time my print copy of the personal finance magazines would arrive in the mail and I got the chance to sit down and read them I had already seen most of the content elsewhere. This is because most of the articles in these magazines are posted online on their own websites, often before the print magazine actually hits newsstands or subscriber mailboxes.

Ultimately I think the better financial education can be found online on personal finance blogs and forum, so personal finance magazines only produce unnecessary expense and clutter.

Well, it looks like a professor out at BYU has done what I had envisioned, and best of all he has made all of his materials available for free. Dr. Bryan Sudweeks, CFA, is a professor of finance at BYU who has developed an online course in personal finance aimed at people of different experience and education levels, which can be found at personalfinance.byu.edu. The lessons are very logically laid out and are easy to follow. There is online text, PowerPoint presentations, and even PDF copies of the lessons in book form if you want to download everything at once. Best of all, it is free of charge and free of bias that you often see at other personal finance tutorial sites.

It is worth noting that BYU is a university sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which means that the material is written from a Mormon perspective and Mormons are the primary target audience. However, the material is based on sound financial principles, and readers of any religion could learn a great deal from the materials.

I am certainly very impressed with the material, so much so that I am adding a link to the site in the sidebar under Cool Sites. As I read through the lessons I will also likely share insights I have gained to highlight the great work that has been done with this.

I found out about the site from an article in LDS Church News. For a great discussion of the site, see the article here.

1. Continuing education courses – I’m lucky enough to work for a company that offers dozens of web-based training modules accessible to all employees. I figure if I’m going to be bored, I might as well get some CPE hours. I’ve also used a good bit of time over the last week to study for another certification exam. Passing the exam will not only look good on my resume, but will earn me a $1,000 bonus as well.
2. Paying bills – I’ll gather up the bills I get in the mail each evening and pay them online at work the next day.
3. Dealing with household issues – Got a nasty letter to write? Nothing looks more productive at work than typing and having Microsoft Word open on your monitor. I spent some time this past week writing an email to my homeowners association about another friggin’ deed restriction letter. This one is nice in tone, so I also went ahead and wrote a formal letter if the warm and fuzzy approach doesn’t work.
4. Educational web surfing – While the internet is the ultimate of work time wasters, it is a worthwhile use of time to surf sites where you can learn something to enrich your life. I like spending time surfing news sites and the personal finance blogs at PFBlogs.org. The forums over at Slickdeals and FatWallet can also alert you to great deals to save you money.
5. Blogging – Yup, there is a reason you’ve seen a bit of an up-tick in the postings here of late. More time allows for more blog postings, and the surfing of the blogs at PFBlogs.org provide a great deal of material to post about.

If you get really bored you can also try some of the following to kill some time:

1. Plan an App-O-Rama.
2. Balance your checkbook.
3. Estimate your taxes for the year.
4. Rebalance your retirement accounts.
5. Fill out rebate forms, or follow up on rebates that are late.
6. Take the time to email an old friend or co-worker you haven’t seen in a while.

Any other ideas? Share them here!

A prime example of this is his system of paying of debt. The basic concept is that you making a listing from lowest to highest of all of your debts and then work at paying them off, starting with the smallest debt and working upwards. If you know anything about accounting or finance this makes you cringe, as the system does not take into account the interest rate charged on these debts. In a financially prudent process, you would pay off the highest interest rate debts first since those are the ones that are incurring the most interest, ignoring the amount of the balance. Why would you pay off $1000 in debt over five accounts at 0% interest when you are incurring interest at 20% on a single account with a balance of $1000? But for the intended audience that has already proven they have trouble handling their finances, the system works because of the psychological effects of seeing more bills completely eliminated help the person keep with the program, although in the end you pay more interest than if you had paid the highest rate debts first and stuck with it.

Anyway, the bad advice from today was a question from a caller about a collection notice received on an old debt. The caller indicated he had received a letter for an old debt that was written off by the credit card company eight years ago, and asked if there was anything to worry about. The debt had been on his credit report and had recently fallen off because of age. Ramsey’s response was that this was a debt that needed to be dealt with immediately and encouraged the caller to contact the collection agency to settle at about 10% of the value of the debt.

BAD ADVICE! At this point, the debt is essentially uncollectable because of the age of the account. That’s why it fell off the credit report. Although it might sound counterintuative, if the debtor makes any payment of the debt it could cost him nearly, as the new activity will essentially make the account active again allowing the creditor to put it back on the debtor’s credit report. Even if he pays the account in full, it will still be listed on the credit report indicating the account was turned over to collection but later paid. If the debtor does nothing, it would probably never appear on the credit report again.

I am all for personal responsibility and paying one’s debts, however the potential negative effect on the person’s credit make pursuing a settlement a bad idea.

FCN was actually the very first personal finance blog I read, and remains one of my favorites. I even subscribe to the RSS feed so I can make sure to keep up with his blog. His blog is one of the best I have found in that it is both informative and entertaining to read. Classic FCN posts include “Life’s too short to drink cheap beer” and “Dave Ramsey is Bad at Math”. While I don’t drink at all, these posts make you laugh but also think.

To celebrate the big 2, FCN is doing a big giveaway. Just by posting here you can enter to win one of five primo prizes, including an iPod Nano. If you have a blog of your own, you can review his site for an additional three chances to win. Learn more about FiveCentNickel by checking out his welcome page, and then be sure to explore around on his site for a while.

One of the newest resources on this website is an online tutorial discussing the basics of personal finance. The tutorial does have an LDS flavor to it (as would be expected), discussing concepts like tithing and including quotes from various LDS Church leaders. However, the tutorial has a lot of great information for members and non-members alike. The tutorial can be found online at:

http://www.providentliving.org/channel/0,11677,1709-1,00.html