NetworthIQ Blog

Introducing NetworthIQ, the web’s first social personal finance tool, where you can track, share (optionally) and compare your net worth.

About six months ago, I started following personal finance blogs, a steadily growing segment of the blogosphere. It started with pfblog.com and I was fascinated that he would would share the intimate details of his financial status. I didn’t think too much more about it, until Russell Beattie (a rather prolific blogger if you don’t follow the blog scene) compared himself to Jonathan at MyMoneyBlog. Though Russell later regretted the post (not a big fan of personal finance), it ultimately gave me the idea for NetworthIQ. Thanks Russ! I also want to give some credit to FMF over at Free Money Finance for giving me a scare with his series of posts discussing bloggers’ net worth. I thought someone else had the same idea and it lit a fire under us to get moving.

The basic idea…. What if you could provide a salary.com type site, where you could track your net worth see how you stack up. Whether it is comparing yourself to others in the country, in your city, in your age group, or in your income level? That would be pretty interesting, wouldn’t it? Then, what if you follow the trend that flickr, del.icio.us, and 43things started with social sharing sites and add the ability to share your net worth. Put the two together and I think you have a pretty interesting social personal finance tool. In March, I shared the idea with some developer friends with whom we’d been contemplating business ideas for starting a MicroISV, and they seemed to like the idea. NetworthIQ was born. 4 months later (we have day jobs, so we’re not as fast as we’d like to be), we’re ready to unveil it.

Now, we’ve still got a lot of work left in completing the vision, but we’re taking the release early, release often approach so that we can get feedback rolling as soon as possible and prioritize what features to add. We invite you to sign up tell us what you think about it.

Before I finish, I’d just like to make it clear that we understand we’re dealing with sensitive information. We value your privacy tremendously and know that we cannot succeed if we don’t treat this information with the utmost respect. We have put a lot of thought into how we gather the data (we don’t ask for or display personal information), and we will never display your information unless you choose to do so by sharing your profile.

With that said, I say go sign up. What is your NetworthIQ?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 15th, 2005 at 7:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.