The Digerati Life

They’re both green and they’re both all about money.

Mint.com For Your Finances

If you’re looking for a personal finance online tool to help you manage your money better, there are quite a few out there that deserve your attention. Mint.com is one of those sites that does a great job with analyzing your spending trends plus provide you the ability to work out your budget, categorize your expenses and alert you to activities in your accounts. Through just a few clicks, you can get a top down view of your money in one place!

So far, Mint has garnered well over a hundred thousand registered users and has won several awards, which attests to the tool’s popularity. The company’s awards include the Webby Awards People’s Voice Winner in Banking and Bill Pay as well as in Financial Services, plus their software has also been named as one of PC World’s “100 Best Products of 2008″. Check out PC World’s review of Mint here.

Not to mention that they’ve also got an awesome blog you need to check out .

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What if you could be a fly in the wall at some company you’re really interested in joining? Know what life is really like at the company where you commit your precious 50 hours a week to.

As employees, we get ourselves ranked, rated and reviewed every time we have a performance evaluation from which our raise and bonus are determined accordingly. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have some way of gauging our bosses in a similar fashion and have the world know about it?

Do you want…

• A place to vent about your place of work?
• A way to see what others are saying about your company?
• A way to check out what goes on at other companies?
• A place for your inner whistleblower to speak?
• Or just a way to screen companies for your job search?

Then use this Web 2.0 solution to kick your company’s tires.

We’re in luck because all these concerns can now be addressed by a neat little Web 2.0 service called Glassdoor.com. With this fairly innovative (and addictive) tool, you’ll get the scoop on whatever company or job within a specific company that you’d like to know more about. It exists to rank, rate and review jobs, companies and company leaders, and in true Web 2.0 fashion, the info is supplied by anonymous insiders (current and former employees). This is where you have the chance to get some feedback (or sordid truth?) about your potential employers. Or if you’re currently employed, you can see how your job stacks up against everyone else.

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Discussing financial tools and personal financial views at a finance blogger conference In San Francisco.

I spent the day in San Francisco yesterday at a blogger conference sponsored by Networth IQ and Expensr. At the ‘Personal Finance Leaders Workshop by “The Bay”‘, we had the opportunity to share personal financial views, discuss financial tools, and to hear ideas about what software companies in this space are doing to make finances easier to manage for the lot of us. It’s great to know that many companies out there are working to make personal finance more palatable to the public, their objective being to “create a new online personal finance management solution that will free the consumer from today’s limiting alternatives.”

I knew that there were a lot of companies breaking into this space, I just didn’t realize how many there were!

It was a highly interactive session where the floor was opened to opinions, brainstorming and active discussion. I was quite honored to be invited to such an event, where I got to meet the founders and representatives of NetWorthIQ and Expensr and several of the most recognizable personal finance bloggers in the blogosphere who came all the way here from as far away as New Jersey. I’m just glad I live around here as it would be tough for me otherwise to attend these things…

Some Personal Observations Garnered From The Conference

I was the only female blogger in the group (and probably the only one with kids), and quite possibly the oldest one in the bunch as well, so I’m not quite sure I’d be the exact target audience for the tools that were being discussed, which focused a lot on tracking expenses and managing budgets. I think I may have admitted before that I am not that big on creating budgets or managing spending for a few reasons:

• Because we saved much more than we spent and were extremely frugal in the 1990’s while coincidentally riding the “dot com wave”, we developed the habit of not really using a budget or tracking expenses. All we know is that we had X amount more money left over at the end of the day, which got deployed into savings and investments.
• I’m comfortable about having a “bird’s eye view” of our budget and spending patterns. We have been fairly predictable spenders and creatures of habit, so we know where our money goes most of the time even if we don’t track things in great detail. We tend to be fuzzy about exact numbers and don’t sweat over the “noise” (as my spouse puts it).
• We’ve always been a household that focused a lot on building wealth and spending the time worrying about that versus doing day-to-day financial management. We only have so much time in our hands after all. Every quarter, we check statements, accounts, portfolio numbers, run a net worth check and review credit card information.

