NetworthIQ Blog

Hot off the presses tonight. The Wall Street Journal is running an article, Managing Your Money
In Public View by Jane Kim, which examines the combination of social networking and personal finance. NetworthIQ is included as one of the sites for “Organizing your finances” and a quick overview of the site is given:

The ability to share and compare one’s finances with others can also help motivate people to build their wealth. NetworthIQ lets users create profiles based on their actual net worth. They can then compare themselves with others by age, income or occupation, link to other users, and track their progress on a blog. About one-third of the site’s 9,000 registered users choose to make their net-worth figures public, although the data are self-reported and the users’ identity is masked.

Needless to say we’re thrilled to be included in this and are looking forward to seeing the community grow with the new visitors.

For the new visitors, please let us know if you have any questions and/or feedback for us, either here or email us at contact@networthiq.com

By far the most frequent suggestion I get is to get rid of the stale and/or fake profiles on NetworthIQ. Today, we took a big step in that direction, and amazingly only needed a small database update to make it happen. The count of users included in the user listings and statistics went from almost 6600 down to 4500.

Now, in order for a profile to 1) be available in the users listings and 2) be included in the net worth statistics and comparison reports it has to meet one of these two criteria.

• More than one entry
• At least one entry in the last 12 months

So, if you came by the site over a year ago and entered only a single entry, your profile has been hidden. Simply make a new entry to appear in the listings again.

I mention the criteria because I’m not looking to hide anything we do in weeding these out and to see what users think of this criteria. This doesn’t eliminate all of the fakes, but it should reduce them significantly and begin to highlight more of the active members of the community. I wanted to start easy and then tweak the formula as we go along. As always, I appreciate any feedback.

It’s time announce the winners of the contest looking for the best financial advice using our tips feature during the month of April.

Most Tips

Winner: buildingnetworth with 15 tips. This one was won going away. Nice work! Now we just have to get you tagging.

Highest Rated Tip

Winner: Blogging_Away_Debt with her tip, Dealing With the Liability Side of the Net Worth Equation that had 12 votes in April. It helps to be our most popular user from the personal finance blogosphere :-). There was a bit of controversy with this category, because there was a tip with more votes. But, those votes were of a questionable nature and not in the spirit of the contest and so it was disqualified.

Editor’s choice

Winner: moneyunder30 with, Ignore Everybody Else.
I alluded in the announcement to looking for one that prompted the most discussion, and this was the one. But, beyond that, this is one of the core truisms when it comes to personal finance. There’s always “spend less than you earn,” but the easiest way to do that is not worry about keeping up with the Joneses. Very sound advice that is worth reinforcing. I know I need to remember this more so.

Congratulations winners! I’ll be contacting the winners soon with your prizes. (I’m on an open WIFI connection so don’t feel like pulling out the credit card at the moment).

Unfortunately the tips feature has dried up a bit this month, and the voting and tagging has not quite been fully embraced. I’m working through ideas to shore this up and expand upon the whole advice discussion. Is this area useful to users?

It’s also a good clue to get back to focusing more on the core net worth features.

You may remember, we partnered with InstaFILE earlier this year to develop a fun game for choosing the best use of a tax refund. By an overwhelming margin, Paying off credit cards, was the winner. It received nearly twice as many votes of the second place finisher.

Here’s the final results.

With the move yesterday, I snuck in our first international bits. You can select your country when registering and for those already using NetworthIQ, you can select it on your account page after logging in. All figures are expected to be in US dollars, but I’ll be working to get a currency selection and listing by country in there soon.

Supporting other countries has been by far the more frequent suggestion, so I’m excited to start spreading our wings beyond the US borders.

In case you missed it, we were down for a couple of hours yesterday morning while we moved to a new server. All in all, the move went pretty smoothly and the site is performing much better. To the extent that we can check, all data appears intact, but if you see any issues, please let us know.

If you received our newsletter, you probably noticed the announcement about our tips contest. We recently added tips, which is a way for the community more formally share their personal finance advice. Here’s the details.

To kick off the tips feature and start finding those great bits of advice packed away in your minds, we are running a contest during the month of April with three (3) $50 Amazon gift certificates up for grabs, one to the winner of each of three different categories:

1) Most tips entered during the month of of April
(caveat, these must be real, legitimate personal finance tips as determined by us, not scams, pump and dump tips, etc.)

2) Highest rated tip (community pick)
The tip with the post points at the end of April. It’s up to you, our loyal NetworthIQ community to tell us which tip you think is worthy of a win.

3) Editors pick.
The NetworthIQ team will pick their favorite tip — it could be the one that sparks the most discussion or just some sound financial advice that we feel needs some extra attention.

All winning tips must be entered during the month of April. Awards will be announced by no later than Monday, May 7, 2007. Winners will be contacted by email for prize distribution, so be sure that the email address on your account is current.

More entries coming across my feed reader today, I’ll try to do this every month, but you know it goes finding the time:

• Boston Gal (NetworthIQ Profile) continues to thrive, amazing to see the online savings account balances that are not funded by credit card arbitrage.
• The Money Diva (NetworthIQ Profile) is encouraged by the growth of her investments, nothing like putting money to work for you (not that I know anything about that).
• Laws of Finance (NetworthIQ Profile) saw net worth increase thanks to a rebound in the markets and a part time job, no april fools joke there.
• Tricia (NetworthIQ Profile) has another good month and is beginning to think a $0 net worth milestone party, I hope we’re invited :-).
• English Major Money (NetworthIQ Profile), who I’m guessing was an English Major(?), is working on accounting methods and wondering if tracking net worth is useful. Of course I think so, but be sure to stop by and let English know what you think.
• Tired But Happy (NetworthIQ Profile) suffered a net worth update post loss (believe me, I too hate it when that happens), but was able to recover nicely with today’s update and saw a nice increase for March.

Nice job everybody.

Wondering what these daily Twitter updates are all about? Twitter is the latest craze and what can I say, I gave in and signed up. I’ll be “microblogging” about NetworthIQ, sharing information on all things NeworthIQ. So far, I’ve found it to be a great way to document thoughts and bring focus to what aspect of the site I need to work on.

If you use Twitter, stop by and add us as a friend.

http://twitter.com/networthiq

The March entries are flying fast and furious, let’s do a quick roundup.

• Finding Freedom (NetworthIQ profile) is closing in on that positive net worth
• Escape Brooklyn (NetworthIQ profile) saw a healthy increase
• Army Amy (NetworthIQ profile) just discovered NetworthIQ and makes her first entry
• PF Odyssey (NetworthIQ profile) looks to be in contention for the top gainers this month with a sizable pickup.