NetworthIQ Blog

• Dropped out of Alexa Top 100k but looks like might be back in soon. Alexa may not be most accurate measure, but is better to see growth. #
• Dumped Typed DataSets, was using them for tag clouds, since it’s handy to run aggregates on them, but MySQL wizards choke in VWD express #
• Hit $100 mark for AdSense, albeit for last two months. Shooting for every month by the end of May. TLA still rules the revenue mix. #
• Bought ISAPI_Rewrite for new server. Hate to spend money when this is free in the LAMP world, but it’s a must have for clean urls in .NET. #

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There are a number of RSS feeds available on NetworthIQ. If you’re reading this blog, you probably know what RSS is, but if not, it’s essentially a way to subscribe to a web site so that if it gets updated you get notified, rather than having to visit the site itself. You can subscribe to feeds in various feed readers, like Google Reader or Bloglines.

The new tips and blog features provide a great source for getting the latest posts from the NetworthIQ community.

You can get the latest from all users:

Tips Feed
Blogs Feed

Or you can get the latest by tag (BTW, a tag is just a user-defined category, which we use rather than pre-determining categories, tags are much more flexible):

Tips on investing
Blog posts on cars

Or you can get the latest from an individual user:

Tips by mwswi
Blog posts by MrSmith

The tips feature has growing since its release, and you may have also noticed their is a new blogs feature. I noticed many NetworthIQ users would sign up on NetworthIQ and then go off and start their own personal finance blog. I think that’s great, and I imagine there are many who have thought about it as well, so we have now made it easy to share your questions, notes, thoughts, stories, and experiences, that may not go with your monthly entry, directly on NetworthIQ.

For private profiles, your posts will not be available to the public. I’ll be working in the coming weeks on the privacy settings, making it so that if you want to keep your net worth private, but share your tips or blogs you can do so.

I’ve long thought that comparing budgets would be an interesting addition to the site, so we can peak at not only what others have, but what they spend too in order to help guide us to better financial decisions (i.e. if I’m spending more than somebody with a healthy net worth, maybe I should re-examine my spending). Recently there have been a couple of items looking at budgets of various American families that bring this topic back in my head. First, Tiredbuthappy has a post, benchmarking locally reporting on some comparisons in Philadelphia. Then I was reading the Liz Pulliam Weston Money Talk column in today’s paper and she reported the following average annual expenditures for a family of four:

$6351 on food
$871 on housekeeping supplies
$735 on personal care including haircuts
$2953 on clothing

(source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Interesting statistics anyway.

Tired of the personal finance advice you give falling on deaf ears? Want to prevent people from making the mistakes you’ve made in your financial dealings? Looking to pass on great knowledge you’ve gained? Well, then the new tips feature is the perfect way to do it.

Up until now, NetworthIQ has been all about tracking, sharing and comparing your net worth. But, with this release, we step into the realm of helping people increase net worth by allowing users to share their personal finance advice which can be rated and discussed to determine the best tips. The unique thing about sharing advice on NetworthIQ is that you can see who is giving the advice and where they are at in their life, both demographically, and financially.

Advice can fall into any category, anything that would help somebody improve their finances. It could be about:

• Budgeting
• Education
• Career
• Family
• Real Estate
• Retirement
• Insurance
• Loans

Those are just some ideas of what to discuss, and if you’re looking for inspiration, I’ve put together the ultimate collection of personal finance advice

• Money 101
• 50 smartest things to do with your money
• The Top 25 Money Tips of All Time
• 46 Things I Wish My Mom Taught Me About Money
• Who Else Wants To Save Money? 88 Tips, Tricks, Tutorials
• 102 Personal Finance Tips Your Professor Never Taught You
• 10 Common Money Mistakes

Wondering what “it” is? I have the UI mock-ups in hand from Todd for our next release, and I’m getting closer to completing the code. I’m thrilled about it because it was one of those ideas on the drawing board two years ago when we started this thing and it’s finally coming to life. You’ve maybe heard me talk about working to improve the conversations about money on the site and starting to tap that collective financial intelligence of the NetworthIQ community.

We all have wisdom gleaned from our many money decisions, be it mistakes we made or wise choices. The new tips feature is our attempt at letting users share that advice and then letting the community vote on and discuss it. After thinking through a few different ways to do it, we decided on doing something that looks similar to Digg. It’s a proven model for finding the best and most important bits of content and I think it will serve well.

So, wish me a productive weekend and next time I post, hopefully it will be to announce the release.

By the way, there is one issue that I’d love some input on. Please take our poll:

NPR has a story on debt bloggers this morning, just a few days after the New York Times ran a similar story.

While there was no mention of NetworthIQ, I will get over it, maybe, I really liked the story and how it discusses the “therapy” aspect and the accountability of posting your numbers publicly. It’s a good summation of our original vision to help motivate people to improve their finances by letting them track, share, and compare.

I spent most of the weekend painting, so unfortunately missed this until today:

Debtors Search for Discipline via Blogs (via)

The New York times has an article on money bloggers, specifically focused on those tracking their climb out of debt. Congratulations to the NetworthIQ users featured:

• Tricia from Blogging Away Debt (NetworthIQ profile)
• Stephanie from Poorer Than You (NetworthIQ profile)

Originally, I thought the comparison feature of NetworthIQ would be the most interesting to people, but I’m finding more and more that the tracking angle, and especially tracking publicly, is a big draw to the site. It seems to give people a nice psychological lift when that chart is heading upwards.

I just did my taxes last night, and was pleasantly surprised with the result. I can rest a little easier knowing that our credit cards will be cleaned up with a good chunk leftover for putting in the rainy day fund and buying things for baby #2. This year I won’t be so generous in loaning the government my money.

But, that’s me, what about you? And maybe more interestingly, what are the best uses of a tax refund? Well, Adam and I put together a fun little site to let you vote and help find the best use of a tax refund:

Best use of Income Tax Refunds

Get over there and vote!

While I was eating breakfast yesterday morning, I enjoyed quite the surprise in seeing that NetworthIQ was featured as the “Web Site of the Week” by Steve Woodward in The Oregonian.

While we’ve enjoyed some nice press in the past, this is the first time where we were the featured subject, and it showed in the response. We had our biggest one day registration bounce since late 2005, better than Business Week last spring and the Dallas Morning News/Boston Globe column this past summer. Thanks Portland and welcome!