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Peer to peer lending, person to person lending or social lending… everyone’s suddenly talking about it.

Everywhere I look around the blogosphere, there’s someone talking about the peer-to-peer lending industry. It’s an interesting space that has recently been picking up steam and getting noticed. With the credit markets under a lot of pressure these days, borrowing and lending Web 2.0 style may be worth looking into. Before you jump into it though, how about reviewing a few facts about it?

5 Things About The Peer To Peer Lending Industry You May Not Yet Know

#1 Peer to peer lending is nothing new, in fact, it’s an old concept.
Direct lending (or lending without traditional intermediaries such as banks) has existed in communities since time immemorial. This industry has been inspired by the concept of Asian micro-lending, borrowing and business, the original idea being that cooperatives of neighbors, friends and family pool money together to help out those who need loans. In the age of online transactions and match-making, p2p lending companies have taken the idea of money pools and direct lending and turned it into viable web models. Cool.

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I noticed a few bloggers covering the beat on what great financial communities and discussion boards existed out there. Mighty Bargain Hunter made his own list, and so did Moolanomy.

So I thought I’d pipe in with a few other additions. I’d like to thank the following communities for encouraging me to join their blog rolls and forums. Please check them out for more information and helpful discussion on various financial topics:

• NestEggr.com is a new site for stock and investment information, financial bloggers, advice exchange, and touts itself as a place for your money questions to be answered. [Update: this site seems to have bit the dust!]
• Frugal Hacks is a group site maintained by several frugal bloggers and is a truly great spot for all things cheap! They also have a blog roll that lists many blogs in the frugality spectrum of which I am a proud member.
• Work It Mom! What else, but a wonderful resource for working mothers: full of active groups, conversations, articles, interviews and blogs of those sharing the same plight.
• OurCommunityPower.org has a few financial forums containing quite a strong following: please check out their Debt Consolidation Care forum and their Mortgage Fit forum for coverage of debt and mortgage topics respectively. They’ve got a wealth of resources there including calculators and views from expert members.

I’d also like to point out this interesting list of 100 best business finance posts of all time. I’m not quite sure how they farmed all this information but kudos to them for doing so!

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When I first started this blog, I thought I would use it as a chance to talk about what it was like to live and work in a place like Silicon Valley. So to commemorate my first year blog anniversary (this week), I thought I’d do a post like this for the fun of it.

I’d like to start by saying that this is why I like being anonymous: so that I may be able to safely share some things about the places I’ve worked for in the past, as well as comment on whom I’ve worked for without having to fear undesirable “repercussions”.

One of the perks of living and working in the Bay Area is to have the opportunity to be a part of the booming trades of Silicon Valley. It’s true that our cost of living is one of the many challenges of living in this area. It is also true, from my observation that the middle class in this part of the nation is getting squeezed harder and harder. It’s almost as if our middle class is eroding since it’s beginning to look like this place is split between the haves and have nots and those in the middle are pulled in one direction or the other depending on how the cards have fallen for them in the last couple of decades.

At any rate, most of the professionals who work for the technical industry are the middle class, and they are the lifeblood of this place. Many can be found toiling for long hours at their decent, well-paying jobs that are required to keep themselves financially afloat in this grossly overvalued part of the world.

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Love thy neighbor. Or would you rather rip them instead?

Real estate is not only about transactions and investments or even about home ownership, it is also about neighborhoods. I’ve frequently offered my thoughts on how we can all enjoy and improve the community and environment around us. But while the recommended way to act neighborly is to settle our differences with our neighbors privately or keep any negative musings (of where we live) to ourselves, there is now a new Web 2.0 type offering that allows us to act otherwise by providing an outlet for us to vent, rant and whine about the people who live around us, all in a public forum.

