Blogs, Books, and Tools For Money Management

The majority of what I’ve learned about managing my finances I have learned in the past few months. I’m going to list some of the major sources that I have used and are solid sources of personal finance information. So I’ll list some blogs that are good for this, some of my favorite books on the subject, and some sites that can help you manage it.

Blogs –

Get Rich Slowly – This is the best blog on personal finance that I have found. J.D. goes over so many different topics and various projects  that this is one of the biggest repositories for personal finance tips, tricks, and information.

Wise Bread – This blog is written by multiple people so there isn’t the same connection as with J.D. The topics can range widely from the writer’s experience and the quality is sometimes lacking. Good information it’s Lifehacker for finance.

Books –

The Richest Man in Babylon – This book is astoundingly in how simple it is too understand and it’s approach of using a story to achieve an osmotic effect with it’s information and your mind. It teaches multiple lessons in how to handle your finances while also having an underpinning in humility. A great read and also a classic from the 1920’s

Rich Dad, Poor Dad – This isn’t necessarily dedicated towards personal finance so much as street wise thinking on finance. This book isn’t to be taken literally but it does off plenty of good advice for business, and investing outside of the stock market. It makes it on the list because of these facts.

Hackers and Painters – I recommend this book not in it’s entirety, but for one essay that is contained within. You can read this essay entitled “How to Make Wealth” at Paul Graham’s website. A much different approach than what we have been ingrained with.

Tools –

Mint – My personal web tool to help chart my monetary flow. I find it fitting for my lifestyle in that it is simple, it easily connects, and implements multiple security measures. Pluses, SMS, nice tagging feature, allows you to break down bills into their subsequent parts, and handles almost any form of monetary trade, from checking, credit cards, and savings to stocks and loans.

Wesabe – This in the personal finance blogging arena comes out on top. It has community support, allows your to set goals, and update manually to keep it balanced. * I had issues with it miscalculating my credit card and telling me I had $245 on the black rather than $70 in the red so it was screwing the debit/credit balance of by $300 .

Geezeo – Another community connected online management tool. This comes out on top in the user happiness it seems. As far as I can tell, it lets you do what the other two do but it seems to be a more complete package haven’t actually used this but I may look into it.

Spreadsheets – Nothing like handling all the pertinent details yourself. Though this isn’t as easy as the others and will take some time out of your day I would at least recommend knowing how to do this either by hand or using software such as Excel, Quicken, Google Spreadsheets, etc.