Perspective in Personal Finance is a blog about financial planning. I have an MBA from Stanford and have been a Certified Financial Planner Professional for over twelve years. I write about the “how to” of personal finance, and specifically about how to think about and plan for your future financial security.

There are hundreds of articles on this site. There are articles on how to save for college, how to retire early, and how to pay off your mortgage early. There are articles on how to save money on travel, and articles on how to invest in stocks and mutual funds, both inside retirement accounts and outside them (taxable accounts).

There are also articles on more specialized topics like creating an estate plan using a revocable living trust, setting up 529 plans for college savings, what Social Security benefits you can expect, Roth IRA conversion strategies, tax loss harvesting using index funds, how much life insurance you need, whether you should invest in an annuity or whole life insurance policy, the best ways to pay off debt while also saving money, and many more topics.

Here are the 25 best blogs in Personal Finance. We looked at hundreds of sites that post about personal finance to narrow down our list to the ones we think are the best.

Welcome to my site!

My name is Jon and I am a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) in Fontana, California. This site was created because I believe the best financial plans are built by the people who are impacted the most, not just by an advisor who sells financial products. While I do provide financial planning services, which are described in more detail below, my primary goal is to help people understand the basics of personal finance and arm them with the knowledge they need to be successful at managing their own finances.

I offer three levels of traditional financial planning services:

Hourly Planning: This is an hourly service where you pay for only the time we spend together. You will have access to our online account management system during this process, but I will not be monitoring your accounts for you. This is good for those who want advice on a specific topic or need help getting started but want to monitor their own accounts after the plan is built.

Wealth Management: The Wealth Management Service includes everything from Hourly Planning but also includes quarterly updates to ensure your plan remains on track and online account monitoring so that we can make proactive changes when necessary. In addition, monthly investment reports will be provided so that you can see how your investments are performing while receiving

Most people go through life with a “spend now, save later” mentality. The problem is that it’s hard to reverse course once we have a family and a mortgage, which is when we need to begin saving in earnest.

The problem goes beyond delayed gratification. In my experience, most people have an unrealistic idea of how much wealth they will need in retirement. I think the reason for this is that they don’t know what the alternatives are.

If you grew up in the United States, you probably didn’t learn about different retirement systems around the world. There are many ways to provide for your old age: work until you die; retire at a set age and receive a pension from the government; put money into an account that you can withdraw from in retirement; or work part-time after retirement from your main job.

If you are working with a financial advisor, the advice you receive should be based on your personal situation. Whether that advice is good or bad depends on the advisor’s knowledge and experience, not their credentials.

Let’s take a look at an example. Let’s say that you are looking for an advisor who can help you with your retirement planning. Perhaps you have some money in your 401k from a previous employer and some cash in a savings account but you really don’t know what to do next. You decide to work with an advisor who has the Certified Financial Planner™ (CFP) designation because it sounds like they have the qualifications to help you with retirement planning. But then after talking to them, it turns out that all they do is sell insurance products to clients. They may call themselves a financial planner but they are not providing financial planning advice; they are selling insurance products.

How could this happen? It happens because advisors can get the CFP designation without having any experience doing financial planning or passing any exams about financial planning! The CFP Board has no requirement for experience and no exam about how to actually provide financial planning services; their exam for certification only covers how to use their software program which is used to prepare

As the year comes to a close, I am always looking for personal finance and budgeting advice for the following year. There are many great blogs that offer this information, but I want to share another resource: Reddit.

Before you begin browsing Reddit, you will want to create an account. You can do that by clicking on “create one” in the top right corner. Next you will want to subscribe to subreddits. Subreddits are specific interests that users create about a topic. For example, if your favorite part of Reddit is the memes, you can subscribe to /r/memes.

You will want to subscribe to /r/personalfinance/. This subreddit is a great resource for those seeking guidance on budgeting, investments and retirement planning.

My wife and I use Mint & YNAB as our main financial tracking tools while utilizing Vanguard as our investment manager. We have found success with these services but there are many other options out there. The best way to find what works for you is research!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how a single income earner could save for retirement and his child’s college expenses at the same time. The goal was to avoid putting all of your eggs in one basket and trying to predict the future. In that example, I think it is fairly safe to say that most people would agree with the approach of saving money into both retirement and college savings accounts.

I wanted to follow up with some additional thoughts on this subject because I believe there may be some confusion about what I am suggesting when I say this. Perhaps it is not clear whether I am saying you should contribute to both accounts or only one account or something else entirely. Hopefully this post will help clear things up a bit.

In almost every case the best thing you can do for yourself financially is to pay down any high interest debt (credit cards, student loans, etc.) before contributing towards either account. Once you are out of debt then you can start thinking about how much you should be contributing towards each account.

The amount you choose to contribute is going to depend on many factors, but here are two things that are always true:

You will never know for sure whether your investment strategy is optimal.

You will never know for sure