I discovered this new Google mashup via a post mention at Two Wise Acres. Of course, there have been numerous other mentions of this web site around the web quite recently, but allow me to add my .02.

This new site is called “RottenNeighbor.com” and it exists to help you determine if a place is a desirable spot to live in… or not. What’s interesting about this site is that it brings to light those characteristics of an area that may not be currently measurable by internet sites like Zillow.com. In short, RottenNeighbor focuses on the subjective features that could make one property attractive to a homebuyer but a turn off to another. This could very well be a step towards bringing in subjective opinion into the property valuing equation.

How do they do it? By letting you tell it like it is: now you can harp about a home, neighbor or location as much as your heart desires:

A Sampling of What RottenNeighbor.com Gives You

Barking Dogs!
For god sakes man! How many damn dogs can one neighborhood have ! There must be 4 per ef-en house over here. I love how they bark in shifts!

Neighbors From Hell
as many as 30 people live here, often 5 or 6 families in 4 illegal units. the noise never stops, the trash is everywhere, roaches and filth everywhere, dope customers dropping by day and night, daycare operating in the back yard daily.

Loud
These people watch TV the whole night with very loud volume. Other tenants have to sleep with their windows closed because of noise. Be careful before renting here.

Crazy Neighbors
Many neighbors on the 3800 Block on 21st Street are crazy and resent those with more money than them. They are mainly from the East Coast with East Coast pretensions. They forget that they live in San Francisco…Live and Let Live. They should be thrown back to the East Coast.

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I would like to share with you this interesting fact I picked up from Henry @ Binary Dollar. There was an online survey from July 30 to August 1 taken by 1,000 adults and conducted by Synovate/Marketing Daily that suggests that there are more women bloggers than men.

The survey also revealed that more women than men are bloggers, with 20% of American women who have visited blogs having their own versus 14 % of men.

Say what? This was news to me.

I’m not quite sure how much of this that I’d buy, since that’s not the impression I’ve had all the time I’ve been reading blogs and maintaining one. But then I realized that I blog in a “male dominated” part of the blogosphere, where the subjects of personal finance, money, debt and especially stocks, investments, business and even high finance are talked about with the gusto of a political blogger letting loose on their next rant. But more and more, new blogs are popping up that are authored by women, even in the financial blogosphere, and this I am pretty excited about :). It’s just nice to have a balance of perspectives, topics and styles out there fueling a very nice diversity in our realm of money.

On this note, Don’t Mess With Taxes and Nina from Queer Cents opened up some discussion on female bloggers in the PF blogosphere and wondered out loud about the representation of women in some recent pf blog lists. Though it’s true that we are disproportionately represented in this part of the blogoshpere, if you look closely, there are a few more lurking women in there than you may first notice. ;). Of course, writing anonymously and in a gender neutral tone — just ask this tool — doesn’t help to clarify one’s gender either. [And to add to the confusion, any writing analysis tool I've played with has pegged my writing style as male.] Nevertheless, I’ve noticed that newer pf sites have a lot of female writers behind them (as I carefully check under each blog’s hood), so it may not be too long before we see more females in a new top 100 list!

Here are only some of the PF blogs I actively follow that are by women:
Blogging Away Debt, My Open Wallet, Boston Gal’s Open Wallet, Frugal For Life, QueerCents, Don’t Mess With Taxes, No Limits Ladies, Frugal Duchess, MapGirl’s Fiscal Challenge, Grad Money Matters, Single Ma’s Fabulous Financials, Young And Broke, Paid Twice, Plonkee Money, Chief Family Officer, Money and Values, Tired But Happy, Millionaire Mommy Next Door, Blunt Money

This just barely scratches the surface of the female pf blogging circle. I know for a fact that there are many wonderful finance-based blogs out there that are run by the ladies. If you’d like to contribute to this conversation, drop us a comment!

 
Image Credit: Cody Commerce