NetworthIQ Blog

I’m excited to announce that NetworthIQ has been acquired by Strands. Big news today (GigoOm, TechCrunch, Center Networks, Tech Craver, The Oregonian) and we wanted to be sure to share all of the details here and be available for answering any questions you may have.

First off, let me just say thanks to all of the NetworthIQ members that have made the site such a helpful place for people to make better financial decisions. That’s ultimately what any personal financial application is aiming for and the members that have joined and stayed with us over the last few years have played a major part in that. NetworthIQ, with the help of its members has blazed a trail in social personal finance and we will continue to do so under the Strands umbrella.

What’s the plan with NetworthIQ? For the time being, NetworthIQ will run just like it is today. You may have heard that Strands is developing a new online personal finance solution called moneyStrands and also has acquired Expensr, a great free personal finance manager. I have joined the Strands team and we are in the process of planning later releases of moneyStrands that will include ideas from what we’ve done with NetworthIQ. But, you’ll be able to track, share and compare your net worth to the fullest right here still.

Why Strands? As I mentioned above, I think any personal finance application is ultimately about helping people make smarter financial decisions. Strands, with its talented team and its social personalization and recommender technology that has been in development for a few years, is in a position to really make this happen in a very powerful manner. Our shared goal will be to build innovative personal finance tools with an active community and utilize the recommendation technology to help people discover problems and opportunities in their financial lives. All along the while, we will work to make it easy, and yes, I dare say fun (sound familiar?).

As members of NetworthIQ, you’ll also get earlier access to moneyStrands as it starts to roll out in the coming months.

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions, you can leave a comment here, find us on Twitter or send us an email, contact@networthiq.com.

The Washington Post has an article this morning, Wanna Talk Money (By Nancy Trejos), which examines how people are taking their money thoughts and discussions online at various social personal finance sites, including NetworthIQ. It’s always exciting to be included in a major media publication.

First, just to clear up one thing from the article. It mentions the public aspect of net worth tracking a couple times, but doing anything publicly is strictly optional, and about 1/3 of members choose this approach. The article’s comments have a lot of negativity about “bragging” and such, and NetworthIQ is not about bragging in any way. In my quote I mention:

“It comes from the whole MySpace generation. Once people become comfortable being social online, it extends into other areas, such as personal finance,”

Which is true, but I still think we can look to all of the great personal finance blogs for more understanding of why people get social about money. In short, because its a way to keep people accountable to themselves and to find help from people that have been or in a similar situation.

But, not to leave without mentioning my favorite part of the article. Owen Graham, a NetworthIQ member, had this great quote about why he uses it:

Each month, he updates his profile with information about how much he spent and saved. He said the site has made him less of a spender and more of a saver. “Now I’m really paying attention,” he said. “It’s one of those things that keeps me motivated in trying to head in the right direction. I would have no idea how much I had in retirement at any given time, and now I’m pretty cognizant of what’s in there and how the markets are doing.”

If we can help people be more saver and less spender than we’re doing the job we set out to do.

What’s that? A new feature? Why yes, yes it is. Well actually, it’s just an update, but it’s a significant update in my view. Last week, I mentioned how statistics were now being calculated for all balance sheet categories, and was working on getting those stats integrated into the site. Up until now, we’ve only offered comparisons for net worth. As of today, that’s changing with the comparison report now featuring the ability to drill down for every category in the balance sheet (cash, stocks, home, mortgage, credit cards, etc.). You can see how you compare across all of the categories for your demographic groups.

Hopefully this is an interesting and helpful feature.

I’ve been working through some deeper statistics calculations this week, looking at the individual balance sheet categories. In the current comparison report you just see comparisons of net worth, but now we can start to drill down into each category, which is the whole reason we have these defined categories as many people often wonder. The following is the initial findings of the data for all “current users” in the US.

Nothing too interesting yet, but it’s a start. I have a hunch this is mainly because our user base skews to the under 30 crowd. It will get more interesting as it’s broken out by the demographic categories and presented as part of the comparison report feature.

Stay tuned.

Median balance sheet

Many members of the NetworthIQ community have expressed an interest in more and more flexible charting options. This week saw the release of two new charting apis from Google and Yahoo. I’ve been playing with the Google one this afternoon and came up with pie chart examples for asset type break down:

What do you think? The percentage charts are pretty easy, but the way they encode the data makes the Net worth trend chart more interesting. I invite anybody to take these apis for a test drive with your own net worth data, the Comparison chart data, or maybe the aggregate net worth statistics. We’ll see what we can work into the site.

