If you’ve ever wanted to take a peak inside my brain, now’s your chance. Just don’t try Sylar‘s approach to brain examination. I’d like to share my favorite websites related to personal finance, not including blogs or pfblogs.org. The websites that are listed are here for different reasons. Some I visit often to get new information, some are just excellent tools that I may visit less frequently. I’m presenting them in no particular order.
1. Yahoo! Finance. They don’t have much in the way of original content other than several columnists, some good, some bad. I agree with The Simple Dollar’s evaluation of the team. I go to Yahoo! Finance mainly for quick stock or mutual fund quotes. Most of their articles come from other sources like BusinessWeek.
2. CNN Money. This website is the home of Money Magazine, Fortune Magazine, Business 2.0, and Fortune Small Business. Between the magazines and CNN reporting, there is a wealth of great personal finance and investing articles every single day, written by intelligent people. The information moves quickly and it can be very difficult to keep up.
3. Google Finance. When I want detailed information about a company, including facts about their executives or financial statements, this is my first stop. Google’s company information pages also pull in recent blog posts about the organization, and pfblogs.org is one of their monitored feeds.
4. Dinkytown.net. As the site claims, these are the Internet’s best financial calculators. If you need to solve a money equation, this is the best place to go. The calculators are organized into sensible categories and the most popular are only one click from the front page.
5. PayPal. Stop and think about it. The ability to send money through email is just very cool. Obviously this is simply a logical progression of technology, but it fits the need perfectly. Now that PayPal has a legitimate competitor in Google Payments, maybe there will be more innovation in the field.
6. FatWallet. FatWallet is probably the best place to find deals on stuff you’d buy anyway and free money. This is where I first heard about ShareBuilder’s promotion codes and the ability for some to collect multiple bonuses. They have a friendly and active community, but I don’t visit very often.
Many years ago, I was a big fan of The Motley Fool, but they kept trying to get me to pay. Back then, a subscription of that sort was beyond my level of affordability.
Updated February 6, 2012 and originally published December 7, 2006.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I also like Morningstar’s discuss forums. Lots of knowledgeable people over there for meaningful discussions. It’s only recently that I discovered Google Finance as I noticed some visitors were referred from Google Finance’s related blogs section after I wrote a couple of posts on stocks I own. Otherwise, I use Yahoo Finance for most of the quotes.
Although the Motley Fool keeps trying to get people to pay, some of the articles (when you finally get to the substance) can be really good. Plus I like their calculators a lot more than most I’ve tried.
Great list, I tend to read Yahoo! Finance myself. I didn’t even know about the Google Finance but then again I should have assumed they had a section for it.
Excellent list! I’m a big fan of Yahoo! Finance as well.
I would add Yodlee MoneyCenter. Account aggregration is the wave of the future.