If you’ve followed the site/blog/twitter feed lately you’ll probably have noticed that things have been pretty quiet around here lately. Well, yesterday we had a large traffic explosion yesterday that had the servers smokin’ (ok, actually, it’s just one server, and well, it held up just fine, but allow me to exaggerate a bit for literary effect).

news.com.au, the major Australian news portal, ran a story on people posting their net worth online. The article gives a quick overview of what people are doing on NetworthIQ and why they’re doing it. A few of our NetworthIQ community members were highlighted including:

• Striving2BDebtFree
• enoughwealth (blog)
• carillion2 (blog)

I thought it was great to see a major point that I like to reinforce about NetworthIQ, that NetworthIQ is not about showing off or a competition, at heart it is meant to be a learning and motivational tool for all ranges of net worth:

Baring all adds social pressure to do more looking before leaping into financial decisions.

“Having your information so publlicly available has changed my financial habits. I find I don’t impulse spend and have adopted a different mindset that fits with the tone of other members,” the student says.

It can also be a benchmarking tool to see what other people in similar circumstances are achieving.

“It’s not so much showing off, it’s a useful cross-comparison,” says another member. “Where should I be, what are other people doing? “Why am I different from anyone else, what do I need to do?”

It’s awesome to connect with users who feel this way and are using NetworthIQ to improve their finances and financial knowledge.

I was late to see that NetworthIQ was mentioned on TheStreet.com this past weekend in an article about online personal finance tools by Terry Savage.

On page 2, the topic of social networking around personal finance is introduced:

Personal finance sites that revolve around “social networking” in general are becoming very popular. For example, www.networthiq.com allows you to post your financial information — including cash, investments, debt, etc. — for all to see and comment upon. It requires users to manually update monthly balances.

Interesting that she introduces Mint as having the ability to share stories about their finances:

Another social networking site, www.Mint.com, allows bloggers to share stories about their personal finances.

Not sure if she was confused there. That’s part of what we’re trying to do with NetworthIQ. As far as I know, Mint’s focus is on helping you track expenses and spend your money better. I haven’t seen much around community interaction and storytelling, but I guess their blog does a good job with that, so perhaps that’s what she was referring to.

Anyway, always fun to see coverage in the media and around the web.

The Boston Globe takes a look at the social personal finance and investing web sites in an article today by Carolyn Johnson. NetworthIQ was included way at the end along with bostongal (NetworthIQ profile), here’s the snippet:

Finally, for the true exhibitionist, a new network of personal finance bloggers has sprouted up, keeping profiles on NetWorthIQ, which offers people a public forum in which to chronicle the ups and downs of their assets.

The woman behind one NetWorth profile said she started blogging about her finances because she felt alone.

“Being able to read and see the details of how others were managing (or not) their money was something I found very interesting and powerful,” BostonGal, who insists on remaining anonymous because she posts so much detailed financial information online, wrote in an e-mail. “For me, it was finally answering questions such as, ‘How can people afford to buy that?’ or ‘Am I the only one who struggles to save?’ ”

Yep, I think it’s interesting and powerful too. Welcome to all the new members.

Long time NetworthIQ member edgeworth has penned a masterful update in his latest net worth entry:

There once was a member of Net Worth IQ,
The market was flat but he didn’t feel blue,
He just kept on saving,
Cause he had a craving,
To get from one million to two.

Awesome. Thanks for the smile Edge.

RedToBlack and Unleadedcoach joined the fun in the comments with their own verses.

Who would’ve thought you mix poetry and personal finance.

On Monday night I rolled out, what I think anyway, is a cool new addition to the public member pages. The public profile page now has a profile section in the right column which gives a little more info about the member. You can see when the member joined, last login, number of times the profile has been viewed and answers to a series of questions that relate to financial personality. I’ve really enjoyed the personal finance interviews that Cap has been doing for the Mint blog and thought that type of interview would be a great addition for NetworthIQ members.

To update your profile, just login into your account and go to the “profile” section (or tab).

Enough talk though, here’s the feature in action, as a couple of newcomers have got the ball rolling with the profile answers:

• http://www.networthiq.com/people/JHuff15
• http://www.networthiq.com/people/JuanCa